PS-Medieval English Literatures: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Andrew James Johnston
Kommentar
The anonymous Pearl Poet’s (aka Gawain Poet) works are amongst the most enigmatic and fascinating – and also the most beautiful and polished – literary texts transmitted to us from the English later Middle Ages. This course will take a closer look at what is arguably his most famous composition, the chivalric romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, an Arthurian tale of love and adventure with a more than surprising sting in the tale.
The text will make it possible for the class to gain insights into a wide variety of issues central to medieval literature in general and to Middle English literature in particular as well as into the problem of how modern scholars deal with literary texts from an age very different from our own. We will ask questions such as: How does the text respond to the aristocratic values of its time? How does the romance construct its perspective on subjectivity? How does its concept of beauty matter socially and politically? What notions of gender and sexuality are discussed by the poem? What do modern readers have to do to understand medieval literature? How can a text more than 600 years old matter to a twenty-first century audience?
Participants in this class are required to use the following facing-page edition (Middle English and Modern English): W. R. J. Barron (ed. & trans.): Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998.
Schließen11 Termine
Regelmäßige Termine der Lehrveranstaltung