 Hello, and welcome to English 2332, Literature of the Western World from the Bronze Age to the Renaissance for the spring semester of 2018 here at Texas A&M University in Corpus Christi. I'm Dr. Eric Luttrell, and I'll be your professor for the next 15 weeks. So what exactly is the Western World and what is the Bronze Age? Well in short, loosely defined, the Bronze Age is a period of history when people began to congregate in cities and to produce some of the earliest forms of technology that we typically associate with civilization. That means large-scale buildings, irrigated agriculture, but most importantly for our purposes the development of writing. Writing developed over a long period of time, centuries, maybe even thousands of years, culminating in a system of formal writing around the year 3000 BC. This was the writing system known as cuneiform that was written on clay tablets in ancient Mesopotamia. That is modern-day Iraq, and that leads us back to the first question. What do we mean by the Western World? Mesopotamia is part of the world that we typically refer to as the Middle East, but as we'll see the literature and other elements of that culture that originated there, some of these elements would travel west over centuries, influencing the literature of ancient Israel, Greece, and Rome, and of course Israel, Greece, and Rome would eventually influence cultures like Britain, Ireland, Spain, and eventually us here in the New World. Now that doesn't just mean that literature was copied and pasted from Mesopotamia to Greece to Rome to Britain to here. When a story travels across different cultures, it loses some of the elements it had in the original and it picks up new ones that are native to a new location. And this phenomenon, this change of narrative over time is something that we're going to pay special attention to in this class. So we'll start with the story of Atrahasis and then move on to the epic of Gilgamesh. Both of these texts have early versions that were written down by around 1600 BCE, and they continued to be revised for the next thousand years. The narratives that preserve these stories of Atrahasis and Gilgamesh were written in cuneiform on clay tablets, which allowed them to survive for thousands of years, but they survive only in fragments, broken fragments. And that means there are words and lines missing here and there, and that leaves gaps in the texts that have come down to us today. Most popular translations of Gilgamesh try to fill in these gaps with some creative interpretations by the translator, but the text I've chosen for us to read in here does not. In this class we'll be reading these two texts from Stephanie Dolly's book Myths from Mesopotamia, and Dolly's edition only gives you the lines that survive on those clay tablets. That means that you're going to have to fill in a lot of these gaps and figure out what happened between the lines that are present. But as we'll see throughout the rest of the course, readers have to fill in the gaps in other texts as well, even if you're reading a text that doesn't have any obviously missing pieces. And how we do that, how we fill in the gaps, how we fill in things that we're not told in a narrative is going to be one of the things that we focus on. So for this reason, you'll need to get Dolly's edition of Gilgamesh and Atrahasis that are included in her book, Myths from Mesopotamia. After Gilgamesh, we'll read the biblical book of Genesis, a book that most of us probably feel like we know quite well. But you may find, however, that the familiarity is deceptive. We're going to read Genesis the way that biblical scholars read it, except that we're not going to read it in the original language. We'll read it in translation, but we're going to read it as a product of a historical time period. And we're going to try to stop ourselves from adding things into the text that aren't there. We're going to find that Genesis, like Gilgamesh, requires us to fill in a great many gaps with assumptions that usually originate outside of the text itself. We'll then move from the Middle East to the world of ancient Greece, and study three works by two authors about one character, that is the Titan Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans. We'll read the theogeny, or the origins of the gods, as well as works and days by the poet Hesiod. Then we'll read the play Prometheus bound by the playwright Eskulus. This will also be where we introduce the genre of theater alongside epic poetry and prose narrative. We'll read sections from Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, and I expect that many of you have read the Odyssey or parts of it before. You probably remember Odysseus's adventures with the Cyclops and the Lotus Eaters and Calypso and that sort of thing. But what many people don't notice is that in the Odyssey it is Odysseus himself who is telling these stories, a narrative within the narrative of the Odyssey. So instead of focusing on his adventures, we'll be focusing on Homer's portrayal of Odysseus as a storyteller, and the events that lead him to tell his own story to the Phaetians. As we move a few centuries ahead and read Virgil's Iliad, we'll see that Virgil borrowed some obvious story elements from Homer, but he's put them into a distinctly Roman narrative. Achilles' rage and Odysseus' trickery made them interesting characters in Homer's day. But the Romans want a hero that puts duty first. The Latin word that Virgil uses is Piatas, which means fulfilling your duty to fate or to the gods or to your nation, even in the face of furor, the Latin word for passion, such as the passion to fare between Daito and Aeneas that tempts Aeneas to settle down rather than fulfilling his destiny. When we come back from spring break, we'll move from classical literature to medieval literature of Northern Europe, starting with the old English poem Beowulf. Beowulf depicts a level of social intelligence that is nearly always overlooked by readers of the poem. It also has to deal with a problem that was new to the Middle Ages, that is how to integrate old pagan stories after the conversion to Christianity. We'll look at old Norse literature, and you'll have a choice of readings in this unit. You may choose to read the saga of Rolf Krocky. You may not have heard of this one, but it shares a historical backdrop and at least one character with Beowulf. In fact, both Beowulf and Rolf's saga belong to a family of folk tales that have been found around the entire Northern Hemisphere, from Iceland to Russia to Native American oral tradition in Canada, the U.S., and even Mexico. Or, if you prefer, you can choose to read the story of the Danish prince named Amlef that appears in the Chronicle History of the Danes by the medieval historian Saxo Grammaticus. The character of Amlef is a forerunner of Shakespeare's Hamlet, and his story closely matches Shakespeare's play, but the character is something very different. Then we'll move down to Spain in a time when it is divided between the Muslim kingdoms from North Africa and Christian kingdoms of Western Europe. In the song of the Sid, we meet Rodrigo Díaz, a Christian who fights against Muslims, but also alongside Muslims and Christians against other Christians and Muslims. His Muslim soldiers respected him enough to call him Said, which means Lord or Commander, and this leads the rest of his men to call him El Sid, or Mio Sid, My Sid, My Commander. El Sid was not a noble, but becomes one of the most powerful people in Spain through his victories on the battlefield. In medieval Europe, before El Sid, if you weren't a noble, if you weren't born a noble, you didn't matter, but El Sid changes all of that, and this poem tells us how. We'll look at medieval literature about King Arthur. You'll again have a choice of readings in this unit. One choice is the story of the marriage of Sir Galwan, Arthur's greatest knight, to the magical but frightening Dane Regnell, and this story is one that figures into Chaucer's Wife of Bath's tale, which we'll read after this. The other choice in this unit is the romance of Morian, a narrative about an African knight who travels to Britain to find his father and ends up going on a quest alongside Sir Galwan and Sir Lancelot. We'll read the general prologue to Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury tales, and then read the Wife of Bath's prologue and tale. Besides being one of the most modern characters of the Canterbury tales, we'll see the Wife of Bath knows the power of storytelling. Just like El Sid, she gives voice to the commoners. The Wife of Bath speaks up for women in a time when women were usually portrayed merely as the objects of men's affections. But when we read her tale, we'll have to remember that this is a man's story about a woman. In fact, it's a man's story about a woman telling a story about a man trying to understand women. And then we'll finish the semester with your choice of one of two of William Shakespeare's plays. You may choose to read Hamlet, probably Shakespeare's most famous character and perhaps the most famous character in Western literature. The young prince has to decide whether or not to avenge his father, even though he knows that he could be deceived and that his actions could end up doing more harm than good. You may also choose to read Othello, the Moor of Venice. Though it was written and performed in England, Othello is about an African who became a general in the Italian city of Venice and has been dispatched to defend the island of Cyprus. The play reflects on the expanding global consciousness of Shakespeare's day. Othello has the same sort of pietas or sense of duty as Aeneas, but he's up against more than passion. The character of Iago embodies the dark side of social intelligence, and in him Shakespeare creates the kind of villain we can still see today in shows like House of Cards or Game of Thrones. So from roughly 1700 BC to 1600 AD, 3,300 years of literature, 3,300 years of insight into how the world works, how people think, what matters. There's a lot to learn from the content of these texts, but there's also a lot to learn in the act of reading them. Some types of classes focus on information content. You learn the facts and the formulas because they're things you will need to know when you leave the classroom. Some types of classes teach skills. The information you learn in the class becomes obsolete, but the skills you learn can still be used when the world has changed. This class tries to do both. We'll deal with the content because it is valuable for its own sake, but it also helps us to sharpen skills that we need in the real world. So what skills can you expect to develop? Well, psychologists and neuroscientists have recently begun to study empirically how reading affects the way we think and interact in the real world, and what they've found may be surprising. Many people presume that reading is just a form of entertainment, and entertainment is usually assumed to be either a waste of time or worse to make us lazy, both physically and mentally. But studies like this one from Emory University have found that reading a novel causes developments at the neural level that are similar to learning from direct real-world experience. Another study found that reading difficult literature made people better able to deal with ambiguous situations in the real world. It improved mental flexibility and the ability to think ahead when confronted with uncertainty. They say that, quote, exposure to literary texts can support a more fluid and flexible representation of meaning in order to allow for multiple potential truths to be weighted with the same levels of curiosity, noticed more easily and updated as new information becomes available. The figurative language in literature, devices like metaphor, irony, new ways of describing familiar things, these can also improve our real-world thinking. Understanding metaphors requires us to keep two conceptualizations in mind at the same time, and reading irony requires us to add social intelligence to that in order to distinguish between the way things are and the way the character thinks they are. The implications are not only that we become better at modeling the physical world, but we also become better at understanding other people and understanding how those people understand the world. Narrative fiction is a sort of virtual reality simulator that we enter into in order to practice one of the most difficult things our brains have to do on a daily basis, and that is to understand other people. According to the psychologists Raymond Maher and Keith Oatley, quote, narrative fiction creates a deep, immersive, simulative experience of social interactions for readers. This simulation facilitates the communication and understanding of social information and makes it more compelling, achieving a form of learning through experience. Engaging in the simulative experiences of fictional literature can facilitate the understanding of others who are different than ourselves and can augment our capacity for empathy and social inference. For the journal Science, David Kidd, a native of South Texas, tested people's ability to figure out other people's ambiguous emotional states after reading either a scientific work or a fictional literary text, and he found that social intelligence is improved more from difficult literary fiction than it was from reading nonfiction. He says, quote, our contention is that literary fiction uniquely engages the psychological processes needed to gain access to a character's subjective experiences. Just as in real life, the world of literary fiction is replete with complicated individuals whose inner lives are rarely easily discerned, but warrant exploration. Whereas many of our mundane social experiences may be scripted by convention and informed by stereotypes, those presented in literary fiction often disrupt our expectations. Readers of literary fiction must draw on more flexible interpretive resources to infer the feelings and thoughts of characters, that is they must engage in theory of mind processes. I'll come back to that concept of theory of mind in a later lecture. What you can think of it is the ability to think about what other people are thinking and about what they think still other people think and what they think the other people think that other people think and so on. So this research tends to center on three different aspects of real-world thinking that are developed when we read literature. They are, first of all, number one, the narrative framing, framing of real-world data into a narrative form, which means focusing on some things, leaving out other things, interpreting why people do what they do. The second thing is the conceptualization addiction. This is the use of figurative language such as metaphors to represent the world, usually to understand complex and abstract phenomenon in terms of simpler or more concrete concepts. And last is that theory of mind or social intelligence of the ability to understand how other people think. And I'll develop each of these three elements in later lectures and we'll apply them to the text we read. To develop these skills we have to go beyond what most people do when they read for pleasure. Most of us, most of the time, read a text just to find out the plot, to find out what happens. But if we just look at narrative to find out what happens to get the plot, we fail to notice how we are getting that information, what might be oversimplified, what might be left out. Think of a text like an iceberg. 90% of the iceberg's mass is floating beneath the water. This is like the 90% of a text that we pay little attention to in our hurry to figure out the plot. If you only focus on what happens, the plot, you're only attending to 10% of the narrative. But you wouldn't be able to figure out that 10% without the 90% that holds it up for your attention. So in this class we're going to do the difficult work of mapping the narration processes of framing language choice and social imagination or theory of mind. So now that we've covered the content of the class and the skills that we're developing in the class, here's how the class is actually going to work. If you're watching this video embedded in Blackboard, I highly recommend that you watch it and the rest of the videos directly on YouTube. So you should see the link to the video directly below the embedded video within Blackboard or you can type the address on the bottom left of this screen and that will take you to the video with the attached playlist on YouTube for most of the videos in the course. This will be especially helpful later in the semester when you need to go back and review past lectures. And it's much, I highly recommend that you have a full screen. You should watch this on your computer rather than your phone because there's going to be a lot of times text that's difficult to read on a small screen. There are going to be maps and things like that that it helps to have a large display so that you can see smaller elements. Another advantage to watching directly on YouTube is that you can speed up the lectures to whatever playback speed that you're comfortable with. That's especially helpful when you're reviewing a lecture. If you've already seen the lecture once, you know basically what I'm talking about and you want to review it very quickly, you can go up to 1.25 or 1.5 and still it still sounds relatively normal. You can still process what's being said. But whether or not you speed up the lectures, you should always stay focused just as if you were in a classroom listening to any other lecture. Also just like a classroom, you should take notes. I highly recommend you use a paper notebook even though this is an online class and everything's digital and it's really easy to just take a screenshot and add it to one note or something like that. When you actually write something now, when you have to go through the manual process of picking up a pencil and writing out each letter of each word, a lot of recent studies have shown that people who take notes by hand with a pencil and paper retain the material better. They remember the material better. They can use that material. They can reproduce what they've heard and what they've written on an exam better than those who type it and obviously better than those who just take a screenshot. To make your note-taking process easier, hopefully, I will have a lot of text on most of these slides but the stuff that I really want you to remember and write down, I put in a red font. If there's a particular section of a quotation that I really want you to know, I'll put that in red or maybe highlight it and I'll also throw in these note cards, these digital representations of the old-fashioned index cards that have the term or the concept in red font and the definition after that. Anytime you see one of these cards, be sure to write down that term and that definition unless you already have it in your notes. So we're going to be using blackboard for all of our interactions and as with any class you're taking college, the first thing you need to read is the syllabus and I've posted that here. The syllabus contains all the course policies, grade percentages, and assignments and due dates. At the top you'll find my contact information though I've removed it in this video because it's going to be on YouTube. After the contact information is a list of books you'll need and the main one, the only one you're required to have this edition of is Stephanie Dolly's Miss from Mesopotamia and they'll have several of them at the TAMUCC bookstore. You may also find them in half-price books. You're going to need this one right away so I don't recommend if you don't already have it, if you haven't already ordered it I don't recommend you place the order now. If you're watching this in week one I recommend you go ahead and get one here locally and start reading it unless you want to get it overnighted. You have a few weeks before you'll need the next one which is Virgil's A Need. These books are listed in the order you'll need them so check the reading schedule on the left to see when each book is necessary. Besides these books there are going to be other readings that are available online or on blackboard and I'll put those in the unit they belong to. So for example while we're reading The Epic of Gilgamesh using Stephanie Dolly's book, Myths from Mesopotamia, we'll also read about a new tablet that was discovered and translated since that book was published. And to read that article you go to Unit 3, Gilgamesh and then click on the link to the article. So each week when we start each unit look at the schedule of readings first. The schedule of readings will always have links to the main reading material and the videos that go with that unit. If you want more detailed information then go to the unit number on the left and blackboard. Now when we come back from spring break we're going to have some optional reading because this is a survey class I want to try to cover as much reading as possible but even in a 15 week semester we can't cover nearly as much as we would like to. So that means you're going to have some options here. When we get to unit 8 you're going to have the option of reading either the saga for off-crocky or Saxo-Gromaticus's amlith. When we get to unit 11 you can read either The Marriage of Sir Galen and Dame Ragnle or The Romance of Morian. When we get to Shakespeare you can read either Hamlet or Othello. Now you're always going to have the option to do both readings for extra credit if that's something you want to do but you'll have to do it within the time frame available. You won't be able to sort of go back weeks later. So if you find that you've gotten behind in the first half of the semester and you need to do something for extra credit well this is it. You're only required to do the quiz for one of the readings and any of these three units but if you choose to do the quizzes for both readings then anything you get in the second one will be an addition to your quiz grade, your final quiz grade, but it won't count against you whatever you get wrong. As long as you do well on one of those quizzes that's all that's required and in that second half of the semester you'll also be able to omit one of those units. In other words if you're running so far behind when we get to unit 12 that you are still working on the Arthurian literature you can completely omit unit 12, Charleston's Canterbury Tales. You can choose any one of these, omit that unit and still make 100% of the grade if you get 100% on everything else. But in this second half you'll want to choose your readings carefully and you'll want to keep in mind what you want to write about in the second essay. The second essay will be due at the end of the semester and in that one of the things you can do is compare two texts and we have a lot of parallel texts here. We have a lot of text in which we have one story but there are two different narratives. For example the saga of Rolf Krocky has a lot of characters and settings and even narrative elements in common with Beowulf but it has a lot of differences as well. So if you're interested in Beowulf you might want to choose the saga of Rolf Krocky and then write about it in comparison with Beowulf instead of choosing Saxochromaticus's Amlith. However if you're more interested in Shakespeare's Hamlet than you are in Beowulf then you would want to choose Saxochromaticus's Amlith and that will be something that you later write about in comparison with the Shakespeare version of the story. When we get to the Arthurian Literature component if you're interested in Chaucer and you want to write about the medieval portrayal of women and that sort of thing then I would recommend reading The Marriage of Sir Gowan and Dame Ragnle instead of The Romance of Morian. But if you would like to talk about the portrayal of people of different ethnicities and nationalities and cultures in medieval literature then I would recommend reading The Romance of Morian and comparing it to Shakespeare's Othello. And you can compare texts that aren't different iterations of the same story if you want to focus on themes that appear in different texts. So you could compare the representation of Rodrigo Diaz, El Cid in the Song of the Cid to Othello and show how both of them as military leaders are very similar. They're both very virtuous leaders but they're both up against a duplicitous pseudo-allies, people who are sort of the backstabbers, people like Iago or the nobles of Carrion in El Cid. So speaking of essays, next on the syllabus you'll find the grade distribution. There are four basic things, four types of things you're going to be doing to earn your grade. The Blackboard Discussion Forum, quizzes, two essays, a midterm and a final. The first is the Blackboard Discussion Forum. This is my attempt to make up for the fact that we can't have class discussions and talk about your readings face to face. For each unit, one through thirteen, there will be a discussion forum for you to discuss something about the text. You can ask a question to me or to the rest of the class. You can offer up an interpretation of some part of the text and see what other people think about it. Whatever it is, you'll need to explain it, make it specific, cite pages and that sort of thing. You'll need to contribute at least one post that is at least 150 words but you can submit more than that if you want to. Your post can reply to someone else's post as long as it is substantive, something around 150 words. There will be a forum for each unit starting with unit two. So click on the unit on the left and then find the discussion forum. Click on the title for that to take you to the forum and then create a new thread. The due date will be posted on each discussion board. I'll only grade what is posted before that date. You can still post on that forum after the date but it won't count toward your grade. For each unit we're going to have a quiz of about 10 questions. It will cover the readings and lectures of that unit. Each quiz will have a due date posted in the description. The due date will be one week after the unit begins. However, you will have an additional week to complete it if you fall behind because as I mentioned you'll be able to skip certain units in the second half of the semester. So that means that I want to give you a way to sort of continue working on the previous unit for an extra week. But try to keep up with the original due date. Try to follow that date. You can still submit for a week after the due date but try to stay on time otherwise it will sort of create a cascading effect where if you get behind on one unit that'll make you get even further behind on the next unit and so forth. In the second half of the semester each reading option within a unit will have its own quiz and in those three units that have optional readings you're not required to do all the options to take out the quizzes but you can if you want to. The grade book will show a running total for your quizzes and the total number of questions that are required to get 100% and you'll have more questions available than you actually need to get 100%. So essentially there will be 30 extra questions that you could answer but you don't have to and if you get them right they go into your total. If you get them wrong they don't count against you. That's because the purpose of the quizzes is to ensure close reading and a regular reading schedule throughout the semester. They also help to ensure the application of the theoretical concepts to the active reading. They're not to test you before the test. The midterm exam and the final exam that's where I want to see what you've learned or what you haven't. They're there to show you how much you might need to review or to let you know how well you're processing the material. Essays will have their own section on the left. You'll have two essays. Each essay should be about five pages, double spaced, posted digitally as a Microsoft Word document, a .doc or docx, or as a PDF. Even if you use a different program other than Word it needs to be saved in one of those formats. Submission uses blackboard safe assign, plagiarism check. Any instances of plagiarism will result in a grade of zero for the essay on the first attempt. After the first plagiarism instance any subsequent attempt to plagiarize will be reported to the Office of Student Affairs. Plagiarism is a serious issue although sometimes people do it because they don't really know what it is. So most people realize if you just copy and paste an entire paper and call it your own that that's plagiarism. But any time you take any information from another source you need to cite that source. And if all you have to say is something you got from somewhere else then that's not actually an essay that's just you know copying and pasting that's aggregating information. For the essay you actually have to make an interpretive claim on your own and I'll talk more about this as we get closer to the first assigned essay. But you can use outside sources you're not required to use anything but the text we read but if you choose to use information you gathered from another source that's fine but you have to cite that source both within the text and at the end in the reference list. The midterm and the final will be found in the exam section. The midterm will start the week before spring break. The final will be open for all finals week. So the midterm exam will consist of questions covering all the readings and lectures assigned in the first seven weeks. The final exam will cover conceptual material from the lectures from the entire semester. That means any of the concepts any of the terms that we learned in the first half of the semester you will need to know on the final exam as well. But the final exam will only cover the literature from unit 8 to 13. And you'll want to read the instructions very carefully for those exams. You'll only be able to take them once. So you need to ensure that you have a reliable internet connection and check the computer hardware and software requirements posted in the exam section of Blackboard before you begin that exam. Once you begin the exam you'll only have a limited time to complete it. The test timer will continue even if you get knocked off line. Even if you either log off or you lose your internet connection. That's why it's very important that you have a reliable internet connection from the time you start the exam. So that's how the course will work. Take a look at the syllabus. Take a look around Blackboard. Email me if you have any questions. And when you're ready move on to the next video that's titled What is Narrative?