SPRING 2012 MEMS courses
CHT 4603/1962 – MEM 4931/08G9: Journey to the West
Professor Richard Wang.
This course is designed to explore the religious culture, cultural history and literary expression of traditional China through a 100-chapter novel known as Journey to the West, or Monkey. Based on the famous Tang Buddhist monk Hsüan-tsang’s (596-664) historical pilgrimage to India, and encompassed the story cycle of the journey to the west developed in a millennia, the novel of the Ming dynasty demonstrates its rich texture of religious and literary themes, sentiments, and assumptions in this novel, a work considered one of the masterpieces of traditional Chinese fiction, and the finest supernatural novel. The Journey’s scope includes a physical journey, a heroic adventure, a religious mission, and a process of self-cultivation, through the encounters between the pilgrims, mainly the well-known character Monkey who is Hsüan-tsang’s chief disciple and guardian, and various monsters. This novel has an unsurpassingly penetrating impact on Chinese cultural history and society. It represents the maturity of the Chinese novel, and most literary genres in its pages. While basically a supernatural novel, it also describes social customs and daily life of different regions of China. More than any other traditional Chinese narratives, the Journey presents concerns and themes directly related to Chinese religious, intellectual and cultural history, in addition to literary tradition.
ENL 4333/6534 – MEM 4931/082F: Shakespeare: Tragedies
Professor Richard Allen Shoaf
This course will be devoted to the ten tragedies Shakespeare wrote in his career, with especial attention to three factors: his transformation of the genre (most especially in KING LEAR); the rhetorics he renewed (e.g., pun) or refined (e.g., synoeciosis; paradox) to articulate his tragic vision; and his response to the sacramentality of nature that enabled him to comprehend and mourn humans’ catastrophic denials and perversions of nature, sexual nature in particular, in consequence of which self-inflicted optionlessness must lead inevitably to the end of the human. Mandatory attendance and two essays (5-7 pages in length), along with unannounced quizzes, will constitute evaluation of your performance in the course. The one text for the course will be the Norton Shakespeare, 2nd edition, which I will order through the university’s stipulated portal.
EUH 5934 Medievalisms
Professor Bonnie Effros
This seminar will explore various manifestations of heightened attention in the nineteenth century to the medieval centuries, a period traditionally castigated as backward by progressive Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers. Growing knowledge of the Middle Ages and the corresponding desire to reinvigorate study (and in some cases use) of the history, literature, arts, architecture, and traditions of this period contributed fundamentally to nineteenth- and twentieth-century intellectual and artistic life both in Europe and the United States. The readings for the seminar will therefore address a number of different themes rising out of the study of the middle ages and its transformation at the hands of modern thinkers, artists and architects. Among the topics to be covered in readings and discussions will be the rise of the fields of medieval history, medieval art history, and Anglo-Saxon studies in the United States, the inspirational role played by medieval artifacts, architecture, and nineteenth-century philosophers such as John Ruskin on English and American artists and designers such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris, and Louis Sullivan, the “restoration” of Gothic architectural sites by the likes of Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc and William Randolph Hearst, the literary studies of medieval texts and the recreation of the medieval period in nineteenth-century fiction and World’s Fairs, and the impact of medievalism on emergent national archaeologies in Europe.
IDH 3931/05FF – MEM 4931/08EH: “To Hell and Back”: Reading Dante’s Inferno (H, N, R)
Professor Mary Watt
This one-credit course will take students on a semester-long journey through the underworld as imagined by the fourteenth century writer Dante Alighieri. The primary source will be Dante’s Inferno but the course will be enhanced with visual materials and will make full use of the many digital resources devoted to the study of Dante and his world. Special attention will be paid to the political, historical and religious context in which Dante was writing but the main point of the course will be to give students an appreciation of the masterful narrative that Dante weaves and the enduring beauty of his poetry. Classes will combine student-centered activities with brief lecture style introductions to the day’s reading. Accordingly, students will be expected to have read the assigned reading and be prepared to comment and participate in a meaningful discussion.
ITT 3431/2282 – MEM 4931/08EG: Pilgrimages in Italy (H,N)
Professor Mary Watt
Through lectures, readings and discussions in English, this course considers the continuing presence of Rome and other Italian cities as metaphors and focal points of Italian artistic and literary sensibilities.
JPT 3300/01H9 – MEM 4931/08G8: Samurai War Tales
Professor Yumiko Hulvey.
Explores the historical and cultural stimuli that led to war, recorded later as war narratives. Supported by images of architecture, narrative picture scrolls, and extant military accoutrements.
LIT 4930/07G1 – MEM 4931/082G: Dante for EH Majors
Professor Richard Allen Shoaf
We will read all of Dante’s Commedia and all of the Vita Nuova; we will also, as occasion warrants, read in others of Dante’s major works, especially the Convivio, De Vulgari Eloquentia, and Monarchia. Our rhythm will consist in roughly five weeks per each canticle of the Commedia. The writing assignment for the seminar will consist in three essays (five pages each) plus short weekly quizzes to assess the pace and quality of the reading. The essays are to be one on each of the three canticles of the Commedia (we will work out topics as we go). Your final grade will be determined, then, by your performance in class meetings and your writing in these essays. In addition, we will make extensive use of the World Wide Web to access the wealth of resources available for Dante Studies, including especially the “Princeton Dante Project” (http://etcweb.princeton.edu/dante/index.html).
MEM 3300/02AE: Castles and Cloisters (H,N)
Professor Will Hasty
The goal of this course will be to develop a familiarity with some of the salient characteristics of monastic and courtly-chivalric communities in the European Middle Ages, by means of a study of the ways in which they organized their lives temporally and spatially, and of the ways in which they gave expression to their views about life, love, work, God, etc. in their art, literature, and music. This course functions as a core course for the interdisciplinary minor in Medieval and early Modern Studies (MEMS).
SPW 4212/01CC – MEM 4931/08G: Writing in an Age of Uncertainty: Golden Age Prose Fiction. TAUGHT IN SPANISH.
Professor Shifra Armon
Pre-req. Completion of one or more SPW 3000-level literature course or permission of instructor. Far from a triumphal march, the enterprise of imperial domination was felt in Spain as an uncertain and deeply conflictive upheaval. In this age of uncertainty, new forms of inquiry and new strategies of social criticism produced experimental literary forms that led to the invention of the modern novel.