 Hello, welcome to English 2332 online here at Texas A&M University in Corpus Christi. I'm Dr. Eric Luttrel. I'll be your professor for the next 15 weeks. Our course is titled, The Literature of the Western World from the Bronze Age to the Renaissance. We'll start with some of the oldest literature in the world, which originated around 4,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, which is modern-day Iraq. We'll read the story of Atrahasis and then the epic of Gilgamesh. Both of these works survive on fragments of clay tablets written in cuneiform, one of the oldest or maybe the oldest form of writing. But they're only fragments, so there are words and lines missing here and there, and that leaves gaps for us to fill in, gaps in the text on these tablets as they've come down to us today. Most popular translations of Gilgamesh try to fill in those gaps with some creative interpretation by the translator, but I've chosen a text that doesn't do that. Stephanie Dolly's edition in Myths from Mesopotamia gives you only the lines that survive. That means that you have to fill in the gaps as a reader. But this isn't really that different from what we do when we read a complete, say a modern novel or other complete text. How we fill in gaps in a work of literature is part of what we're going to focus on in this class. After Gilgamesh, we'll read the biblical book of Genesis, a book that many of us may feel we know quite well. However, you may find that the familiarity is deceptive. We're going to read Genesis the way the biblical scholars read it, and we're going to find that Genesis also requires us to fill in many gaps, and we may find that people tend to do that by inserting assumptions that originate outside the text, rather than coming from within the text as we have it. We'll then move from the Levant to the world of Ancient Greece and study three works by two authors about one character, that is the Greek titan Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans. We'll read the theogony or the origins of the gods and the works and days by the poet Hesiod. Then we'll read a Prometheus bound by the playwright Aeschylus. This will also be where we introduce a genre of theater alongside epic and prose narrative. We'll read sections from Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. I expect that many of you have probably read the Odyssey or released parts of it. 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, sometimes don't even read, is the part that leads up to those adventures and describes how Odysseus himself comes to tell those stories within the narrative. So there's a narrative within a narrative. Instead of focusing on Odysseus's adventures, we're going to focus on the part where Homer portrays Odysseus as a storyteller and the events that lead up to his opportunity to tell his own story to the Phoegetians. As we move a few centuries ahead, we'll read Virgil's Iliad and we'll see that Virgil has borrowed some of the obvious story elements from Homer, but he's put them in a distinctly Roman narrative. The rage of Achilles and the trickery of Odysseus made them interesting characters in Homer's day, but the Romans want a hero that puts duty first. The Latin word Virgil uses as pietas, where we get our modern word piety. It means fulfilling your duty to fate, to the gods, to your nation, even in the face of furor, which is not just anger, but any kind of passion. That's the Latin word for passion, such as the passion to fare between Dido and Aeneas, that tempts Aeneas to settle down rather than fulfilling his destiny. After spring break, we'll move from the classical world to the early medieval world of Northern Europe. We'll start with the Old Norse saga of Rolf Krocke. You may not have heard of this one, but it shares a historical backdrop and at least one character with the Old English poem Beowulf, which we'll read next. In fact, both Beowulf and Rolf Krocke's saga belong to a family of folk tales that have been found around the entire northern hemisphere, from Iceland to Russia, and even over into Native America and Canada, the U.S. and Mexico. Both of these texts also deal with a problem that was new in the Middle Ages, that is how to integrate old pagan stories into the new Christian religious worldview. We'll move down to Spain in a time when it's divided between Muslim kingdoms coming in from North Africa and the Christian kingdoms backed by the rest of Western Europe. In the Song of the Sid, we meet Rodrigo Diaz, a Christian who fights against Muslims, but who also fights alongside Muslims and Christians against other Christians and Muslims. His Muslim soldiers respect him enough to call him Said, which means Lord or Commander. And that leads the rest of his men to call him El Cid, or Mio Cid, which means my Lord or my Commander. El Cid was not a Lord, however, he was not a noble, but he becomes one of the most powerful people in Spain through his victories on the battlefield. At the time, in medieval Europe, before El Cid, he weren't born a noble, you didn't matter. But El Cid is going to change all of that, and this poem really focuses on how. Then we'll return to England for the High Middle Ages. We'll read the general prologue to Jeffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and then read the Wife of Bath's prologue and tale. Besides being one of the most modern characters in the Canterbury Tales, we'll see the Wife of Bath, like Odysseus, knows the power of a good story. Just like El Cid gives voice to the commoners, the Wife of Bath is going to speak up for women in a time when women were usually portrayed merely as the objects of men's affections. But we'll read her remembering that this is a man's story about a woman. In fact, it's a man's story about a woman who tells a story about a man who's trying to understand women. And we'll finish the semester with William Shakespeare's Othello, the Moorish Venice. Though this was written and performed in England, Othello is about an African who becomes a general in the Italian city of Venice and is then dispatched to defend the island of Cyprus. This play in this way reflects an expanding global consciousness in Shakespeare's day. Othello, the character, has some of the same pietas or sense of duty as Aeneas in the Aeneid, but he's up against more than just passion. The character of Iago brings in a Machiavellian type of character that is relatively new to Shakespeare's day. He embodies the dark side of social intelligence. And in him, Shakespeare creates the kind of villain that we can still see today in shows like House of Cards or Game of Thrones. So from roughly 1700 B.C., that's 1,700 years B.C., to 1600 A.D., 1601 actually, this is when Othello was written, 3,300 years of literature. That's 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 need to know when you leave the classroom. Other types of classes teach skills. So the information you learn in a class may become obsolete, but the skills you learn can be used when the world has changed. This class tries to teach both. We will deal with the content because it's valuable for its own sake, but it also helps to sharpen skills that we need in the real world. Now, the real world may not be something you typically associate with a literature class or with the act of reading. So what kind of skills can you expect to develop in this class? Psychologists and neuroscientists have recently begun to study how reading affects the way we think and interact in the real world and what they found may be surprising. People presume that reading is just a form of entertainment and entertainment is usually assumed to either be a waste of time or worse mixes lazy, both physically and mentally. But studies like this one by Gregory Burns and colleagues at Emory University have found that reading a novel causes developments at the neuro level that are similar to learning from direct experience in the real world. Neuroscientist Noreen O'Sullivan and her colleagues at the University of Liverpool 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 weighed with similar levels of curiosity. Noticed more easily and updated as new information becomes available, end quote. Figurative language that is used in literature, devices like metaphor, irony, new ways of describing familiar things, these can also improve our real world thinking. In the journal Neuropsychologia Isabel Bourne and her colleagues at the University of Berlin say, quote, figurative language is usually more distinct, complex and unpredictable than literal language and thus requires a range of different cognitive processes such as focused attention, semantic integration and semantic selection. End quote. They find that processing metaphors requires us to keep two conceptualizations in mind at the same time, two different ways of imagining the same thing. And reading irony requires us to add social intelligence to that mix in order to distinguish between the way things really are, the way things might be, and the way a particular character thinks they are. The implications are not only that we become better at modeling the physical world, better at understanding other people and understanding how those other people themselves understand the world. Psychologists Raymond Marr and Keith Oatley come to a similar conclusion. They argue that fiction is a sort of virtual reality simulator that we enter into in order to practice one of the most difficult things our brains ever have to do on a day to day basis. That is understand other brains, understand other people. They say, quote, narrative fiction creates a deep and 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 experience of fiction literature can facilitate the understanding of others who are different from ourselves and can augment our capacity for empathy and social influence in court. For the journal Science, David Kidd, who by the way is the author of the journal Science, and his co-author Emmanuel Costano 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 what they found is that people's social intelligence has actually improved more from reading the difficult literary fiction than it is from reading science or nonfiction. They say that, quote, our contention is that literary fiction uniquely engages psychological processes needed to gain access to characters' subjective experiences. Just as in real life, the worlds of literary fiction 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 more flexible interpretive resources than the feelings and thoughts of other characters. That is, they must engage in theory of mind processes, end quote. I'm going to come back to this term, theory of mind, in a later lecture. But you can think of it as an ability to think about what other people are thinking and to think about what they think you're thinking or what they think someone else is thinking or what they think someone else is thinking that someone else is thinking. You get the idea. This research tends to center around three aspects of real world thinking that are developed when we read literature. They are narrative framing and that's the framing of real world data into the narrative form. Number two is the conceptualization, addiction. In other words, the words we use to describe reality. The figurative language such as metaphor that we use to represent the world and usually to understand complex and abstract phenomena in terms of simpler or more concrete concepts. And then number three, the use of theory of mind or social intelligence in order to understand how other people think. I'll develop each of these three elements in later lectures and then we'll apply them to the text that we're reading. To develop these skills we have to go beyond what most people do when they read for pleasure. So most of us, most of the time, read a text in order to find out what happens. In other words, to find out the plot. If we just look at a narrative to the plot, we fail to notice how we are getting that information. What might be oversimplified and what might be left out. It helps to think of a text like an iceberg. 90% of an iceberg's mass is floating beneath the water. What you see is only 10%. But you wouldn't see that 10% without the 90% below the surface holding it up for your attention. In this class, we're going to do the difficult work of mapping out that 90%. The narration process is a framing, language choice and social imagination or theory of mind. So here's how to get started. We'll be using Blackboard for all of our interactions. And as with any class you take in college the first thing you want to do is read the syllabus. So I've posted it here. The syllabus contains all the course policies, grade percentages and assignments and due dates. At the top, you'll find my contact information. I've taken it out because this is on YouTube. But after that is a list of books that you'll need for the semester. The first one you'll need, the one you'll need for our first readings is Stephanie Dolly's Myths from Mesopotamia. They have several of these at the Tamio C.C. bookstore. You have a few weeks before you'll need the next one which is the Aneed. They're listed in the order that you're going to need them. Check the reading schedule on the left to see when each book is going to become necessary. Besides these books, there will be other readings that are available online or on Blackboard. Those are the books in the unit they belong to on the left. So for example, while we're reading the Epic of Gilgamesh, using Stephanie Dolly's books Myths from Mesopotamia, there's going to be an added reading. We're also going to read a new tablet that was discovered and translated since Dolly posted or published her book. And to get to that article, you go to Unit 3 on the left. It says Gilgamesh. Click on the link and then you'll see the article. And after this, we'll move on to Unit 4. In Genesis, I'll post the text in the Unit 4 section. Then the links to Estuulis' Prometheus Bound in Unit 5 and so on. I'll also include sections labeled optional further reading in those same sections. As it says, these are just optional. They're not required for the class. They're just if you happen to be interested in this material. But it might be something that's useful to you when you're looking for ideas for your essays. Now, speaking of essays, next on the syllabus, you'll find the grade distribution. There are five things you'll be doing to earn your grade. The Blackboard Discussion Forum, the quizzes, two essays, two exams in the term of the final, and 10% of the grade will be for other assignments like peer review exercises. The first Blackboard Discussion Forum, sorry, 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 to face in a classroom. For each unit, sections 2 through 12, excluding section 1, there will be a discussion forum for you to discuss something about the text that you're reading. You can ask a question to me or to the rest of the class, or both. You can offer up an interpretation of some part of the text to see what other people might think. Whatever it is, you'll need to explain it, make it specific, cite passages that make us to exactly what you're talking about and that's why it needs to be specific. Don't just try to offer explanations of the entire text. Try to really say on this page or in this section we find this and I don't know what to make of it. What do you think? Or here's the way I interpret that. But you'll need to contribute at least one post that has at least 150 words to each of these units. You can submit more than that one post if you want to. You can reply to other people's posts, but you'll need at least one significant 150 word post for each unit. And if you want to make your long post to reply to somebody else's post, then by all means. That would look a great discussion. There will be a forum for each unit starting with unit 2. Click on the unit to read and post. The due date will be posted on each discussion board. I'll only grade what is posted before that date. So be sure to check the date for each board. You can still post in that forum after that date but it won't count toward your grade. Quizzes are not posted in the unit since they'll be given every week rather than with every unit. To get there scroll down to the menu marked quizzes down below all of the units 1 through 12. Every Wednesday a quiz will be posted in the blackboard quizzes section. It will cover the readings and lectures of that week. It will be available for one week. On the following Wednesday that quiz will be closed and the quiz for the next week will be open. Once a quiz closes it can't be made up. So give yourself time to do your readings, watch the lectures, and then take the quiz before the Wednesday deadline. The purposes of the quizzes is to ensure close reading. Ensure that you're reading closely. You're looking for certain looking to see how the narrative worked why the characters are portrayed the way they are, what sort of metaphor is used. In other words, you're applying the theory from the class to the text of the class. Also that you're keeping on schedule, that you're keeping up with the reading throughout the semester. But they also help to ensure that the assignment is meant to be formative rather than summative. Those two terms you don't actually need to know but formative assignment you learn something. A summative assignment is there to see if you learned something. So in taking the quizzes you'll realize, oh I should have gotten that but I got it wrong. I don't know I never thought of this I never thought of the text the way that this quiz question poses it. So it's better to do that during the quizzes and to make that formative assignment and to make it sort of low stakes, I'm going to drop 25% of the quiz questions in your final grade. That means you can basically make a 75 and still get 100 on the total quiz score. Essays also have their own section on the left down at the bottom. You will write two five-page essays during the semester. One is due the Friday before spring break the other is due at the end of finals week. Keep in mind that you'll have a midterm or a final exam on those same weeks. So you want to start a couple of weeks early. You'll be able to choose from several topics. I'll post a list of options in the essays section and you can choose one of those options or if you want to write about something else email me with your proposal for your paper. Your essays will be submitted using Safe Assign which checks for plagiarism. Any incidence of plagiarism will result in a zero on that essay which is 15 points off of your final grade. And depending on the severity it may be reported to the Office of Student Affairs and be entered into your student record. So please make your own arguments use your own brain and cite all of your sources. If you bring in a text that we don't read in the class but it's about our text I encourage that but you need to cite your sources. You need to have your own idea and you can use other sources but be sure you've cited them. The assignments grade will be composed of everything that's not an essay, quiz, exam or discussion post. This will include things like the War of the Ghost assignment that I'll introduce at the end of the next video. Most of these will be lightweight assignments. So basically as long as you do what the instructions ask you'll get full credit. There may be some peer review assignments. If you get a grade from a peer that you think is unfairly low you can appeal it. Just send me an email and I'll take a look at it. The midterm and the final will be found down in the exams section. The midterm will start the week before spring break or it'll be open for the week before spring break. The final will be open for all of finals week. The midterm exam will cover the questions or I'm sorry, will consist of questions covering all the readings and lectures assigned in the first seven weeks. The final exam will cover the same conceptual material, the theory, the terms that sort of thing from lectures from the entire semester. But it's only going to cover the readings that were assigned after the midterm. So in other words, starting with Ralph Krocky, Saga and Beowulf from there to the end of the semester. I may end up using Examity which is a test proctoring service where you can use a computer with a camera built in or attached and then take the test while someone monitors you. Someone who works for the service will watch you take the test just to make sure you're not cheating. I may not decide to go with that. I'll have to see how feasible that is. But I'll let you know either way as we get closer to the midterm. Either way be sure to carefully read the instructions before you start the test. Ensure that you have a reliable internet connection and check the computer hardware requirements posted in the exam section of Blackboard before you begin that exam. Once you begin the exam you're going to have a limited time to complete it. So once you press start the exam the timer will start and no matter what even if you log off, even if you become disconnected or whatever that timer is going to run out. It might be like an hour or an hour and a half. But after that hour and a half no matter what happens to your computer falls in Oso Bay it's still going to the due date is still going to be one hour and a half after you press start. So be sure that everything is taken care of as far as technical requirements ahead of time. You're also only going to be able to take the test once. So don't think I can take it and stop and then start again later. So that's how the course will work. Take a look at the syllabus take a look at Blackboard and email me if you have any questions when you're ready move on to the next video which is titled What is Narrative?