The following courses are cross-listed with MEMS for Spring term 2015. Many other courses can be used to contribute to the minor or IDS major.
MEM2500 Tales of King Arthur
(H, N),Judith Shoaf. Starting with Geoffrey Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain around 1138, stories of King Arthur became immensely popular all through Western Europe. Almost as quickly, skeptical historians were shaking their heads, declaring that there never had been an Arthur or at least that not everything written about Arthur was true. Arthur is still today the “once and future king” around whom form political ideals and satires, historical propositions and archaeological efforts, and entertaining tales in all media.
In this course we will focus primarily on the medieval Arthur, with opportunities to consider later versions. We begin with some of the British/Welsh sources Geoffrey used to create his King Arthur, but most of our time will be devoted to reading medieval stories about Arthur written in England and France, including excerpts from Geoffrey’s History, a romance of Chretien de Troyes, the English romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, portions of the French Lancelot-Graal and of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, and a bit of Tennyson. Student projects will help fill in the artistic and imaginative efforts of the 20th and 21st centuries. Students will be expected to keep up with the reading and do some writing in addition to the final project.
MEM 3301/GET 3930: Palaces and Cities: An Introduction to Early Modern Communities
(Online; H), Prof. Wlll Hasty. This course enables understanding of a new kind of European culture taking shape in palaces and cities, the outlines of which were already visible in medieval castles and cloisters. The new operant principle in cultural processes is the primacy of individuality and the individual, and the more or less implicit assumption that individual things or cultural domains – such as politics, theology, poetry, economics, etc. – have to be understood first and foremost as functioning according to intrinsic principles. Students discover that it is in residential palaces and cities that the principle of individuality is cultivated as nowhere else and to such a degree, that the early modern world – after numerous indispensable technological enhancements – eventually becomes the modern one in which we live today.
MEM3931 sec 0431/CHT 3123 Pre-Modern Chinese Fiction in Translation
Prof. Richard Wang. This course explores pre-modern Chinese literary narrative from its beginnings through the seventeenth century. Emphasis will be laid on 16th and 17th centuries when Chinese vernacular fiction flourished. All required readings are in English translation, with no knowledge of Chinese required. Class time will primarily be devoted to discussions of the readings, although an introduction to critical issues and literary, historical, and cultural context will be presented in lecture. This is a reading and writing intensive class.
MEM3931 sec 0439/CHT 3513 Taoism & Chinese Culture
Prof. Richard Wang. An exploration of Taoism as a specific set of cultural traditions that evolved within the historical context of ancient, medieval, and modern China, and how Taoism evolved to meet the spiritual needs of people in specific historical situations. The multi-sources and complexity of Taoist belief systems and ritual practice, and the influence of Taoism upon Chinese thought, religion, art, culture and society will also be covered.
MEM3931 sec 0837 Boccaccio’s Decameron
Prof. Mary Watt.
MEM4931 sec 005H Paradise Lost
Prof. Peter Rudnytsky.
MEM4931 sec 01DA/JPT 4130 Tale of Genji
Prof. Yumiko Hulvey. The Tale of Genji is a masterpiece of Japanese literature, written by a woman known as Murasaki Shikibu. In many ways, the Genji represents the essence of an aristocratic culture that is unfamiliar to Japanese and non-Japanese who consider the past in Japan equivalent to the Tokugawa or Edo period (1600-1867). Heian-period (794-1185) Kyoto was inhabited by a small aristocratic class exemplified by an elegant, sensitive male as the idealized hero of this masterpiece and era. Primary objectives are first to read the precursor to The Tale of Genji, the poetic memoir (nikki), The Gossamer Diary written by Michitsuna’s mother, who influenced the author of The Tale of Genji; next we read the masterpiece, the Genji, that influenced subsequent generations of fiction monogatari), drama, and the like; and finally we read the 20th century novel, Masks by Enchi Fumiko, based entirely on The Tale of Genji for its inspiration. Secondary objectives are to focus on genre development: nikki, monogatari (tales), uta (poetry) and sub-categories of consideration such as fictional vs. factual, public vs. private, formal vs. informal, and so on. We will foster meaningful cross-cultural communication skills by focusing on class and gender distinctions prevalent in classical Japanese culture. Knowledge about the origin of Japanese tradition and culture in the classical period is the necessary foundation for a proper interpretation of modern and postmodern Japan. This class fulfills the Humanities (H) and International (N) requirements, but it does not meet Gordon Rule.
MEM4931 sec 08A8/GET 4930 Courtly Romance
Prof. Will Hasty. A consideration of the courtly verse romances composed in German in the late twelfth and early thirteenth century. Readings include Arthurian and Grail romances, as well as the heroic epic “Nibelungenlied” and two vernacular religious narratives that are demonstrably influenced by the romances. The seminar begins with a brief consideration of the Latin literary culture of the Christian “Roman empire” that was seen to continue in the Middle Ages. The vernacular verse romances produced in the High Middle Ages are then considered according to the ways in which they can be regarded both as a continuation of and as a break from Latin-Christian “Roman” imperial culture that prepares the way for the Renaissance and Reformation (the latter is represented by a seminal early text by Martin Luther we will consider at the end of term). In conceptualizing the continuities and discontinuities evinced by the romances, particular attention is paid to them as documents of a cultural transition occurring in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries from an understanding of self as sacrifice to an understanding of self as investment or wager.