Kathryn Lynch
Class Hours: Tuesday, 1:30-4:00
Office Hours: Tuesday, 12:30-1:30
Friday, 9:50-11
Wednesday, 2:30-3:30
Chrétien de Troyes, Perceval, trans.
Burton Raffel
The Complete Works of the Pearl Poet, ed. and trans. Casey Finch
Francois Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. Burton Raffel
William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, I, ed. Arthur Raleigh Humphries
It has been said that English literature began in a pub. This rather startling claim actually turns out to be true in more ways than one might first imagine. The father of English poetry, Geoffrey Chaucer, set his most famous and influential poem, The Canterbury Tales, in the Tabard – a pub of sorts – where a sundry group of pilgrims sets out to win a supper as a storytelling prize. More than 500 years earlier, the proto-poem of all English literature, the epic adventure Beowulf, set its hero the foundational task of liberating a mead hall (again, a pub of sorts) from a gluttonous monster. But on an even more primal level, it might be claimed that poetry had its start after a hot meal around a warm fireside (another pub) on a cold night, at a time we no longer remember, when the first man or woman undertook to spin the first story. This primitive connection between food and literature emerges in many famous literary works from Plato's Symposium to Boccaccio's Decameron, that stage tale-telling as after-dinner entertainment. The links between food and literature are indeed so numerous and so profound that it is easy to forget them. This course will try to foreground and to analyze the ways that poetry borrows, indeed incorporates, food metaphors; the ways that food provides writers with a means of talking about their own craft, about connections between the literal and the figurative and between the secular and the sacred. Even the absence, or deprivation, of food has a profound signifying power, as it brings the most primitive and powerful of all human drives --hunger -- to the center of consciousness. The manner in which humanity satisfies its various hungers, its food taboos and food practices, goes to the center of a civilization's self-definition, to the heart of what it means to be called a civilization at all. The culinary arts, as we will see, have a language, just as the linguistic arts require taste, and careful conversation about the relationship between the two has a surprising power to illuminate both. In celebration of food and its importance, our course will thus both begin and end in a pub! (Not literally, of course…)
Every student is required to keep a reading journal for the course, which she will submit in a portfolio at the end of the semester (Tuesday, May 4). The reading journal will include an entry for every week of the semester (approximately one typed page per entry) – six or approximately half of each student's entries should be made "pub"-lic by the student by posting on the course conference (ENG315-S04, "Food-Discussion"); the first entry each student posts, I will print out and critique, so that she will have a sense of what I'm looking for in these and how well hers fulfills the goals of the assignment. When you post "an entry," please distinguish it from other postings, by titling it "Journal Entry," so that I (and the other students) know that this is your slightly more formal and worked out piece of writing for the week. My hope is that issues the journal postings raise will both help us focus our class discussion and will also provide fodder for the final papers. Journal entries for each week's readings should be posted by noon Monday, giving me time to read through them before the next day's class. There is no set form that the journal entries should follow, and they may include personal, non-academic reactions to the reading, but they should engage the reading with some specificity and look for links between readings. Specific questions for the first journal entry will be distributed separately. In addition, each student will make an oral presentation to the other students in the course – a separate list of presentation topics will be made available. The major work for the semester will be a seminar paper. This will come due in two stages – first as a two-page proposal, due on April 6, and finally as a final paper, due on Friday, May 14, by 4:00. I welcome, though do not require, drafts of this paper. The weighting of these assignments will be approximately as follows: reading journal 25%; oral presentation 15%; seminar paper proposal 10%; final paper 40%; general class participation 10%.
Please bring all readings to class, either in text form or in the form of a print-out.
From Mead Hall to Tavern
Week 1 (2/3): Intro; food and poetry – Beowulf to The Banquet
Civilizing Hunger
Week 2 (2/10): Class meeting to begin in the Davis Museum. The raw and the
cooked: Ovid, Metamorphoses, VIII.611-724 (Baucis and Philemon); Luke 16:19-31
(Dives and Lazarus) (both in photocopy); visit to Davis Museum; Norbert Elias,
The Civilizing Process, pp. 48-75 (e-reserves), Claude Lévi-Strauss, "The
Culinary Triangle" (from Food and Culture, pp. 28-35) (e-reserves). (If
you want to read a short, but entire, poem
on manners, see "Carmen Juvenile," in Auctores Octo, on reserve.)
Week 3 (2/17): Perceval: The Story of the Grail, pp. 1-93.
Week 4 (2/24): Perceval, pp. 93-150, 196-291. Visit from Lilian Armstrong, Department of Art
Food and Sin
Week 5 (3/2): Gluttony and the seven deadly: William Langland, Piers Plowman, B-text, Passus V-VI (e-reserves), Geoffrey Chaucer, The Summoner's Prologue & Tale (in Riverside Chaucer or in Michael Murphy's "reader-friendly" version at http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/webcore/murphy/canterbury/)
Week 6 (3/9) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in The Complete Works of the Pearl Poet
Week 7 (3/16): Purity in The Complete Works of the Pearl Poet
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~SPRING BREAK~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Divine Hunger
Week 8 (3/30): Spiritual Women,1: Elizabeth Petroff, Intro to Catherine of Siena, Letters, pp. 263-75 (e-reserves); Raymond of Capua, Life of St. Catherine, pp. 276-304 (e-reserves); Holy Feast, Holy Fast, pp. 31-69 (e-reserves). Visit from Sharon Elkins, Department of Religion
Week 9 (4/6): Spiritual Women, 2: Raymond of Capua, Life of St. Catherine of Siena, pp. 23-62 (e-reserves); Rudolph Bell, Holy Anorexia, pp. 22-53 (e-reserves); Margery Kempe (Petroff, 301-02, 314-29, e-reserves)
Transgressive Hunger
Week 10 (4/13): Dante, Inferno, Canto 6, 32-34 (e-reserves); Chaucer, The
Monk's Tale, lines 2407-62 (xerox). Visit from Rachel Jacoff, Italian Department
Week 11 (4/20): Ovid, Metamorphoses, III.339-510, VI.424-674, and John Milton,
Paradise Lost, II.629-870 (in xerox, and from http://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/pl/book_2/index.shtml);
Maggie Kilgour's From Communion to Cannibalism: An Anatomy of Metaphors of
Incorporation, pp. 119-39 (e-reserves). Maggie Kilgour, Chair of the English
Dept. at McGill University in Canada, will be visiting our class on this day,
and will be giving a lecture just afterwards – of course, you will be
expected to attend both the class and lecture.
Food and Carnival
Week 12 (4/27): Francois Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel , pp. 7-40, 64-90, 102-47, 230-35, Mikhail Bakhtin, "Banquet Imagery," from Rabelais and His World (pp. 278-302) (e-reserves)
Week 13 (5/4): Return of the Pub: Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I
Final Paper due Friday, May 14, by 4:00