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SoSe 15: S-Modernity and Alterity in the Literatures of Medieval Britain II: Middle English Debates and Dream-Visions

Neil Cartlidge

Comments

Poetic debates and dream-visions are particularly prominent in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English writing, providing formal frameworks for some of the best known of all Middle English texts. Such shapes seem to have been particularly appealing to medieval poets because they make it possible to address large ideas in ways that are provocatively open-ended. The two traditions are closely related in the sense that dream-visions often contain debates, and debates are often presented as dreams. In some cases, debate- and dream-vision texts provide what looks like a dramatisation of the experience of thought itself. Among the texts at issue are the first long comic poem in the English language, The Owl and the Nightingale; two of Chaucer's most important free-standing works, The Book of the Duchess and The House of Fame; the brilliant consolation-poem Pearl, which is probably by the same hand as Gawain and the Green Knight; debate/visions in the northern, alliterative tradition, like The Parliament of Three Ages and Winner and Waster; and "courtly" texts like The Kingis Quair (by King James I of Scotland) and The Flower and the Leaf. Primary texts: The Owl and the Nightingale: ed./trans. Neil Cartlidge (Exeter, 2001) OR (trans. only) Bella Millett at Wessex Parallel Web Texts (http://www.southampton.ac.uk/~wpwt/trans/owl/owltrans.htm) The House of Fame: ed. Nick Havely, Geoffrey Chaucer: The House of Fame, 2nd edn (Durham, 2013) OR in Chaucer's Dream Poetry, ed. Havely and Helen Phillips (London, 1997) OR in The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson (New York, 1987) The Book of the Duchess: in Havely and Phillips OR The Riverside Chaucer Pearl: ed. Sarah Stanbury (Kalamazoo, 2001) [available online via TEAMS: http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams] OR ed. E.V. Gordon (Oxford, 1980) [out of print, but available second-hand] OR ed. Ad Putter and Myra Stokes, in The Works of the Gawain Poet (London, 2014) Parliament of Three Ages and Winner and Waster: ed. Warren Ginsberg (Kalamazoo, 1992) OR in Middle English Debate Poetry: A Critical Anthology, ed. John W. Conlee (East Lansing, 1991) [out of print, but relatively cheaply available second-hand] Kingis Quair: in The Kingis Quair and Other Prison Poems, ed. Linne R. Mooney and Mary-Jo Arn (eds) (Kalamazoo, 2005) [available online via TEAMS: http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams] OR in Fifteenth-Century English Dream Visions: An Anthology, ed. Julia Boffey (Oxford, 2003) Flower and Leaf: The Floure and the Leafe, The Assemblie of Ladies, and The Isle of Ladies, ed. Derek Pearsall (Kalamazoo, 1990) [available online via TEAMS: http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams] Suggested initial background reading: C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (Oxford, 1936) [reprinted frequently, and still cheaply available in paperback] close

13 Class schedule

Regular appointments

Fri, 14:00 - 16:00 13 Class schedule

Fri, 2015-04-17 14:00 - 16:00

Lecturers:
Prof. Neil Cartlidge