Lesson 1 – ENGL 2 – Survey of English Literature
All dates for this course are available on the home page. Due dates must be followed.
There will be 8 lessons total; they will be available to access through the Barstow College online course system. Most students will access one lesson at a time, finish it, and email the assignments for the professor grade to Dr. Hanson. Then the student will progress on to Lesson 2 and so forth. Dr. Hanson will email you each week, letting you know that the assignments were received, and what grade you received on that week’s assignments. If you have problems doing your assignments for Lesson 1 or any lesson, just email me for help or clarification: mhanson@bcconline.com.
First Email Assignment
***The first thing you are to do is to email the instructor, Dr. Hanson, and
let me know that you are in my summer session I ENGL 2 online course. This way I
will have a working email address for you and can contact you whenever I need
to.*** As part of this email, you will also write a brief biography/personal
profile about yourself of about 5 to 10 sentences (5 sentences minimum), so that
the instructor can get to know you better. Tell me about your past life, family,
friends, favorite subjects in college, favorite foods/colors, sports interests,
leisure time activities, hobbies, and/or languages you speak. Information about
Dr. Hanson appears on the Barstow College website. Also in the first email,
please re-type the following paragraph, typing your name at the end of the
paragraph as a signature:
I will maintain a working email address during the time that I am in Dr.
Hanson's ENGL 2 summer class 2009. I consent to having Dr. Hanson email me
whenever she needs to. I understand the course grading policy and all other
policies set forth in the course syllabus. I understand what materials I must
hand in to pass this course and that I must hand in all assignments by
June 23 at midnight. I am aware of
the BC plagiarism policy.
Email the information above to mhanson@bcconline.com.
Information about Lessons:
You will be given 8 lessons with instructions, lecture, reading, and assignments to complete. Each lesson will include reading from the textbook, a discussion/commentary, an essay to compose, and lecture. Each assignment will be graded on quality and quantity; the assignment should be complete, thorough, creative, and should meet the sentence or page-length requirements to receive full credit. If the assignment is done poorly, I will send you an email asking you to redo the assignment, giving you instructions on how to do this, and then asking you to re-submit the assignment for full credit. There will be an online midterm and a proctored final essay exam (both of these exams include quote identification, short and long essay exam); these 2 exams will be graded A through F -- 90% or above correct is an A, 80% to 89% correct is a B, 70% to 79% correct is a C, 60% to 69% correct is a D.
Lecture #1 – The Middle Ages in England (450 to 1500)
ARTHURIAN LEGENDS
Arthur was never a "king"; he may well have been commander-in-chief of British resistance to the Anglo-Saxons. Not until the twelfth century, though, did Arthur achieve a quasi-historical existence as the greatest of British "kings" in the works of Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace, and Layamon (NAEL 8, 1.118-28). At the same time, Arthur was flourishing in Welsh tales as a fairy-tale king, attended by courtiers named Kei (Kay), Bedwyn (Bedivere), and Gwalchmain (Gawain). It was in the French literature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that Arthur and his knights came to embody the rise, and eventual decline, of a court exemplifying an aristocratic ideal of chivalry. In the verse romances of Chrétien de Troyes, the focus shifts from the "history" of Arthur to the deeds of his knights who ride out from his court on fabulous adventures and exemplify the chivalric ethos. Chrétien's works were adapted and imitated by writers in German, English, Dutch, and Icelandic. The new genre of romance focused not only on the exploits of knights fighting in wars and tournaments or battling against monstrous foes but also on the trials and fortunes of love, and romances addressed mixed audiences of men and women.
In French romance, along with his uncle's, Sir Gawain's chivalry becomes equivocal and, in many respects, more interesting. In Chrétien's Yvain, Gawain serves as the advocate for male bonding, who succeeds in wooing the hero of the romance away from his newly wedded wife. In courtly romances at least (there is an exception in popular romance), Gawain never acquires a wife or even a permanent mistress like Lancelot, although there are covert and, occasionally, overt affairs with different ladies. In one late tale, Gawain agrees to woo a cruel lady on behalf of another knight, who then discovers Gawain in bed with that lady. The poet of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight may well be referring to such episodes when in the first of the three titillating bedroom scenes, he has the lady of the castle reproach Gawain for his lack of courtesy.
French romance can help one appreciate the subtlety and delicacy of the
humor with which the Gawain poet and Chaucer treat bedroom scenes. The Gauvain
of French romances, however, contrasts with his English counterpart. In English
romance before Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, Sir Gawain remains
Arthur's chief knight. Chaucer's Squire's Tale praises the speech and
behavior of a strange knight by saying that "Gawain, with his olde curteisye, /
Though he were come again out of fairye, / Ne coude him nat amende with a word."
In Arthur's nightmarish dream in Layamon's Brut, Gawain sits astride the
roof of the hall in front of the king, holding his sword (NAEL 8, 1.125,
lines 13985–87). The English Gawain does get married in
The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle,
which is one of eleven popular Gawain romances surviving in English in all
of which Sir Gawain is the best of Arthur's knights. That story is of special
interest because it has the same plot as The Wife of Bath's Tale, except that in
this tale the hero is not getting himself but King Arthur off the hook.
The legendary king of the Celtic Britons and his nephew were eventually adopted as national heroes by the English, against whose ancestors Arthur and Gawain had fought. Yet even after Arthur's historicity had been discredited, his legend continued to fuel English nationalism and the imagination of epic poets. Spenser made Prince Arthur the destined but never-to-be consort of Gloriana, the Faerie Queene (NAEL 8, 1.808-12, Canto 9.1–153); the young Milton had contemplated Arthur as a possible epic subject (NAEL 8, 1.1813, note 2).
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
Near
the beginning of Chaucer's General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, the
narrator tells his audience that he will describe the "condicioun" of the
pilgrims, their "degree" (social rank), "whiche they were," and also "what array
that they were inne"; at the end he says that he has now told their "estaat" and
"array" and apologizes if he has not arranged them in the "degree . . . as that
they sholde stonde," i.e., their correct social order (NAEL 8, 1.219,
lines 38–41; 235, line 718; 236, lines 745–47). This professed concern for
putting people in their proper place is obviously of great interest to the poet
and his audience. It should also be a matter of interest and amusement to modern
readers, especially if they realize that the poet's ostensible concern for
propriety is a mask he puts on. What is interesting about Chaucer's Prologue is
not that it portrays an archaic and closed social order but that it reveals that
order in the process of breaking down. Most of Chaucer's pilgrims are by no
means content to stay in their proper places but are engaged in the pursuit of
wealth, status, and respectability. The conflict between the old and the new,
between tradition and ambition is evident not only in the General Prologue but
throughout The Canterbury Tales in the individual pilgrims' prologues and
tales.
Every society devises terminology meant to express social stratifications but also often used to disguise them. Class, the principal term in both popular and academic discourse about our society, is not very useful or accurate in analyzing medieval society or the ways in which that society thought about itself. The main purpose of the following selections is to define more precisely such terms as condition, degree, estate, and order, a word that can signify both the (theoretically) harmonious arrangement of the cosmos and society and individual units of the general order, such as a religious order or an order of chivalry.
One
of the main differences between the order of medieval and the order of modern
society is the preeminent role played in the former by the Church and its many
institutions. An obvious division is the bipartite one between the clergy and
the laity — those belonging to the Church and those outside it. Another — one of
several tripartite divisions — which stems from the Roman Church's doctrine of
celibacy of the clergy, is based on sexual activity: virgins, widowers and
widows, and married people. This is a classification that the Wife of Bath in
her Prologue professes to accept while defending her right to remarry as often
as she pleases (NAEL 8, 1.256–60).
In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the nobility developed a taste for romances of chivalry — many of them about King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table. The Round Table itself came to be thought of as an "order," in some respects like a religious order. Ramón Lull's The Book of the Order of Chivalry, one of the most popular works of the Middle Ages, lays out that concept in the form of a book of instruction presented like a rule by an older knight to a young squire who is about to be dubbed into the order of knighthood.
In the Romance of the Rose, Jean de Meun (Guillame de Lorris began the work and de Meun finished it), created a satiric character named La vieille, the Old Woman, who holds a long discourse on how to take advantage of men and succeed in that enterprise (in which, she confesses, she has failed). Her discourse is an important source for Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Prologue.
1. Reading #1 -- In Norton Anthology of English Literature textbook
"Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," the prologue to the "Wife of Bath’s Tale," the "Wife of Bath’s Tale," and any other ancillary reading material connected to these works in your text that you would like to read (ancillary reading is optional).
Read starting on page 84 (if you have a different edition, just read the assignment) from the Arthurian legend "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight." Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a late 14th-century Middle English alliterative romance outlining an adventure of Sir Gawain, a knight of King Arthur's Round Table. In the tale, Sir Gawain accepts a challenge from a mysterious warrior who is completely green, from his clothes and hair to his beard and skin. The "d" offers to allow anyone to strike him with his axe if the challenger will take a return blow in a year and a day.
If you read the information in the discussion section below concerning Ovidian and Petrarchan discourse before you read this famous Arthurian legend about a brave knight who goes on a journey and returns to Arthur’s court to tell his tale of intrigue and adventure, you can apply these two discursive traditions to your reading. As a literary genre of high culture, romance or chivalric romance refers to a style of heroic prose and verse narrative that was particularly current in aristocratic literature of
Medieval and Early Modern Europe, that narrated fantastic stories about the marvellous adventures of a chivalrous, heroic knight, often of super-human ability, who goes on a quest. By the way, the story plotline of a hero or heroine who leaves home (the heroic quest), has adventures, conquers demons, goes into a very dark place that really challenges the hero’s character, comes out of the dark place victorious but changed (by learning a valuable lesson), and then returns home to tell the tale is a common storyline that appears in many ancient texts as well as in contemporary film and television (The Wizard of Oz, Star Wars, The Hobbit). The heroic quest usually includes fantasy, magic or illusion in some form. You will see this form again when we read excerpts from Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene.
Also read pages starting at page 94 (use your judgment if your book starts at a different page). Read the prologue that accompanies the "Wife of Bath’s Tale" and the "Wife of Bath’s Tale." "The Wife of Bath's Tale" and prologue are among the best-known of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. They give insight into the role of women in the Late Middle Ages and are probably of interest to Chaucer himself, for the character is one of his most developed ones, with her prologue twice as long as her tale. Female sexual dominance, the relationship between love and economics, and religious issues concerning the Lollards (radical reformers of the dominance of the Catholic church in England) are themes in this work.
2. Reading Discussion
– You must log on to the Barstow College Discussion area to post your discussion commentary each week. The Discussion area is connected to the webpage where you find the lesson instructions each week. The discussions/commentaries in each lesson are connected to the textbook reading and exercises. Your reading responses and discussion comments in this class can be in expository/essay form, but they don’t have to be. You could write a short story, an obituary, a diary entry, a business letter, or a paragraph (10 sentences minimum). If you prefer, your reading response could be a poem, a skit, a recipe, a song lyric, a personal anecdote, or a list (10 lines minimum). I encourage students and give higher grades to students who design creative comments and responses to our critical discussion topics posted here. Also, you do not have to respond to all the questions listed as part of the discussion/commentary instructions. These ideas that I have included here are supposed to help you think about the reading in the textbook and the issues attached to the reading. Your response can be about the textbook reading or about any or all of the ideas listed in the prompt above for your discussion/commentary that you will write for that textbook reading for this week.Lesson #1 Discussion topic: After reading "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" and the prologue to the tale and the "Wife of Bath’s Tale," write a 10-sentence minimum paragraph response or a 10-line creative response concerning gender roles in the 21st century. To assist you with this discussion, I would like you to read the following poems and comment on them in your discussion, particularly concerning Ovidian and Petrarchan discourse that appears in contemporary media (art, music, drama, dance, body piercing, tattoos, bumper stickers):
A. Ovidian discourse is named after Publius Ovidius Naso – you can see why scholars just call him Ovid – who was born in 43 BCE and died in CE 18. He was a Roman poet. We would know very little about Roman mythology if it was not for Ovid’s extant work Metamorphoses
. Ovid is also well-known for his work Ars Amatoria. Ovidian discourse is a contemporary phrase that refers to any piece of writing that denigrates women/paints women as evil, stupid, the sinful/monstrous daughters of Eve who need to be controlled. This concept is perfectly illustrated in Ovid’s Ars Amatoria:Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love) – Book 1, 43 (modern translation of text)
Book 1 – Where to find women and how to manipulate them
Comedic tone, Molestiae nuptiarum – discourages men from marriage
First: be a confidant soul, and spread your nets with assurance.
Women can always be caught; that’s the first rule of the game.
Sooner would birds in the spring be silent, or locusts in August,
Sooner would hounds run away when the fierce rabbits pursue,
Than would a woman, well-wooed, refuse to succumb to a lover;
She’ll make you think she means No! while she is planning her Yes!
Love on the sly delights men; it is equally pleasing to women.
Men are poor at pretense; women can hide their desire.
It’s a convention, no more, that men play the part of pursuer.
Women don’t run after us; mousetraps don’t run after mice. . .
Oh, of course, it’s a shame to be the first one to start it,
Still, when another one starts, isn’t it fun to give in?
Nevertheless, young man, you’ll be conceited and foolish
If you wait till the girl makes the first passes at you.
Let the man be the first to make the approach and entreaty,
Let the girl be the one willing to wait and be kind.
Ask her outright: that’s all any girl has been waiting for, really,
Give her cause, an excuse, just so you give her a start.
Jove himself would go and beg the girls for their favors:
He was seducer, in love; no girl solicited Jove.
Yet, if you find that your pleas inspire an arrogant coldness,
Stop what you may have begun, take a few steps in retreat.
Many a girl desires the coy and hates the aggressive:
Take it a little bit slow, don’t let her weary of you.
Don’t always show in your talk that you know you are going to get her—
What you are eager to be, tell her, is Only a friend.
I have seen this work, on the most unwilling of women—
who was found more than proficient in bed!Only a friend,
B. Petrarchan discourse is named after Francesco Petrarch, who was born in Italy in 1304 and died in 1374. Petrarch is best known for writing sonnets; his sonnet style greatly influenced Shakespeare and his contemporaries; Petrarch’s writing was mimicked, altered, and satirized during the early modern period in England (1500-1660). Petrachan discourse is a contemporary term applied to any work of literature that idealizes women as virtuous angels. Feminists are not fond of Ovidian and not pleased with Petrarchan discourse as well. Both forms of discourse mock women; Ovidian writing puts women down and Petrachan discussion idolizes women so much so that no real woman could live up to such high standards. William Shakespeare made fun of the Petrarchan blazon (putting a woman on a pedestal to idolize by anatomizing a woman/picking apart a woman into her body parts in a poem) in his sonnet "My mistresses eyes look nothing like the sun."
You can see in the following passage that Petrarchan discourse dates clear back to the 3rd or 2nd millennium BCE, predating Petrarch’s life but exhibiting the blazon that Petrarch made famous:
"Distracting is the Foliage of my Pasture," Egyptian Love
Songs, trans. W. K. Simpson
The Ancient Near East, 3rd to 2nd millennium B.C.E.
Distracting is the [foliage] of my [pasture]:
[the mouth] of my girl is a lotus bud,
her breasts are mandrake apples,
her arms are [vines],
[her eyes] are fixed like berries,
her brow a snare of willow,
and I the wild goose!
My [beak] snips [her hair] for bait,
as worms for bait in the trap.
Bracketed words indicate what was most likely written in damaged parts of the papyrus manuscript.
3. Writings #1--6
In this lesson you will write the first of 6 essays in this class, covering 6 different rhetorical genres. You will write 6 essays of 2-2 ½ pages or 40 to 50 sentences each minimum; these 6 essays will exemplify one of the following 6 rhetorical genres: Literary Analysis, Critique, Comparison/Contrast, Argumentation, Critical Interpretation, and Synthesis. At the midterm, you will be asked to write a 2-2 ½ page or 40 to 50 sentences minimum Annotated Bibliography on a topic or theme or author or literary work that interests you from this course. Each essay you write should be an example of your best writing.You are encouraged to email the professor a draft of your essay before you hand it in each week; in this way, I can give you comments to help you improve your essay so that you can revise the essay and get the best grade possible when you hand it in for grading. Drafts must be emailed to Dr. Hanson and received by midnight the Friday before the essay is due. Dr. Hanson will not comment on essay drafts emailed at the last minute.
Writing #1 – To begin, use the following handout printed below, Story Analysis, as an outline for your literary analysis of one of the literary works you read this week. You may choose the narrative poem "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" or "The Wife of Bath’s Tale" to write your essay about. Since these works are stories in poetic form, you can use the story analysis. Fill out the outline on the work of literature from the textbook you have chosen. Use the outline to help you formulate your essay. The essay should be on only one reading from the textbook and should be 2-2 ½ pages of 40 to 50 sentences in length. MLA form (parenthetical citations and works cited) will be taught in a later lesson and therefore is not needed in this essay, although you may use MLA form if you would like to.
A literary analysis of a piece of writing dissects the writing to show the assets of the composition. The purpose of the literary analysis is to show off how the writer uses composition tools to create a masterpiece of writing style. Of course, these are the sorts of things that should appear in all of the essays you write for this course as well. Writing #1 asks you to analyze someone else’s writing. It does not ask you to interpret, or give the meaning of the writing, nor does it ask you to criticize the writing, or tell whether the writing is well done or poorly crafted. An analysis simply looks at the writer’s style and how the writer uses language and organization and sentence structure to create a successful composition.
This essay must be written in 3rd-person voice (they, them, their, his, himself, her, herself, them, themselves, person, people). You may not use 1st person (see writing #1 for details) and you may not use 2nd person voice (you, your, yourself, yourselves) in this essay. The essay must use deductive organization: an introduction paragraph, a body of several paragraphs, and a concluding paragraph. This essay will be graded using the rubric in the course syllabus.
The purpose of the intro paragraph is to grab the reader’s attention so they will want to read more of your essay. The thesis of the essay appears in the intro paragraph and in the concluding paragraph. The purpose of writing this essay must appear in the first paragraph of the essay. Your purpose is to inform the reader about the writing style of the author. The body is the analysis of the poem in your textbook. To create the body of your essay, first fill out the outline below (Story analysis). The analysis has to be included with the essay when you post it for grading. Use the analysis to give you ideas to write the body of your essay. Discuss examples from the text that illustrate how the author uses words and phrases to create imagery. How does the author use story elements or poetic aspects to create imagery for or an effect on the reader? The Concluding paragraph gives the reader something interesting to ponder after the reader has finished reading the essay. Be careful – an analysis is NOT a book report.
Instructions for Homework #1 - Due by date on front page of course
All of the assignments listed below must be completed and then copy-and-pasted into the interactive form below. Be sure to keep copies of your work on disk or on your hard drive in case assignments are lost; that way if Dr. Hanson needs you to re-paste your assignment, you still have a copy. You must keep copies of all your work this term saved in case you are required to submit work again for any reason. You—not the instructor--are solely responsible for saving copies of all your work this term. Please remember that any and all of your work submitted may be checked for plagiarism.
The instructor is aware that the interactive forms will remove the double spacing and formatting in your paper and will not count you down for this. However, should she choose to copy and paste your paper into a word processor the length when double-spaced should be 2-2 ½ pages of 40 to 50 sentences in length..
Once your essay is done, spell and grammar checked and saved, use copy & paste to place the essay below in the submittal box.
Complete all of the work for the essay, save it in one file and then copy and paste it into the form for lesson one.
STORY ANALYSIS
Short Story/Tale/Legend Analysis Form
Use of details, Emotions evoked in the reader, Voice (commanding, soothing, charming, urgent, intimate, reserved), Style (form, structure, rhetoric, syntax/including vocabulary choice and sentence variety), Topic, Coherence (techniques to create smooth flow of ideas), Unity (devices used to unify elements of essay), Organizational style, Mechanics (use of grammar, sentence structure, punctuation).