Elizabeth Scala

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales

This course proposes an intensive and extended reading of Chaucer’s unfinished masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales, a central literary text for anyone studying the premodern period. This multi-genre story collection holds a central place in the traditional British canon and thus the history of vernacular literary education in the English-speaking world. At the moment, it sits at a contested site of literary authority even as its fictions contest the very terms of authority (gendered, political, and ethnic, among others) that it now supposedly stands for. Included in many survey courses, the Tales are rarely read whole, even by field-specialists. They are instead treated piecemeal and as individual stories for the purposes of varied pedagogical enterprises. This course seeks to explore the texture of Chaucer’s poetry, comparing vocabulary and literary features across different stories, in the story-telling collection by bringing a deep reading of the entire work, not merely those tales typically anthologized and often encountered. The course seeks to give students a different perspective on Chaucer’s popularity as a “religious” writer, a prose stylist, and an experiment driver by thinking through the ways his poem was itself pulled apart and anthologized in some early manuscripts and adapted to the early modern stage. In many ways this course hopes to get beyond the “introductory” aspects the Tales typically serve in courses devoted to literary history or the interests of “the survey,” some of which have made it appropriate to adaptation for children. We’ll thus be thinking about the uses to which the Tales were put, especially early in its canonical career, and how those uses have shaped the work we think we now know. We’ll also think about teaching Chaucer and the kinds of compromises student need and experience typically calls on us to make. To those ends some experience with Chaucer in just such introductory courses or surveys (and with some Middle English) is desirable.

E 321K  l  Introduction to Criticism: HONORS-WB

Instructor:  Scala, E

Unique #:  36050

Semester:  Spring 2021

Cross-lists:  LAH 350, 30750

Prerequisites: Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description:  This course will introduce students to “theory” and the critical debates about how we read literature. We’ll start with the tenets of New Criticism and work forward to post-structuralism in order to familiarize ourselves with the specialized vocabulary of theory that often defies simple dictionary definition. The course will be historical, seeking to understand the rise of theory out of philosophy, linguistics, and various modern cultural writings between 1850 and 1900.  

Texts (subject to revision):  Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, ed. Jonathan Culler (Oxford); Critical Terms for Literary Study, ed, Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, 2^nd ed. U Chicago Press, 1995; Various chapters from Critical Theory Since 1965 and the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (available online via Canvas); Various poems and short stories (also on Canvas)

Requirements & Grading:  Zoom participation (cameras on) 30%; Canvas discussion board, weekly postings 30%; 3 short essays (5pp max) 40%.

E 350E l  Love and Betrayal in Troy: HONORS

Instructor: Scala, E

Unique: 35545

Semester:Spring 2020

Cross-lists: LAH 350

Prerequisite: Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description: The story of Troy and its epic destruction was the most important story in Classical literature and provided the basis for the founding of Rome and the European nations that emerged from Rome’s fall.  This course examines some of the major texts of the Medieval and Early Modern periods that depend upon and restyle that narrative to new purposes, including Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, and Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage. Beginning with the Classical tradition itself, and principally Vergil’s Aeneid, we will look to the ways the fall of Troy, and the infamous doomed romances at its core, provide the groundwork of English literary history and its representation of the demands of heroic duty, erotic compulsion, and human subjectivity.  Such concerns will take us out of the realm of specific retellings of the Troy story or its immediate aftermath to its further uses in Medieval and Renaissance literary culture more generally.

Readings Likely Include:  Homer, The Iliad; Vergil, The Aeneid; Ovid, The Heroides(selections); Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde; Chaucer, The Legend of Good Women(selections); Henryson, The Testament of Cresseid; Lydgate, Troy Book; Marlowe, Dido, Queen of Carthage; Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida; Greenlaw, A Double Sorrow.

Requirements & Grading: Two short writing projects (one of which will be the subject of a presentation): 25% each; a final research essay (including an annotated bibliography) 40%; continuous class preparation and attendance 10%.

E 314L  l  4-Texts and Contexts-HONORS

Instructor:  Scala, E

Unique #:  34410

Semester:  Fall 2019

Cross-lists: n/a

Prerequisites: One of the following: E 303C (or 603A), RHE 306, 306Q, or T C 303C (or 603A).

Description: the Harry Potter Phenomenon –

One of the more exciting and sometimes controversial literary events of the last quarter century is J.K. Rowling’s stunningly successful Harry Potter series.  From the beginning, it set new sales records and almost single-handedly renewed interest in those old-fashioned objects known as books, particularly for a young audience usually more gripped by television.  For better or worse, Harry Potteris the common narrative of a new generation, assuming a position formerly held by the Bible, the Arthurian tradition, and some commonly taught high school texts, such as The Great Gatsbyand The Scarlet Letter.

This course seeks to introduce students to the methods of literary analysis and research through various approaches to the Harry Potter phenomenon: both the initial novel itself and some of its cultural and historical contexts.  We will read the British edition of the text (comparing it to the American one), Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, for its sustained intervention in a number of literary critical traditions, including medieval heroism, Renaissance occultism, Romanticism, Victorian medievalism, and the school novel genre.  We’ll use controversies over Harry Potter’s “magical” thinking to learn how to research various public debates, and we’ll investigate the sales data to research the rise of YA fiction following the Potter phenomenon.  We’ll also learn to think critically and even historically about a book we love: what might a feminist critique of Harry Potter look like and how might that contextualize the book in the historical moment of its emergence as well reshape it now: #Hermionetoo.

Tentative Texts: Students will read a variety of texts from the Middle Ages to the present that form the literary inheritance of J.K. Rowling’s novel so as to understand better the content, contexts, and contests in which the book engages and has been placed.  Readings include: J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Jonson, The Alchemist; a selection of Romantic poetry; Tennyson, Idylls of the King; Hughes, Tom Brown’s School Daysplus various essays and excerpts in literary theory and criticism.  Students can expect to finish the course with skills in online and print research, close and comparative reading, and copyediting and citation format that will ground any English literature course they subsequently take.

Requirements & Grading: 3 papers (30%) each and classroom work: preparation, participation, presentation 10%.

E 376  l  Chaucer

Instructor:  Scala, E

Unique #:  35210

Semester:  Fall 2019

Cross-lists:  n/a

Prerequisites: Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description: This course serves as an introduction to one of the three most important poets in the English tradition—Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton—and the earlier form of the English language in which he composed through an intensive reading of his most famous poem, The Canterbury Tales.  Focusing exclusively on the reading and interpretation of the stories that make up this unfinished medieval tale collection, this course operates in terms of some medieval scribal practices:  copying, translating, memorizing, and glossing passages as part of a classroom commentary tradition.  Rehearsing some of these original practices in our post-modern classroom, we will investigate the clerical, courtly, and intellectual culture in and about which Chaucer writes in both serious and comic forms.

In reading Chaucer’s story collection, we will pay particular attention to the medieval veneration of “old bookes,” noting throughout the semester the various ways Chaucer’s “book” looks toward and depends upon other texts for its significance. We will also perform some book veneration of our own by visiting the HRC, where we will see medieval manuscripts of Chaucer’s Canterbury Talesin the flesh – literally, on the vellum (sheepskin) on which they were written – and in facsimile as we work to recapture something of late medieval textual culture before the advent of print.  We will also take some time to look at the transmission and development of Chaucer’s works by looking at translations, popular serializations, and adaptations of the Canterbury Talesin modern culture.

Texts: Required: The Canterbury Tales, complete. Ed. Larry D. Benson, et. al. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.

Helen Cooper, Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales. 2^nded. OUP, 1996.

Requirements & Grading: Three examinations: 25%; 25% and 40%; Class preparation and participation (including any in-class assignments): 10%.

Instructor:  Kevorkian, M

 Unique #:  35120

Semester:  Fall 2018

Cross-lists:  n/a

Restrictions:  English Honors; Plan I Honors

Computer instruction:  No

Prerequisites:  One of the following: E 303C (or 603A), RHE 306, 306Q, or T C 303C (or 603A).

Description:  “Donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging”; thus did Ben Johnson condemn the poet John Donne for a perceived violation of literary form.  In this introduction to literary study, we will consider form as a primary reading context, a context which, as the Johnson verdict demonstrates, could also be highly contested.  Wallace Stevens directs our attention to “the outlines of being and its expressings, the syllables of its law:/ Poesis, poesis, the literal characters, the vatic lines”; the various creative ways in which artists have interpreted that “law” has produced long, contested history.  Throughout the course, we will consider issues of structure in a series of genres, from poetry to drama to the novel.  We will also make use of such resources as the Norton Critical Edition to develop a familiarity with several approaches to literary criticism.  Toward the goal of developing your own voice as an expository writer, I encourage you to drop in on Trimble’s “conversations” early and often as you compose and revise.

Tentative Texts:  For an extensive poetry database, please see Literature Online (LION) <https://literature-proquest-com.ezproxy.lib.utexas.edu/gotoSearchTexts.do;jsessionid=94858C29CEBA0DF833C65257C4FFD570?listType=poetry&initialise=true>.

The library itself also contains quite a few poems.

Terry Eagleton, How to Read a Poem; M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, Ninth Edition; Shakespeare, Much Ado about Nothing, ed. David L. Stevenson; Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter; Optional recommended text: John Trimble, Writing With Style: Conversations on the Art of Writing, Second Edition; (supplementary readings – including selections from Pinsky, The Sounds of Poetry, Steele, All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing, and Koch, Making Your Own Days – will be made available via Canvas throughout the semester)

Requirements & Grading:  Two short (3-5 page) papers and one slightly longer (6-8 page) term paper will make up the bulk of the final grade.  At least one of the papers must make use of the OED; the final paper will include an engagement with at least one critical article. Papers will be graded on a “portfolio” basis to afford opportunity and incentive for revisions. Attendance is mandatory; repeated unexcused absences will affect your grade.  Weekly focused response writings will be a regular feature of the course, to be used as catalysts for discussion and for the development of paper topics.  Also, periodically you will be asked to facilitate discussion.

Attendance and participation (25 %); paper 1 (25%); paper 2 (25%); paper 3 (25%).

This is a course for anyone who might need to teach a British literature survey “from the beginning.” It takes as its ideational focus the ever-expanding, ever-excerpting, ever-digitizing Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume 1, Part A as its focus: the so-called “Medieval Period.” A 1O^th edition is about to appear. The materials “in” this anthology will be the focus of our reading and, perhaps, our animus—or at least our critique. We’ll look back at earlier versions, some not very distant, to see how quickly it has changed and how those changes work in relation to other parts of the national literary canon it represents. We’ll compare it to other anthologies of medieval literature to understand better its scope. We’ll think about the “anthologizing impulse” in terms that Leah Price uses to talk about the rise of the novel, as well as the way this idea represents manuscript miscellanies in the Middle Ages and printed ones in the early modern period.

It is very much hoped that the course will attract students working beyond medieval or early modern studies who will be interested in working in these comparative terms and who can speak to the other sections of the Norton Anthology in more specialist fashion. Using the medieval period as our focus and something of a critical lens, we’ll be interested in questions of disciplinary formation, canonicity, periodicity, and temporality. We’ll be looking at the many faces of the “historical” and different versions of historicism and its shifting purview(s). We’ll also be intensely engaged with theory, and the most recent theoretical formations, in a fulsome discussion of applicability and anachronism. Issues of race, ethnicity, color, gender, and sexuality will be major foci of this theoretical discussion. Students can expect to end the course with a better understanding of the medieval period in English, a grounding in its major texts and how to teach them (regardless of their own area of specialization or interest), of how to teach a survey course in general, of the politics of canon (de)formations, and of current issues in critical theory and culture as they relate (to) the distant past.

Assignments will include:

A conference length paper

At least one fully introduced and annotated British lit survey syllabus and, possibly, a field specific one from students’ areas.

Instructor:  Scala, E

Unique #:  35145

Semester:  Spring 2018

Cross-lists:  n/a

Restrictions:  n/a

Computer Instruction:  No

Prerequisites:  Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description:  This course serves as an introduction to one of the three most important poets in the English tradition—Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton—and the earlier form of the English language in which he composed through an intensive reading of his most famous poem, The Canterbury Tales.  Focusing exclusively on the reading and interpretation of the stories that make up this unfinished medieval tale collection, this course operates in terms of some medieval scribal practices:  copying, translating, memorizing, and glossing passages as part of a classroom commentary tradition.  Rehearsing some of these original practices in our post-modern classroom, we will investigate the clerical, courtly, and intellectual culture in and about which Chaucer writes in both serious and comic forms.

In reading Chaucer’s story collection, we will pay particular attention to the medieval veneration of “old bookes,” noting throughout the semester the various ways Chaucer’s “book” looks toward and depends upon other texts for its significance.  We will also perform some book veneration of our own by visiting the HRC, where we will see medieval manuscripts of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in the flesh – literally, on the vellum (sheepskin) on which they were written – and in facsimile as we work to recapture something of late medieval textual culture before the advent of print.  We will also take some time to look at the transmission and development of Chaucer’s works by looking at translations, popular serializations, and adaptations of the Canterbury Tales in modern culture.

Texts:  Required: The Canterbury Tales, complete. Ed. Larry D. Benson, et. al. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.

Helen Cooper, Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales. 2^nd ed. OUP, 1996.

Requirements & Grading:  Three examinations: 25%; 25% and 40%; Class preparation and participation (including any in-class assignments): 10%.

Instructor:  Scala, E & Blockley, M

Unique #:  35520

Semester:  Fall 2017

Cross-lists:  n/a

Restrictions:  n/a

Computer Instruction:  No

Prerequisites:  Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description:  This course introduces students to some of the earliest literary works produced in England following the Norman Conquest, particularly those important for their exploration of medieval ideas about love, honor, and the natural world, as well as about Englishness among competing literary traditions in the time when England was a trilingual nation, producing poetry and fiction in Latin, English, and French.  We will focus largely on the English materials produced on the island, moving from early lyric and romances, with some attention (in translation) to the earlier Irish epic, The Tain as one of the influences on ideas about vernacular literature, through the genre-establishing works of Chaucer, the Pearl-poet, and Malory to the great poets and dramatists of the Renaissance.  We will read a variety of popular genres and learn a bit about the history of our language with its literature.

Required texts:  Norton Anthology of English Literature: Part A Medieval.

Texts and authors include:  

The Tain, Marie de France, Sir Orfeo, Pearl, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Middle English lyrics, Chaucer, Le Morte d’Arthur, the Second Shepherd’s Play, Skelton, Wyatt, Surrey, Shakespeare (As You Like It) Marlowe, Ralegh, Herrick, Jonson, Marvell, Donne.

Requirements and Grading:  three in-class exams (20%: 30%; 40%) and classroom prep and participation (10%)

Attendance:  Mandatory.  Two absences will go unnoticed.  Any further absences will result in a 5-point deduction on final grade.  Five or more absences results in course failure.

Social Critique and Story Collecting: Langland, Gower, Chaucer

This course focuses on the three most important poets of late fourteenth-century London by thinking in terms of the “collection”—an abstract representation of the medieval manuscript miscellany that becomes the book—through Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Gower’s Confessio Amantis, and Langland’s serial set of dream visions, The Vision Concerning Piers the Plowman. Each of these longer works is made from a series of shorter texts and can be considered in such formal and textual “collective” terms.

These works are collective in more ways the one.  They take up the social fabric of late medieval England in collective terms, arguing for the good of the many over the privileges of the few. We will be reading these centrally canonical medieval works in terms of their related content: their visions of society, their critiques of various worldly institutions (some of them rather clerical), as well as their reception history after the Reformation. (This means that we will attend to some of Chaucer’s tales that are less regularly taught and perhaps some he did not write at all.) That is, we will look to the ways in which these works were collected and disseminated by the printers of the sixteenth-century, to which the HRC holdings give us a unique point of access.

This course will be of interest not only to medievalists or students of British literary history looking to understand the fourteenth century as an important point of origin for a variety of modern concerns but also to Early Modernists and book historians who might wish to investigate the way the Reformation and early decades of print shaped a canon we have come to know quite differently. Our investigation of the “collection” will consider the compendious genres medieval genres that collect material such as the summa and encyclopedia, the effects of medieval manuscript textuality collecting material in anthologies and miscellanies, and the authoritative, shaping forces of print culture, which will include some attention to efforts to “collect” what the dissolution of the monasteries threatened to destroy as well as what it preserved.

Those students specializing in British literature before the 18^th century may want to read the works in Middle English, and additional assistance with the language will be provided in the early weeks of the semester. Others may wish to read in Modern English translation, information on which will also be provided.

Course requirements are continual and active participation; one book review; one in-class presentation; a short response essay (3-5 pp) and a full-length seminar paper.  Students wishing to take the class P/F will be asked to fulfill all course requirements, except the final seminar paper. Instead, they will substitute a 5-page paper proposal with a 3-page bibliography.

E 376  l  Chaucer

Instructor:  Scala, E

Unique #:  35530

Semester:  Fall 2016

Cross-lists:  n/a

Restrictions:  n/a

Computer Instruction:  No

Prerequisites:  Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description:  This course serves as an introduction to one of the three most important poets in the English tradition—Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton—and the earlier form of the English language in which he composed through an intensive reading of his most famous poem, The Canterbury Tales.  Focusing exclusively on the reading and interpretation of the stories that make up this unfinished medieval tale collection, this course operates in terms of some medieval scribal practices: copying, translating, memorizing, and glossing passages as part of a classroom commentary tradition.  Rehearsing some of these original practices in our post-modern classroom, we will investigate the clerical, courtly, and intellectual culture in and about which Chaucer writes in both serious and comic forms.

In reading Chaucer’s story collection, we will pay particular attention to the medieval veneration of “old bookes,” noting throughout the semester the various ways Chaucer’s “book” looks toward and depends upon other texts for its significance.  We will also perform some book veneration of our own by visiting the HRC, where we will see medieval manuscripts of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in the flesh – literally, on the vellum (sheepskin) on which they were written – and in facsimile as we work to recapture something of late medieval textual culture before the advent of print.  We will also take some time to look at the transmission and development of Chaucer’s works by looking at translations, popular serializations, and adaptations of the Canterbury Tales in modern culture.

Texts:  Required: The Canterbury Tales, complete. Ed. Larry D. Benson, et. al. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.

Helen Cooper, Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales. 2nd ed. OUP, 1996.

Requirements & Grading:  Three examinations: 25%; 25% and 40%; Class preparation and participation (including any in-class assignments): 10%.

E 376  l  Chaucer

Instructor:  Scala, E

Unique #:  34635

Semester:  Fall 2015

Cross-lists:  n/a

Flags:  Global cultures

Restrictions:  n/a

Computer Instruction:  No

Prerequisites: Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description: This course serves as an introduction to one of the three most important poets in the English tradition—Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton—and the earlier form of the English language in which he composed through an intensive reading of his most famous poem, The Canterbury Tales. Focusing exclusively on the reading and interpretation of the stories that make up this unfinished medieval tale collection, this course operates in terms of some medieval scribal practices: copying, translating, memorizing, and glossing passages as part of a classroom commentary tradition. Rehearsing some of these original practices in our post-modern classroom, we will investigate the clerical, courtly, and intellectual culture in and about which Chaucer writes in both serious and comic forms.

In reading Chaucer’s story collection, we will pay particular attention to the medieval veneration of “old bookes,” noting throughout the semester the various ways Chaucer’s “book” looks toward and depends upon other texts for its significance. We will also perform some book veneration of our own by visiting the HRC, where we will see medieval manuscripts of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in the flesh – literally, on the vellum (sheepskin) on which they were written – and in facsimile as we work to recapture something of late medieval textual culture before the advent of print. We will also take some time to look at the transmission and development of Chaucer’s works by looking at translations, popular serializations, and adaptations of the Canterbury Tales in modern culture.

Texts: Required: The Canterbury Tales, complete. Ed. Larry D. Benson, et. al. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.

Helen Cooper, Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales. 2nd ed. OUP, 1996.

Requirements & Grading: Three in-class examinations: 20% each; Final Examination: 30%; Class preparation and participation (including any in-class assignments): 10%.

E 316L  l  British Literature-HONORS

Instructor:  Scala, E

Unique #:  34315

Semester:  Spring 2015

Cross-lists:  n/a

Flags:  Global Cultures

Restrictions:  Prospective English Honors students

Prerequisites: E 603A, RHE 306, 306Q, or T C 603A.

Description: This course serves as an overview of the most important and influential works of the British literary and linguistic tradition from its beginnings through the 20th century. The course will be conducted in both lecture and discussion format, and the goal of the course will be “coverage”—a vast majority of students’ time will be devoted to reading and annotation. The course will make an effort to give students a coherent narrative of British literature from the earliest writings in English through the major periods and transitions. It will cover important writers, genres, and styles as they characterize those literary periods. This course will aim to provide the foundation for future study in English literature by enabling students to contextualize and relate to each other the specific upper-division classes in which they enroll.

Required Texts: Two-volume Norton Anthology of British Literature: Major Authors, packaged with Norton Critical Edition of Pride and Prejudice; William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night (Oxford World Classics); Alfred Hitchcock, dir.  Vertigo.

Requirements & Grading: 2 in-class examinations (25% each); final writing project (30%); class participation, preparation and quizzes (20%).

Instructor:  Scala, E

Unique #:  35835

Semester:  Fall 2014

Cross-lists:  n/a

Flags:  Global Cultures; Writing (both pending approval)

Restrictions: 

Prerequisites: Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description: English literature is full of classical and Biblical references, both explicit quotations of specific authors and implicit imitations of forms, that students in today’s classroom can have a hard time recognizing.  These works used to be standard texts in the curriculum and could be found on any educated person’s bookshelves.  Many modern students have not yet encountered them directly and thus are at a disadvantage when reading British and American texts that assume their familiarity. In this class we will read the major Greek and Latin “classics” (epic, tragedy, myth) as well as stories in the Christian Bible that form the groundwork of English (and American) literary production.

Texts: Readings include (may be selections): Homer, Iliad, Odyssey; Sophocles, Oedipus Rex; Euripides, Bacchae; Virgil, Aeneid; Ovid, Metamorphoses, Heroides, Ars Amatoria; Aesop, Fables; Old Testament Pentateuch (selections); Song of Songs; New Testament, Gospel of Matthew

Requirements & Grading:  Three essays (30% each) and consistent class participation (10%).

Instructor:  Scala, E

Unique #:  35950

Semester:  Fall 2014

Cross-lists:  n/a

Flags:  Global cultures

Computer Instruction:  No

Prerequisites: Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description: This course serves as an introduction to one of the three most important poets in the English tradition—Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton—and the earlier form of the English language in which he composed through an intensive reading of his most famous poem, The Canterbury Tales. Focusing exclusively on the reading and interpretation of the stories that make up this unfinished medieval tale collection, this course operates in terms of some medieval scribal practices: copying, translating, memorizing, and glossing passages as part of a classroom commentary tradition. Rehearsing some of these original practices in our post-modern classroom, we will investigate the clerical, courtly, and intellectual culture in and about which Chaucer writes in both serious and comic forms.

In reading Chaucer’s story collection, we will pay particular attention to the medieval veneration of “old bookes,” noting throughout the semester the various ways Chaucer’s “book” looks toward and depends upon other texts for its significance. We will also perform some book veneration of our own by visiting the HRC, where we will see medieval manuscripts of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in the flesh – literally, on the vellum (sheepskin) on which they were written – and in facsimile as we work to recapture something of late medieval textual culture before the advent of print. We will also take some time to look at the transmission and development of Chaucer’s works by looking at translations, popular serializations, and adaptations of the Canterbury Tales in modern culture.

Texts: Required: The Canterbury Tales, complete. Ed. Larry D. Benson, et. al. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.

Helen Cooper, Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales. 2nd ed. OUP, 1996.

Requirements & Grading: Three in-class examinations: 20% each; Final Examination: 30%; Class preparation and participation (including any in-class assignments): 10%.

Instructor:  Scala, E

Unique #:  83350

Semester:  Summer 2014, second session

Cross-lists:  n/a

Flags:  Writing

Restrictions:  n/a

Computer instruction:  No

Prerequisite: E 603A, RHE 306, 306Q, or T C 603A.

Description: This course introduces students to the methods of literary study by exploring the secret language of Harry Potter: the literary references and Latinate spell-casting of J.K. Rowling’s “medievalist” fantasy series. We will read some Rowling as well as J.R.R. Tolkien (another wildly popular modern medievalist) in light of their sources and literary heritage: Chaucer, medieval romances such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and heroic tales like Beowulf.

Requirements and Grading:  3 short essays (30% each); class participation (10%).

Instructor:  Scala, E

Unique #:  35450

Semester:  Spring 2014

Cross-lists:  n/a

Prerequisites: E 603A, RHE 306, 306Q, or T C 603A, and a passing score on the reading section of the Texas Higher Education Assessment (THEA) test.

Description: This course serves as an overview of the most important and influential works of the British literary and linguistic tradition from its beginnings through the 20th century. The course will be conducted in both lecture and discussion format, and the goal of the course will be “coverage”—a vast majority of students’ time will be devoted to reading and annotation. The course will make an effort to give students a coherent narrative of British literature from the earliest writings in English through the major periods and transitions. It will cover important writers, genres, and styles as they characterize those literary periods. This course will aim to provide the foundation for future study in English literature by enabling students to contextualize and relate to each other the specific upper-division classes in which they enroll.

Required Texts: Two-volume Norton Anthology of British Literature: Major Authors, packaged with Norton Critical Edition of Pride and Prejudice; Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, Annotated; Alfred Hitchcock, dir.  Vertigo.

Requirements & Grading: 2 in-class examinations (25% each); final writing project (30%); class participation, preparation and quizzes (20%).

Instructor:  Scala, E            Areas:  I / D

Unique #:  35945            Flags:  Global cultures

Semester:  Fall 2013            Restrictions:  n/a

Cross-lists:  n/a            Computer Instruction:  No

Prerequisites: Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description: This course serves as an introduction to one of the three most important poets in the English tradition—Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton—and the earlier form of the English language in which he composed through an intensive reading of his most famous poem, The Canterbury Tales. Focusing exclusively on the reading and interpretation of the stories that make up this unfinished medieval tale collection, this course operates in terms of some medieval scribal practices: copying, translating, memorizing, and glossing passages as part of a classroom commentary tradition. Rehearsing some of these original practices in our post-modern classroom, we will investigate the clerical, courtly, and intellectual culture in and about which Chaucer writes in both serious and comic forms.

In reading Chaucer’s story collection, we will pay particular attention to the medieval veneration of “old bookes,” noting throughout the semester the various ways Chaucer’s “book” looks toward and depends upon other texts for its significance. We will also perform some book veneration of our own by visiting the HRC, where we will see medieval manuscripts of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in the flesh – literally, on the vellum (sheepskin) on which they were written – and in facsimile as we work to recapture something of late medieval textual culture before the advent of print. We will also take some time to look at the transmission and development of Chaucer’s works by looking at translations, popular serializations, and adaptations of the Canterbury Tales in modern culture.

Texts: Required: The Canterbury Tales, complete. Ed. Larry D. Benson, et. al. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.

Helen Cooper, Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales. 2nd ed. OUP, 1996.

Requirements & Grading: Three in-class examinations: 20% each; Final Examination: 30%; Class preparation and participation (including any in-class assignments): 10%.

This course addresses the “works” of the medieval poet in the earliest days of print culture. Beginning with a reading of Troilus and Criseyde, the most famous English literary romance before the sixteenth century, we will study the various apocryphal poems attached to Chaucer’s Workes beginning in 1532.  Starting with Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid, we will read those texts that continued, imitated, and pretended to be Chaucer’s own in the ever growing, “newly emprinted” Renaissance editions of Thynne, Speght, and Stow.

Some issues: the “dull” 15th century; the rise of the early modern book; formal features and changing paratextual design in the Renaissance book; literary paternity (anxiety); modernization and antiquarian language; new dictionaries; printers and publishers in the early modern book trade

Given these concerns, we will spend some time in the HRC with the Renaissance editions of Chaucer and researching the various individuals concerned with their production

Some texts:  Troilus and Criseyde; Testament of Cresseid; Dreme of Chaucer; King’s Quair; Assembly of Ladies; Plowman’s Tale; Seige of Thebes; Tale of Beryn

Course requirements:  short reader’s response (20%); annotated bibliography (20%); 20-25 pp research paper (50%); full and consistent classroom participation, including presentation (10%)

Course pre-requisites:  none. But it would help if students had read Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale and Troilus and Criseyde before class begins.  We will not read the Knight’s Tale as part of the course, but some of the “additional” material to the Canterbury Tales takes it for granted that the audience knows the plot of this story and how it continues the narrative.  We will read Troilus over a few weeks in class, but that reading will be deeper and richer if students have already been able to go over the story at least once, for plot if for nothing else.

Instructor:  Scala, E            Areas:  -- / B

Unique #:  34950            Flags:  n/a

Semester:  Spring 2013            Restrictions:  English Honors

Cross-lists:  n/a            Computer Instruction:  No

Prerequisites: E 603A, RHE 306, 306Q, or T C 603A, and a passing score on the reading section of the Texas Higher Education Assessment (THEA) test.

Description: This course serves as an overview of the most important and influential works of the British literary and linguistic tradition from its beginnings through the 20th century. The course will be conducted in both lecture and discussion format, and the goal of the course will be “coverage”—a vast majority of students’ time will be devoted to reading and annotation. The course will make an effort to give students a coherent narrative of British literature from the earliest writings in English through the major periods and transitions. It will cover important writers, genres, and styles as they characterize those literary periods. This course will aim to provide the foundation for future study in English literature by enabling students to contextualize and relate to each other the specific upper-division classes in which they enroll.

Required Texts: Two-volume Norton Anthology of British Literature: Major Authors, packaged with Norton Critical Edition of Pride and Prejudice; Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, Annotated; Alfred Hitchcock, dir.  Vertigo.

Requirements & Grading: 2 in-class examinations (25% each); final writing project (30%); class participation, preparation and quizzes (20%).

This course reads Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and excavates the contours of the critical field, with special emphasis on material since 1985.  Offering a deeper and more extensive reading of the tales than in most undergraduate courses, we will consider questions of genre, source, manuscript production as well as those topics that currently animate critical discussion of Chaucer, including: gender and sexuality; historicism and politic; psychology and character.

Instructor:  Scala, E            Areas:  n/a

Unique #:  35085            Flags:  n/a

Semester:  Spring 2012            Restrictions:  English Honors

Cross-lists:  n/a            Computer Instruction:  No

Prerequisites: Completion of at least thirty semester hours of coursework, including E 603A, RHE 306, 306Q, or T C 603A, and a passing score on the reading section of the Texas Higher Education Assessment (THEA) test.

Description: This course serves as an overview of the most important and influential works of the British literary and linguistic tradition from its beginnings through the 20th century. The course will be conducted in both lecture and discussion format, and the goal of the course will be “coverage”—a vast majority of students’ time will be devoted to reading and annotation. The course will make an effort to give students a coherent narrative of British literature from the earliest writings in English through the major periods and transitions. It will cover important writers, genres, and styles as they characterize those literary periods. This course will aim to provide the foundation for future study in English literature by enabling students to contextualize and relate to each other the specific upper-division classes in which they enroll.

Required Texts: Two-volume Norton Anthology of British Literature: Major Authors, packaged with Norton Critical Edition of Pride and Prejudice; Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, Annotated; Alfred Hitchcock, dir.  Vertigo.

Requirements & Grading: 2 in-class examinations (25% each); final writing project (30%); class participation, preparation and quizzes (20%).

Prerequisites: Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description: This course serves as an introduction to one of the three most important poets in the English tradition—Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton—and the earlier form of the English language in which he composed through an intensive reading of his most famous poem, The Canterbury Tales. Focusing exclusively on the reading and interpretation of the stories that make up this unfinished medieval tale collection, this course operates in terms of some medieval scribal practices: copying, translating, memorizing, and glossing passages as part of a classroom commentary tradition. Rehearsing some of these original practices in our post-modern classroom, we will investigate the clerical, courtly, and intellectual culture in and about which Chaucer writes in both serious and comic forms.

In reading Chaucer’s story collection, we will pay particular attention to the medieval veneration of “old bookes,” noting throughout the semester the various ways Chaucer’s “book” looks toward and depends upon other texts for its significance. We will also perform some book veneration of our own by visiting the HRC, where we will see medieval manuscripts of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in the flesh – literally, on the vellum (sheepskin) on which they were written – and in facsimile as we work to recapture something of late medieval textual culture before the advent of print. We will also take some time to look at the transmission and development of Chaucer’s works by looking at translations, popular serializations, and adaptations of the Canterbury Tales in modern culture. 

Texts: Required: The Canterbury Tales, complete. Ed. Larry D. Benson, et. al. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.

either: Derek Pearsall, The Canterbury Tales. Routledge, 1994, 1996

or: Helen Cooper, Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales. 2nd ed. OUP, 1996.

Requirements & Grading: Three in-class examinations: 20% each; Final Examination: 30%; Class preparation and participation (including any in-class assignments): 10%.

The Signature Course (UGS 302 and 303) introduces first-year students to the university’s academic community through the exploration of new interests. The Signature Course is your opportunity to engage in college-level thinking and learning.

E 376L (Topic: Chaucer and Shakespeare) may not also be counted.

Course Description: This course investigates the textual relations between two of the foundational writers in English literary history, Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare. Reading selections from the Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde, we will look at the ways Chaucer’s poetry provided the source for a number of Shakespeare’s plays, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Troilus and Cressida, and Two Noble Kinsmen. But we will also look to other relations such as the comparative handling of genre (how was tragedy differently conceived for these writers), history (what were the Latin classics for the two poets) and subjectivity (how did they fashion a sense of intimate interiority). Examining the poems and plays closely, engaging with critical debate about the relation between the two writers, we will also look at the textual cultures in which these individuals wrote by examining original materials at the Humanities Research Center, including medieval manuscripts of Chaucer’s poetry and the edition of Chaucer that Shakespeare likely read.

Texts: The Riverside Chaucer, or The Canterbury Tales, Complete and Troilus and Criseyde; A Midsummer Night’s Dream (all Arden editions of the plays); Two Noble Kinsmen; Troilus and Cressida; Romeo and Juliet; Hamlet.

Grading: Writing Assignments, 20%; Research Group Work, 20%; Final Research Essay, 50%; Classroom performance, 10%.

Prerequisites: Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

This course introduces students to a variety of current issues, topics, and methodologies in medieval English studies.  Working across Old and Middle English genres, the course will include presentations from various resident and visiting faculty on their particular areas of expertise and current research. 

Readings

During the semester we will focus our attention on four important texts spanning the “medieval period” as broadly conceived and its various genres: Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, a text bordering the classical and medieval periods that was translated by King Alfred into Old English, by Chaucer into Middle English and by Elizabeth I into Early Modern English; the French Romance of the Rose, also partially translated by Chaucer; the Middle English Pearl; and Walter Hilton’s “best-seller,” Scala Perfectionis.  These texts are in differing and overlapping ways central to medieval English literary studies but are seldom encountered in most regularly organized courses, even at an advanced level.  Supplementing our reading of these larger works will be a number of shorter primary texts (selected lyrics from the Harley 2253 ms, Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, the Life of St. Katherine) as well as the canonical Piers Plowman, and a number of critical and theoretical essays to provoke our discussion throughout the semester.

Description: This course serves as an introduction to one of the three most important poets in the English tradition—Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton—and the earlier form of the English language in which he composed through an intensive reading of his most famous poem, The Canterbury Tales.  Focusing exclusively on the reading and interpretation of the stories that make up this unfinished medieval tale collection, this course operates in terms of some medieval scribal practices:  copying, translating, memorizing, and glossing passages as part of a classroom commentary tradition.  Rehearsing some of these original practices in our post-modern classroom, we will investigate the clerical, courtly, and intellectual culture in and about which Chaucer writes in both serious and comic forms.

In reading Chaucer’s story collection, we will pay particular attention to the medieval veneration of “old bookes,” noting throughout the semester the various ways Chaucer’s “book” looks toward and depends upon other texts for its significance.  We will also perform some book veneration of our own by visiting the HRC, where we will see medieval manuscripts of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in the flesh – literally, on the vellum (sheepskin) on which they were written – and in facsimile as we work to recapture something of late medieval textual culture before the advent of print.  We will also take some time to look at the transmission and development of Chaucer’s works by looking at translations, popular serializations, and adaptations of the Canterbury Tales in modern culture.

Requirements:  Reading Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales requires learning Middle English, and much of the first few class periods will be devoted to acquiring the necessary language skills.  Therefore attendance, preparation, and participation are not simply recommended but mandatory. All readings below are from the course’s required text, The Canterbury Tales: Complete, ed. Larry D. Benson (Houghton Mifflin, 2000) available at the University Co-Op.  An introductory text on the Canterbury Tales  by Derek Pearsall or by Helen cooper is also required reading (see which one is avaialbe at teh Co-op).  Also available for order from me, CD’s of the individual tales. Most cost $10.  I will place an order during the second week of class.  You may order as many as you like, but I recommend that you get at least one to help you with Middle English pronunciation, which in turn will help your reading comprehension generally.

Grading:

There will be three exams (worth 20%) each and a final (worth 30%). The remaining 10% will be comprised of a score on your preparation and participation.  We will work on various in class assignments, which may be collected and marked as part of this grade.

Schedule of Classes:

Tu. 1/19                        Introduction—The most famous opening sentence in English literature

Th. 1/21                        General Prologue

Tu. 1/26                        General Prologue

Th. 1/28                        General Prologue

Tu. 2/2                        Knight’s Tale (part 1)

Th.  2/4                         Knight’s Tale (part 2-3)

Tu. 2/9                        Knight’s Tale

Th. 2/11                         Examination #1           

Tu. 2/16                        Miller’s Tale           

Th. 2/18                        Miller’s Tale

Tu. 2/23                        Reeve’s Tale           

Th. 2/25                        Reeve’s Tale and Cook’s Tale

Tu. 3/2                        Examination #2

Th. 3/4                        Wife of Bath’s Prologue

Tu. 3/9                        Wife of Bath’s Prologue

Th. 3/11                        Wife of Bath’s Tale

Tu. 3/16                        SPRING BREAK

Th. 3/18                       

Tu. 3/23                        Clerk’s Tale           

Th. 3/25                        Clerk’s Tale                       

Tu. 3/30                        Merchant’s Tale

Th. 4/1                        Franklin’s Tale

Tu. 4/6                        Franklin’s Tale

Th. 4/8                        Examination # 3

Tu. 4/13                        Pardoner’s Tale

Th. 4/15                        Pardoner’s Tale

Tu. 4/20                        Prioress’s Tale

Th. 4/22                        Nun’s Priest’s Tale

Tu. 4/27                        Nun’s Priest’s Tale

Th. 4/29                        Manciple’s Tale   

Tu. 5/4                        Parson’s Prologue and Retraction           

Th.5/6                                    FINAL EXAMINATION           

Classroom Policies: Though not a writing flag course, this is an upper-division, reading-intensive English course.  I expect students to attend class every time, to have a copy of the Canterbury Tales with them, and to have prepared the material on the syllabus for that day.  If you will be absent for any reason, I would appreciate an email letting me know.  Three absences  (or 10% of our scheduled meetings) will result in a course grade deduction by 10 points—a full letter grade Each absence thereafter will reduce the grade by another five points.  

The grade scale for the course will be as follows. Grades are not automatically rounded up:

100-95 A; 94.99-90 A-; 89.99-86 B+; 85.99-83 B; 82.99-80 B-; 79.99-76 C+; 75.99-73 C; 72.99-70 C-; 69.99-65 D; 64.99 and below F.

The University of Texas at Austin provides upon request appropriate academic accommodations for qualified students with disabilities. For more information, contact the Office of the Dean of Students at 471-6259, 471-4641 TTY.

TBD