This second term of the Honors College literature sequence organizes our readings around the idea of travel to explore important literary themes: language, individuation and identity, culture and cultural relativism, and the definitions of fact and fiction. These issues arise out of the concerns of traveler and narrator. For instance, a traveler's sympathy and identity relates to Socratic self-knowledge and its dark side, narcissism; the language of travel complicates ideas about real and imaginary, especially as we move into the age of enlightenment. Travelers' political and economic aims reflect and create public and private spheres, with their concomitant gendering: geography "maps" the human body. Because the West's colonial impulse grows exponentially from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, the ethical dimension of travel and narrative has special meaning for this term of the HC literature sequence. The ways in which literature indexes colonial expansion -- through accommodation and critique -- will be a theme throughout our readings.

The first reading for the term, from Mandeville's Travels, as well as the four articles for the article response papers, are available from Electronic Reserves (user name winter03, password storm: Please note that all Electronic Reserve articles are in PDF format; be sure to have Adobe Acrobat installed on the computer you are using). Three other texts are available at the Copy Shop (past the hospital, north side of 13th Street): Chaucer, "The Man of Law's Tale" (Middle English and modern English translation), The Book of Margery Kempe selections,Wollstonecraft's "Scandinavian Travel Letters" and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. The other four texts are available at Mother Kali's Books, south side of 13th Street, next to the Dairy Queen: Thomas More, Utopia (Bedford Casebook edition); William Shakespeare, The Tempest (Bedford Casebook Edition, see the quotation at the top of this page); Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, The Turkish Embassy Letters (Virago); and Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative (Penguin).

HC 222H folds writing analysis (composition) into the study of literature. To that end, please be advised of the university's Web-based composition resources. (Back to top of page)

Requirements:
Response papers. You'll write four short response papers this term. These are formal papers in the sense that spelling, grammar, and thinking count--all papers must be neat, typed, revised, finished, and proofread. At the same time, these are papers in which to try out ideas, to experiment and challenge yourself intellectually. I will read these papers, comment on them, and grade them pass/no pass. A passing paper requires a clear and pointed thesis, cogent evidence, and NO grammatical errors. No-pass response papers may be rewritten but MUST be handed back to me within a week. Four passing papers will count as a 4.0, three as a 3.0, two as a 2.0, one paper as a 1.0. See the reading schedule for response paper due dates.

Article responses. During the term, you will read, summarize, and comment on two critical articles. These articles will be available on Electronic Reserve (username winter03, password storm) and there are four of them, treating The Man of Law's Prologue and Tale, The Tempest, Lady Mary Wortley Montague's Letters, and Wollstonecraft's Letters. You will choose which articles you will read at the beginning of the term; note that the articles will be available on Electronic Reserve (username winter03, password storm) for a limitedof time (normally one week). Please note that all Electronic Reserve articles are in PDF format; be sure to have Adobe Acrobat installed on the computer you are using. The first sentence of your response will summarize the article's thesis. Follow with a few sentences to detail the critic's argument, paying attention to such things as method, types of evidence, and critical assumptions. Then, in a second paragraph, respond to the article: did it enrich your experience of reading the text? How did it shift your ideas about literary criticism or literature? What further questions do you now have of the text? You may discuss your article with others--in fact, I encourage you to do so. At the same time, the summary must be your own work. These responses, like the response papers, will be graded Pass/No Pass, and you have one week in which to rewrite No Pass summaries. See the schedule for article response due dates.

Graded formal papers. Two five- to six-page papers, each of which may use observations originally explored in response papers. PAPER 1, due Thursday, January 30, will treat Mandeville, "The Man of Law's Prologue and Tale," and/or Margery Kempe. PAPER 2, due Thursday, February 27, will treat Utopia, The Tempest, and/or Montagu's Letters. Note paper due dates: papers must be turned in on the date specified.

Final exam. Cumulative, essay, take-home exam, especially emphasizing our last two texts, due no later than Wednesday, March 19, at 5:00 p.m.

Grading: The response papers constitute 15% of your grade; the two formal papers, 30% each; the article summaries 10%; and the final exam will constitute 15% of your grade. (Back to top of page)

Reading Schedule Please read the assigned pages BEFORE the class meeting

Reading guide: texts
The following notes and questions are meant to complement your reading of the text. They touch on the central issues we'll be discussing in class. At the same time, be aware that not every question will be answered, and many issues cross over from one text to the next. You may use this guide to spark your response papers' theses.

Mandeville's Travels: While originally written in French in 1356, Mandeville's Travels gained popularity in both manuscript and print culture. It was translated into English c. 1400, and into other vernaculars as well as Latin by the fifteenth century. Note the methods by which Mandeville makes his narrative "real." Develop a "‘rhetoric' of reality": how vital is first-hand experience to your ‘rhetoric' of reality? How does it fit with Mandeville's? What do the differences tell us about our expectations for "literature"? What are the ways "reality" is mediated? Is there a hierarchy among these methods of mediation? What supports, or challenges, such a hierarchy?

"Man of Law's Prologue and Tale": Part romance, part saint's life, part allegory, this text invokes melodramatic horror in response to, among other things, dysfunctional families and cosmic turbulence. What, if anything, is "real" about this tale? How does that reality square with a teller who is a lawyer? How does "journey" differ from "escape" or "exile"? What is the role of belief in this tale? Choose a particular episode and analyze its meaning of "travel" in relation to belief, gender roles, rulership, obedience, or continuity.

The Book of Margery Kempe: Margery emphasizes the suffering she endured in her journeys and asserts that suffering heightened her spiritually. What evidence does she present to substantiate this claim? Does she establish a difference between a pilgrimage and a "trip"? What is the relationship between spirit and body as Margery presents it, and how does writing fit into that paradigm? Characterize Margery's "voice": be alert to what you're taking from the text, and what expectations or assumptions you're bringing to your analysis.

Utopia: Originally in Latin, Utopia as we will read it comes from the translation of Ralph Robynson (1556), who produced his translation after More's execution and during the reign of Henry VIII's Catholic daughter Mary. Our edition's editor points out Robynson's having made his Utopia more limited and English, rather than universal and Latin, but the kinds of ethical meanings Raphael Hythloday attaches to mercantile practices, his arguments against the death penalty for vagrancy, and other issues in both books address the complex intersection between wealth and morality. In Book One, how does the dialogue form affect the "truth-value" of Hytholoday's, or More's, opinions? In Book Two, do you detect any humor/irony/sarcasm in the description of Utopian ethics or government? How does humor contain, or exploit, or invoke danger? How does danger intersect with travel?

The Tempest: The fertile intersections among family-polity-theatre that appear on the island intersect dynastic concerns (Prospero-Miranda; Alonso-Ferdinand) with mercantile reward (Stephano and Trinculo) and colonial oppression (Caliban-Sycorax) with magic (Ariel). Why does Prospero have books along with his magic staff? What does this play say about "good rulership"?

The Turkish Embassy Letters: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu accompanied her husband, the British Ambassador, to his post in the Ottoman Empire (present-day Turkey) in 1716. Few British women had made such a journey. She wrote to various friends and acquaintances, including her sister, the Countess of Mar, and the poet Alexander Pope. After her return, she revised her letters as if for publication, but they weren't published until after her death in 1763. What types of sights or experiences seem to interest Montagu most as she crosses Europe and arrives in Turkey? Does she write differently to different correspondents? She was English, Protestant, aristocratic and female; do these aspects of her identity seem to you to mark her letters, and if so, how? Does she display the condescending attitude of many later Europeans toward non-Western or "Oriental" regions and peoples?

The Interesting Narrative: Olaudah Equiano, also known as Gustavus Vassa, was born in Africa and kidnapped into slavery as a boy. He worked on British Navy warships and in Britain's Caribbean colonies before purchasing his freedom at age 21. Afterward he traveled extensively in Europe, Central America, and even the Arctic, working as a sailor and servant, and became an activist in the movement to abolish the slave trade, touring the British Isles to lecture and sell copies of this very popular autobiography. Can a slave, traveling involuntarily, be considered a "traveler"? In an autobiography promoted and sold as abolitionist propaganda, why do you think Equiano included so much material on his travels? Pay special attention to his interactions with his various owners and employers. How does he navigate his role as a slave and an African in British society? Does he come to consider Britain his home?

"Scandinavian Travel Letters": Mary Wollstonecraft is best known as the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, (1792), an early feminist treatise dealing with women's mis-education into "gentle, domestic brutes." In the summer of 1795 she traveled to Scandinavia with her one-year-old daughter and French maid on a business mission for her lover, Gilbert Imlay, owner of a ship carrying valuable contraband that had been lost or stolen in the area. After she got back she wrote and published this travelogue in letters. What image of herself does W. subtly project in these carefully revised letters to an unidentified correspondent? How does she weave her philosophical and political opinions into her description of her journey? Notice her frequent descriptions of nature and scenery (conventional in travel writing then and now). How does she present the relation between the land of this bleak, sparsely populated region and the people who live on and from it?

Reading guide: articles
Due Thursday, January 16: Dugas, Don-John. "The Legitimization of Royal Power in Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale." Modern Philology 95 (1997): 27-43. Dugas states his thesis in the first paragraph--be sure to understand his differentiation between a "plot of thought" and plots of action or character. Translatio imperii refers to the idea that human knowledge--arts, politics, "culture"--began, as the Bible recounts, in Israel, then moved successively to Greece, then Rome and, after the fall of Rome, to the various medieval European kingdoms; hence Charlemagne is crowned "Holy Roman Emperor" in 800 C.E. Translatio imperii legitimates the "divine" rulership of medieval monarchs. Reflect on the connection between "history" and "literature" as Dugas explains Chaucer's connection to Richard II.

Here are translations for the Latin sections on p. 35 (both from Lewis Thorpe's Penguin edition): "Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford, a man skilled in the art of public speaking and well-informed about the history of foreign countries, presented me with a certain very ancient book written in the British language. This book, attractively composed to form a consecutive and orderly narrative, set out all the deeds of these men, from Brutus, the first King of the Britons, down to Cadwallader, the son of Cadwallo."

"Brutus, beyond the setting of the sun, past the realms of Gaul,
there lies an island in the sea, once occupied by giants.
Now it is empty and ready for your folk.
Down the years this will prove an abode suited to you and to your people;
and for your decendants it will be a second Troy.
A race of kinds will be born there from your stock
and the round circle of the whole earth will be subject to them."

Click here and scroll down for more information on the Merciless Parliament.

Due Thursday, February 13: Warner, Marina. "‘The foul witch' and Her ‘freckled whelp': Circean Mutations in the New World." "The Tempest" and Its Travels. Ed. Peter Hulme and William Sherman. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. 97-113. Warner is a feminist critic, meaning that the questions she asks of a text have to do with gender definitions, in particular the uses of the feminine. In my own work I have used Warner's earlier book, Alone of All Her Sex: the Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (1976), an investigation into the uses of Mary as image and story in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Her most recent book, Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds : Ways Of Telling The Self (2002) may include some of her meditations from the essay we're reading. She has also written books on cinema, Joan of Arc, and fairy tales (look her up on Janus--it's instructive).

This essay assumes the reader's familiarity with a locus classicus of feminist criticism of The Tempest: what about Sycorax? Mentioned as Caliban's mother, Sycorax provides the pretext for Caliban's ownership of the island. Yet Sycorax (whom we never see) seems associated with negative, rather than positive magic. Positive magic is, of course, the realm of Prospero. How much of Prospero's denigration of Sycorax depends on her gender and a fear of feminine magic, or even a fear of "mothers"? Why doesn't Caliban inherit the island? Essentially Sycorax provides a way to analyze the gender definitions the play assumes for good and bad magic, good and bad rulership, and good and bad generation. Warner is widening that purview, placing Sycorax in a classical literary context--Circe and her "travels"--while also pointing out the assumed associations with the feminine animating the play: irregularity, disorder, extravagance, animality, curiosity. The feminine is also associated with the New World beginning in the sixteenth century, and Warner points out the intersections between New World descriptions and classical attitudes (108). The article thus ties the classical and its idea of the feminine and exotic to Shakespeare's play, and explains to some degree the attraction of that combination to Shakespeare and his audience.

The "Chapman" mentioned on page 104 is the sixteenth-century translator of Homer into English. It's assumed that the Homer Shakespeare read was Chapman's.

Due Thursday, February 20: Lowe, Lisa. "Travel Narratives and Orientalism: Montagu and Montesquieu." Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991. 30-52. Lisa Lowe's book is part of what is called "colonial discourse studies," critical investigations of written representations of European colonialism and empire. The word "Orientalism" in her title alludes to a famous 1978 book by the Palestinian-American critic Edward Said entitled Orientalism.

Said defines Orientalism as "a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between 'the Orient' and (most of the time) 'the Occident.' Thus a very large mass of writers, among whom are poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and imperial administrators, have accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate theories, novels, social descriptions, and political accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, 'mind,' destiny, and so on." Lisa Lowe questions (as have a number of critics since 1978) Said's tendency to treat Orientalism as monolithic or undifferentiated; hence the plural in her title,"Orientalisms." Lowe sees Montagu's proto-feminism, which seems at least partly to motivate her interest in Turkish women's lives, and her Orientalism as working against or undercutting each other. A "rhetoric of identification," or similarity, and a "rhetoric of differentiation" are both at work in these letters, Lowe argues, interacting in complex ways.

Like Said, Lowe grounds her analysis of Montagu's representation of "Orientals" in the context of the concrete economic and political relationships between East and West, the Ottoman Empire and England. Notice the relationship Lowe states or implies between colonialism, or English domination of other territories around the globe, and the somewhat different relationship that England had at this time with the Ottoman Empire, another world power with whom it traded. Lowe also examines the relationship between Montagu's letters and earlier published accounts of travel to the Ottoman Empire, with the Orientalist stereotypes they circulated, in particular of Turkish women. Pay particular attention to Lowe's use of textual evidence from Montagu's letters and the detailed commentaries she gives us on these quotations, tying them into her argument.

Due Thursday, March 13: Favret, Mary A. "Mary Wollstonecraft and the Business of Letters." Romantic Correspondence: Women, politics, and the fiction of letters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. 96-132.This is part of a book on the literary uses of letters during the Romantic period (late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries). Traditionally, during the twentieth century, Romanticism was discussed in terms of poetry and of a few canonical male writers -- Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats. Recent scholarship, however, has broadened this perspective a great deal to take seriously neglected women writers and genres such as the novel, travel writing, etc. Favret's approach is feminist and historicist: she's interested in how gender works itself out in the Letters with and against other factors influencing Wollstonecraft's production of this book, notably "business" -- the motive for her trip (Imlay's lost ship) and for writing the book (her need of money to support herself and her daughter). Pay particular attention to Favret's handling of the imagination, traditionally a key concept in Romantic studies, but not traditionally treated in the kind of material, historical context she
gives us.

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