Fall 2012 Prep

*blows dust off blog again*

I will set aside the usual mea culpa here and just say that it's been a long year, and blogging hasn't been the highest of priorities. But I'll try it again, if nothing else to produce a resource that might actually be useful for someone else, if not myself.

So, you missed my first attempt at Chaucer last spring, which I thought went all right--not great, but all right--until I got a student comment that said I'd killed their interest in the middle ages. Not exactly a bright and sunny beginning for Chaucer, I'll admit. But everybody's got to start somewhere, and now all that material exists, and can be improved upon. Especially the lectures, which should become actual lectures at some point, and not just a regurgitation of notes.

The fall fast approaches, and I've got nothing new on the plate: three sections of World Literature to 1650 and one section of Introduction to Literature, both of which I've taught before. WLIT has some new surprises--I'm teaching "Bisclavret" for the first time, and Le Morte Darthur for the first time since last year's "Arthurian Lit" Course. Intro has also been revamped, after students in the spring kept asking "why are all these stories so damn depressing?" Gone are Raymond Carver ("What We Talk About"); Sherwood Anderson ("Hands"); and Flannery O'Connor ("A Good Man is Hard to Find"); in their place are, respectively, Neil Gaiman ("How to Talk to Girls at Parties"); William Gibson and John Shirley ("The Belonging Kind"); and Etgar Keret ("Healthy Start"). Keret and Gaiman appear as options for the first out-of-class paper for Intro as well; Keret's "Lieland," a moral about lies that reminded me of Italo Calvino; and Gaiman's "The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains," which feels like a Poe story written by Stephen King.

I'm also trying an exam-free semester this time around; there is no midterm, and the final exists only as an option to improve the final paper score. Both courses are also using a modified version of my research paper assignment sequence:

1. A paper proposal, of 150-300 words
2. A close reading paper--now with a clear explanation of how a close reading works
3. One (or two) summary-critique-application papers, which combines a regular summary/critique of their secondary research with a final paragraph in which they demonstrate how they will synthesize their research into their essay
4. And the final, synthetic Research Paper, which draws together all the work they've done so far.

 I tried an earlier version of this in Chaucer, and it appeared to produce better, more meaningful research papers. Here's hoping it'll go well again.

One final bit of good pedagogical news: I will be teaching "Medievalism" in the spring. It's listed as a 4000-level course, which means that I will have now taught every level of undergraduate course, from Freshman to Senior. Hurrah!

Update on Reading List

The score is still Jacob 2, List 3 in the first half.

As of this moment, I have read (or re-read) the following:

• Caedmon’s Hymn
• Bede’s Story of Caedmons’ Hymn
• The Battle of Maldon
• Genesis A and B
• Dream of the Rood
• Guthlac A
• The Phoenix
• The Wanderer
• The Seafarer
• The Wife’s Lament
• Deor
• The Gifts of Men
• The Fortunes of Men
• Cotton Vitellius A.xv (Nowell Codex only):
• Wonders of the East
• The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle
• Beowulf
• The Three Dead Kings
• Winner and Waster
• Pearl
• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
• Troilus & Criseyde
• House of Fame
• King Horn
• Sir Orfeo
• Several Lyrics and Ballads
• Vincent Geoghegan. Utopianism and Marxism.
• Louis Marin. Utopics: the Semiological Play of Textual Spaces.
• Tom Moylan. Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia.
• Lyman Tower Sargent. “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited.”
• Sheila Delany. Chaucer’s House of Fame: The Poetics of Skeptical Fideism.
• Jacques Le Goff. Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages.

I have also read some things that are not on my list but probably should have been:

• Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern
• Russell Jacoby, The End of Utopia
  

I am in the midst of reading (or re-reading) the following:

• The Owl and the Nightingale
• Geoffrey of Monmoth, History of the Kings of Britain
• Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur
• Ernst Bloch. The Principle of Hope. (all of it)
• Fredric Jameson. The Political Unconscious.
  
• Patricia Clare Ingham. “Making All Things New: Past, Progress, and the Promise of Utopia.”
• Karma Lochrie. “Sheer Wonder: Dreaming Utopia in the Middle Ages.”

On the other hand, these I still have left to read (or wossname):

• Life of St Christopher
• Judith
• La3amon, Brut
• Mandeville’s Travels
• Bevis of Hampton
• Richard Coer de Lyon
• Piers Plowman
• The York Register of Corpus Christi Drama
• Canterbury Tales
• Fredric Jameson. Archaeologies of the Future.
  
• Susan Stewart. On Longing.
• Phillip Wegner. Imaginary Communities.
• Daniel Birkholz. “Mapping Medieval Utopia: Exercises in Restraint.”
• William Burgwinkle. “Utopia and Its Uses: Twelfth-Century Romance and History.”
• Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Medieval Identity Machines.
• Hilário Franco. “La construction d’une utopie: l’Empire de Prêtre Jean.”
• John Ganim. Medievalism and Orientalism.
• Michael Uebel. Ecstatic Transformation.
  

Of them all, the following may show up in my dissertation:

• Ernst Bloch's stuff
• The House of Fame
• Winner and Waster
• Pearl?
• Louis Marin?
• Delany
• The four articles from JMEMS
• Both Jamesons
• Cohen
• Ganim
• Uebel

None of the Old English stuff, or the early middle English stuff, or the Malory is going to make it in, because I'm limiting myself to the 14th century in England. This isn't to say I haven't had good ideas about that stuff—actually, I've started a wiki file just for Future Projects—but I do want to get done with the dissertation before I die.

To add to that, I've just received through ILL Slavoj Žižek's In Defense of Lost Causes, which is so interesting that everything else may get put on hold.