English 533: Studies in Medieval Literature (Chaucer and His Contemporaries): The Works of the Gawain-Poet

Professor Richard Newhauser

Fall Semester, 2011; W 5:40-8:30, LL 271

Office: LL 226B, Tel.: 480-965-8139
E-mail: Richard.Newhauser@asu.edu, Web site: http://www.public.asu.edu/~rnewhaus/

Office hours: TTh 1:30 - 3:00 p.m., and by appointment


Description:

This course will offer advanced study of one of the most remarkable poets in England in the late Middle Ages. We will focus especially on the social, historical, religious, and intellectual context of the four poems contained in the manuscript preserving his works and on the generic differences of these works: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Arthurian romance), Pearl (dream vision), and Cleanness and Patience (homiletic meditations), as well as a poem attributed to the Gawain-Poet but transmitted in a different manuscript: St. Erkenwald (miracle tale/saint's legend).

Texts:

  • The Complete Works of the Pearl Poet, trans. Casey Finch, ed. Malcolm Andrew, Ronald Waldron, and Clifford Peterson (Berkeley, etc.: University of California Press, 1993). ISBN: 9780520078710. [available in the ASU bookstore].
  • Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon, 2nd ed. Norman Davis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967). ISBN: 9780198114864. [available in the ASU bookstore]
  • A Companion to the Gawain-Poet, ed. Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson, Arthurian Studies 38 (Cambridge, Engl.: D. S. Brewer, 1997). [on reserve in Hayden Library]
    •

    Bibliographies:

    http://people.ucalgary.ca/~scriptor/cotton/

    http://gawainpoet.org/

    Requirements:

    An oral report on the topic you have chosen to work on in consultation with me and a final paper (not to exceed 35 pages).

     

    Syllabus
    Fall Semester, 2011

     

    1. W 8/24: The Gawain-Poet and Material Culture: Manuscripts, Dialect, Geography, Author

    Companion, pp. 23-33, 105-17, 197-219, 221-42

    2. W 8/31: The Gawain-Poet and Literary Culture: History, Religion, Poetry

    Companion, pp. 35-51, 71-90, 91-101, 293-313

    3. W 9/7: St. Erkenwald

    Marie Borroff, "Narrative Artistry in St. Erkenwald and the Gawain-Group: The Case for Common Authorship Reconsidered," SAC 28 (2006): 41-76; Gordon Whatley, "Heathens and Saints: St. Erkenwald in Its Legendary Context," Speculum 61,2 (1986): 330-63

    4. W 9/14: St. Erkenwald

    David Coley, "Baptism as Eucharist: Orthodoxy, Wycliffism, and the Sacramental Utterance in Saint Erkenwald," JEGP 107,3 (2008): 327-47; Jennifer L. Sisk, "The Uneasy Orthodoxy of St. Erkenwald," ELH 74,1 (2007): 89-115

    5. W 9/21: Patience

    C. David Benson, "The Impatient Reader of Patience," in Text and Matter: New Critical Perspectives of the Pearl-Poet, ed. Robert J. Blanch, Miriam Youngerman Miller, and Julian N. Wasserman (Troy, NY: Whitson, 1991), 147-62; Lynn Staley Johnson, "An Examination of the Middle English Patience," American Benedictine Review 32,4 (1981): 336-64

    6. W 9/28:

    No Class: Rosh HaShanah

    7. W 10/5: Patience

    A. C. Spearing, "The Subtext of Patience: God as Mother and the Whale's Belly," Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 29,2 (1999): 293-323; Adam Brooke Davis, "What the Poet of 'Patience' Really Did to the Book of Jonah," Viator 22 (1991): 267-78

    8. W 10/12: Cleanness

    David Wallace, "Cleanness and the Terms of Terror," in Text and Matter: New Critical Perspectives of the Pearl-Poet, ed. Robert J. Blanch, Miriam Youngerman Miller, and Julian N. Wasserman (Troy, NY: Whitson, 1991), 93-104; Monica Brzezinski, "Conscience and Covenant: The Sermon Structure of Cleanness," JEGP 89,2 (1990): 166-80

    9. W 10/19: Cleanness

    Amity Reading, " 'The Ende of Alle Kynez Flesch': Ritual Sacrifice and Feasting in Cleanness," Exemplaria 21,3 (2009): 274-95; J. J. Anderson, "Cleanness: The Wages of Sin," in J. J. Anderson, Language and Imagination in the Gawain-Poems (Manchester, Engl.: Manchester Univ. Press, 2005), 82-125

    10. W 10/26: Pearl

    J. Allan Mitchell, "The Middle English Pearl: Figuring the Unfigurable," The Chaucer Review 35,1 (2000): 86-109; Lawrence M. Clopper, "Pearl, the Consolation of Scripture," Viator 23 (1992): 231-45

    11. W 11/2: Pearl

    Barbara Newman, "The Artifice of Eternity: Speaking of Heaven in Three Medieval Poems," Religion and Literature 37,1 (2005): 1-24; David Aers, "The Self Mourning: Reflections on Pearl," Speculum 68,1 (1993): 54-73

    12. W 11/9: Pearl

    Elizabeth Harper, "Pearl in the Context of Fourteenth-Century Gift Economies," The Chaucer Review 44,4 (2010): 421-39; John M. Bowers, The Politics of Pearl: Court Poetry in the Age of Richard II (Cambridge, Engl.: Brewer, 2001), 39-65.

    13. W 11/16: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

    Companion, pp. 175-79, 351-62, 243-55; Morton W. Bloomfield, "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: An Appraisal," in Critical Studies of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. Donald R. Howard and Christian Zacher (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame Univ. Press, 1968), 24-55; reprint from PMLA 76 (1961): 7-19

    14. W 11/23: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

    Companion, pp. 157-63, 181-90

    15. W 11/30: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

    Jill Mann, "Price and Value in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," in Chaucer to Spenser: A Critical Reader, ed. Derek Pearsall (Oxford, Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999), 187-205; Richard Newhauser, "The Meaning of Gawain's Greed," Studies in Philology 87,4 (1990): 410-26

    Final Papers are due by noon on Wednesday, December 7.

     

     

     

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