Office: LL 226B, Tel.: 480-965-8139
E-mail: Richard.Newhauser@asu.edu, Web site: http://www.public.asu.edu/~rnewhaus/
Office hours: TW 3:00 - 4:00 p.m., and by appointment
Description:
This seminar 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:
Requirements:
An oral report on the topic you have chosen to work on in consultation with me and a final paper.
1. W 8/22: The Gawain-Poet and Material Culture: Manuscripts, Dialect, Geography, Author
Companion, pp. 23-33, 105-17, 197-219, 221-42
2. W 8/29: The Gawain-Poet and Literary Culture: History, Religion, Poetry
Companion, pp. 35-51, 71-90, 91-101, 293-313
3. W 9/5: St. Erkenwald
Gordon Whatley, "Heathens and Saints: St. Erkenwald in Its Legendary Context," Speculum 61,2 (1986): 330-63
4. W 9/12 - No class
5. W 9/19: St. Erkenwald
Jennifer L. Sisk, "The Uneasy Orthodoxy of St. Erkenwald," ELH 74,1 (2007): 89-115
6. W 9/26: Patience
Lynn Staley Johnson, "An Examination of the Middle English Patience," American Benedictine Review 32,4 (1981): 336-64; 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
7. W 10/3: 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
8. W 10/10: 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
9. W 10/17: Cleanness
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 10/24: Pearl
Lawrence M. Clopper, "Pearl, the Consolation of Scripture," Viator 23 (1992): 231-45
11. W 10/31: Pearl
David Aers, "The Self Mourning: Reflections on Pearl," Speculum 68,1 (1993): 54-73; Barbara Newman, "The Artifice of Eternity: Speaking of Heaven in Three Medieval Poems," Religion and Literature 37,1 (2005): 1-24
12. W 11/7: Pearl
John M. Bowers, The Politics of Pearl: Court Poetry in the Age of Richard II (Cambridge, Engl.: Brewer, 2001), 39-65.
13. W 11/14: 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 11/21: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Companion, pp. 157-63, 181-90
15. W 11/28: 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