UPDATE: WEEKS 9-10, INDIVIDUAL MEETINGS: SIGN-UP POST NOW AVAILABLE
Form: open. Main options:
– a commentary
– an essay
– other structured forms (including a beginning, middle, and end) of a critical, polemical, and discursive nature
Format: 7-8 pages (2500 words maximum), NOT including cited passages. I would expect/hope that there will be quite a lot of cited material from the texts concerned.
Formalities: 11-12 size font, single- or 1.5-spaced, typed up in a legible font (no Comic Sans, no handwriting script ones). Please indicate your name and the title of your paper.
Subject:
– on a topic relating to commentary and/or criticism
– comprising an independent research element (primary and/or secondary sources)
– based on your choice (in consultation with O’Brien) of 14th-16th c. material: this may be one of the texts listed below, or it may be other material (as discussed with O’Brien and agreed to by her)
– usually but not necessarily literary material: music, painting, sculpture, architecture, and other non-textual material objects are also available as options
– may be non-European, but from the cultural equivalent of the European later Medieval period
– may be from a later period (versions, rewritings, refashionings, related 21st century reworkings), taking a Medievalist commentative or commentating approach
– as this is a fairly short paper, you will probably be working on/with one single text.
Suggested supplementary readings (of a 14th-16th c. European literary sort) include:
– parts and portions of MDVL302 required texts (the Romance of the Rose etc.) that have not been covered in class or for the mid-term paper
– the Old French fabliaux
– the European Reynard tradition
– Boccaccio, Decameron
– Guillaume de Machaut
– Chaucer
– Gower
– Langland, Piers Plowman
– the Pearl poet: Pearl, Patience, Cleanness.
– Julian of Norwich, Revelations
– The Cloud of Unknowyng
– Margery Kempe, The Book of…
– Jean Froissart
– Eustache Deschamps
– Wycliffe
– Heinrich Wittenwiler, Der Ring
– Christine de Pisan and the querelle de la Rose
– Christine de Pisan, other works
– Alain Chartier, La Belle Dame sans merci and its querelle
– René d’Anjou
– Nicolas of Cusa
– Leonardo Bruni
– John Lydgate
– Thomas Hoccleve
– Till Eulenspiegel
– François Villon
– William Caxton, as translator
– Machiavelli
– Baldassare Castiglione, Book of the Courtier
– Pico della Mirandola
– Marsilio Ficino
– Thomas More, Utopia
– Erasmus, the Adages and other works
– Rabelais
– Montaigne
– Jonson
– Marlowe
– Shakespeare
– Cervantes
These may be read and worked on in the original or in translation, as best suited to the kind of work you are doing with your chosen text.
The topic and parameters have been left open to permit flexibility, to suit individual students’ interests and inclinations.
In WEEKS 9-10, we will schedule individual appointments for each student to come and see me and talk through your proposals for your papers.
See also:
– RESOURCES: CRITICISM & COMMENTARY
– RESOURCES: MEDIEVAL & RENAISSANCE EUROPEAN LITERATURE
– RESOURCES: SUPPLEMENTARY RESOURCES FOR RESEARCH WORK IN/ON LITERATURE
(also c/0 main menu at the top of the page)
DUE DATE: FRIDAY 13 APRIL (the week after the end of the teaching term, and the day before the final exam): emailed to me by the end of that day (= midnight). In case of technical issues: on the Friday, bring your work on a memory stick / USB key
