Alumni Sequence: The Middle Ages Year II

Seminar: This quarter brings us to journey’s end with a selection of travels and tales. In The Arabian Nights, the resourceful Shahrazad tells stories, and stories within stories, to keep the story of her life moving forward. Marco Polo recounts his years of travel through Asia in a mix of the fabulous and the factual, including a description of life at the court of Kublai Khan. The Interesting Narrative bridges the genres of travelogue and autobiography, as Equiano relates his journey from Africa to the Americas to England, and from slavery to freedom. At the end of the quarter we arrive in the imaginative world of Invisible Cities, and revisit Marco Polo’s Description of the World, in this elaborately structured set of prose poems framed as a conversation between Polo and Kublai Khan.

Tutorial: The Canterbury Tales is Chaucer’s masterpiece: a philosophically rich investigation into many of the central problems of being human, and also a collection of wonderful stories. As the pilgrims make their way to Canterbury, and we make our way through the major tales and several minor ones, we will discuss the situations and perspectives of the narrators, the relations among the tales, the function of the pilgrimage as framing device, and the status of “Chaucer” the pilgrim-narrator.

Course Outline

REQUIRED TEXTS

1. Husain Haddawy. The Arabian Nights. Norton. ISBN 978-0393331660.

2. Marco Polo. The Description of the World. Hackett. ISBN 978-1624664366

3. Olaudah Equiano. The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings. Carretta. ISBN 978-01424371624.

4. Italo Calvino. Invisible Cities. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. ISBN 978-0156453806

5. Chaucer. Canterbury Tales. Penguin. ISBN 978-0140424386