SoSe 21: HS-Medieval English Literatures: Arthurian Romance
Andrew James Johnston
Kommentar
The late fourteenth-century Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is probably the most famous Arthurian romance written in English. But for all its canonical status as an Arthurian masterpiece it is oddly unique, since it constitutes something more akin to a commentary on Arthurian fiction than simply a straightforward representative of the genre.
Preserved in a single manuscript and written in a (slightly) challenging West-Midlands dialect, this alliterative romance appears to be interrogating everything Arthurian literature stands for: the code of chivalry, the aestheticism of the chivalric classes, the concept of courtly love, aristocratic religion, the reality of history and the reality of fiction.
In this class, we will first read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and then juxtapose it with Geoffrey Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale in order to understand whether these are late texts looking back with an ironic sense of ennui to a chivalric ideal always already lost or whether they constitute rigorous poetic attempts at testing the cultural ideals of the late medieval elites – or perhaps something completely different altogether.
Students are advised to use W. R. J. Barron’s edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight which has a facing page translation of the text and to use the Riverside Chaucer’s version of The Franklin’s Tale.
A reader with important secondary material will be put at the participants’ disposal via Blackboard at the beginning of the semester.
Schließen13 Termine
Regelmäßige Termine der Lehrveranstaltung