meta-Arthuriana —
Again, on the image of “Camelot” – the Kennedys, and Democratic politics – Mat Bai notes that comparisons between Barack Obama and Robert F. Kennedy are on the loose:
There’s something unhealthy about all this Baby-Boomer reminiscing, because it forces Democrats always to look backward, to serve some unrealized ideal of government rather than a more [...]
As our class draws to a close, I think it is appropriate for us to start considering the high level issues of Arthuriana. In other words, I am going to focus on some large impressions that I have from the course about the general direction Arthurian Lit has taken since it was originally written, this [...]
It’s been said that the idea of vernacular epic was first formalized by literary historians and philologists (i.e. early linguists and folklorists) in the nineteenth century, which is also traditionally the era of the rise of modern nationalism. This connection is not accidental, “epic” literature like the Chanson de Roland, and even Beowulf (which has [...]
Parzival comes from a different (German) culture than both Chretien and the Prose Lancelot cycle. It is hard not to notice some of the dissimilarities implied by the narrative discrepancies of Parzival and the The Story of the Grail. In particular, Parzival makes interesting choices surrounding sexuality, compared with Chretien’s Romance. For example when Parzival encounters the lady besieged [...]
It might have been helpful to go over these ideas a week ago or so, but we’ll be spending another week with Chrétien, and other romance narratives as well. . . [This week's notes are appended]
Reading any medieval text isn’t quite like reading modern or contemporary texts; it requires the modern reader to make a [...]
When Tessa asked the question – how did these stories become kids stories, I kind of scrambled for an answer, assuming it must have been Andrew Lang, the Scottish folklorist and prolific writer/translator. Lang may have adapted some Arthurian material, but Sidney Lanier (again, one of those 19th Century “men of letters”) wrote two books [...]