Факультет иностранных языков БарГУ

Кафедра профессиональной иноязычной подготовки

Материалы рассмотрены и утверждены на заседании кафедры,

протокол № ____ от "___" ____________ 200__ г.

Заведующий кафедрой __________ Ю.В. Маслов

Литература великобритании и сша материалы по усрс (16 часов)

№	Тип	Тема	Пособия, наглядность	УСРС		Формы контроля
1.	Л02	Рассказы и легенды средневековой Англии (1066 – 1476)	Основная литература, текст лекций, отрывки из произведений		Работа с источниками 2 – 6	Индивиду-альный опрос на семинаре
2	Л05	Жизнь и творчество Шекспира	Основная литература, текст лекций, отрывки из произведений		Работа с источниками 2 – 6, 7, 9, 11	Индивиду-альный опрос на семинаре
3.	Л06	Произведения Шекспира отражение национального духа	Основная литература, текст лекций, отрывки из произведений		Работа с источниками 2 – 6, 7, 9, 11	Взаимоопрос на семинаре
4.	Л09	Острова и островитяне: литература зрелого Про-свещения (1736 – 1776)	Основная литература, текст лекций, отрывки из произведений		Работа с источниками 2 – 6	Взаимоопрос на семинаре
5.	Л 15	Литература Англии 1956 – 1996	Основная литература, текст лекций, отрывки из произведений		Работа с источниками 1 – 6	Индивиду-альный опрос на семинаре
6.	Л16	Мы, народ… (1620 – 1836)	Основная литература, текст лекций		Работа с источниками 1 – 6	Коллоквиум
7.	Л 18	“Позолоченный век” в американской литературе (1876 – 1916)	Основная литература, текст лекций, отрывки из произведений		Работа с источниками 1 – 6	Взаимоопрос на семинаре

Материал 1 (2 часа)

1. Study the following lecture on mediaeval English literature. Explain why Chaucer is considered to be the father of English poetry. Answer the questions below.

Medieval english literature

1066 – 1476

The first four hundred years of the second millennium were hard for England. It remained a backyard of Europe, and was torn apart by greedy lords and rival feudal families. The written work of the period is much better documented than that of the earlier period. At the beginning though, it was largely written in French or Latin.

Most of the literary pieces are religious in character. Material in English appears as a trickle in the 13^th century, but within 150 years it became a flood. There was a marked increased in the number of translated writings during the 14^th century. Guild records, proclamations, proverbs, dialogues, allegories, and letters illustrate the diverse range of new styles and genres. Middle English poetry was influenced by French literary traditions, both in content and style. Later works include romances in the French style, secular lyrics, bestiaries, ballads, biblical poetry, Christian legends, hymns, prayers, and elegies.

Drama also begins at that time. Because the manuscripts of medieval English plays were usually short-lived performance scripts rather than reading matter, very few examples have survived from what once must have been a very large dramatic literature. What little survives from before the 15th century includes some bilingual fragments, indicating that the same play might have been given in English or Anglo-Norman, according to the composition of the audience. From the late 14th century onward two main dramatic genres are discernible, the mystery or Corpus Christi cycles and the morality plays.

The mystery plays were long cyclic dramas of the Creation, Fall, and Redemption of mankind, based mostly on biblical narratives. They usually included a selection of Old Testament episodes (such as the stories of Cain and Abel and Abraham and Isaac) but concentrated mainly on the life and Passion of Jesus Christ. They always ended with the Last Judgment. The cycles were generally financed and performed by the craft guilds and staged on wagons in the streets and squares of the towns. Their literary quality is uneven, but the York cycle (probably the oldest) has a most impressively realized version of Christ's Passion by a dramatist influenced by the alliterative style in verse.

The morality plays were allegorical dramas depicting the progress of a single character, representing the whole of mankind, from the cradle to the grave and sometimes beyond. The other dramatis personae might include God and the Devil but usually consisted of personified abstractions, such as the Vices and Virtues, Death, Penance, Mercy, and so forth. The single most impressive piece is undoubtedly Everyman, a superb English rendering of a Dutch play on the subject of the coming of death. Both the mystery and morality plays have been frequently revived and performed in the 20th century.

The most puzzling episode in the development of later Middle English literature was the sudden reappearance of unrhymed alliterative poetry in the mid-14th century. Debate continues as to whether the group of long, serious, and sometimes learned poems written between about 1350 and 1410 should be regarded as an "alliterative revival" or rather as the late flowering of a largely lost native tradition stretching back to the Old English period.

Among the poems central to the movement were three pieces dealing with the life and legends of Alexander, the massive Destruction of Troy, and the Siege of Jerusalem. The fact that all of these derived from various Latin sources suggests that the anonymous poets were likely to have been clerics with a strong, if bookish, historical sense of their romance "matters." The "matter of Britain" was represented by an outstanding composition, the alliterative Morte Arthure, an epic portrayal of King Arthur's conquests in Europe and his eventual fall, combining a strong narrative thrust with considerable density and subtlety of diction. The poem was later used by Sir Thomas Malory as a source for his prose account, Le Morte Darthur (completed c. 1470).

The alliterative movement would today be regarded as a curious but inconsiderable episode, were it not for other poems now generally attributed to a single anonymous author. One of them is the chivalric romance Sir Gawayne and the Grene Knight, miraculously preserved in a single manuscript dated c. 1400. The poet of Sir Gawayne far exceeded the other alliterative writers in his mastery of form and style, and though he wrote ultimately as a moralist, human warmth and sympathy (often taking comic form) were also close to the heart of his work. It is likely that alliterative poetry, under aristocratic patronage, filled a gap in the literary life of the provinces caused by the decline of Anglo-Norman in the latter half of the 14th century. Alliterative poetry was not unknown in London and the southeast, but it penetrated those areas in a modified form and in poems that dealt with different subject matter.

William Langland's long alliterative poem Piers Plowman (c.1370) begins with a vision of the world seen from the hills in Worcestershire, where, tradition has it, the poet was born and brought up, and where he would have been open to the influence of the alliterative movement. If what he tells about himself in the poem is true (and there is no other source of information), he later lived obscurely in London as a cleric. The poem takes the form of a series of dream visions. Realistic and allegorical elements are mingled in a phantasmagoric way, and both the poetic medium and the structure are frequently subverted by the writer's spiritual and didactic impulses. Passages of theological reasoning mingle with satire, and moments of sublime religious feeling appear alongside political comment. This makes it a work of the utmost difficulty, but at the same time Langland never fails to convince the reader of the passionate integrity of his writing. His bitter attacks on political and ecclesiastical corruption (especially among the friars) quickly struck chords with his contemporaries.

T

he alliterative movement was over before the first quarter of the 15th century had passed. The other major strand in the development of English poetry from about 1350 proved much more durable. The cultivation and refinement of human sentiment with respect to love, already present in earlier 14th-century writings, took firm root in English court culture during the reign of Richard II (1377-99). English began to displace Anglo-Norman French as the language spoken at court and in aristocratic circles, and signs of royal and noble patronage for English vernacular writers became evident. These processes undoubtedly created some of the conditions that encouraged and gave direction to the genius of one author who eventually established English as a literary language. His name was Geoffrey Chaucer.

Chaucer, Geoffrey (1343?-1400) is one of the greatest English poets, whose masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales, was one of the most important influences on the development of English literature.

The son of a prosperous London wine merchant, Chaucer may have attended the Latin grammar school of Saint Paul's Cathedral and may have studied law at the Inns of Court. Early in his teens, he was page to the countess of Ulster, Elizabeth; there, he would have learned the ways of the court and the use of arms. About 1366 he married a lady-in-waiting to the queen and afterward Chaucer served as controller of customs for London.

He traveled on several diplomatic missions to France, one to Spain in 1366, and two to Italy from 1372 to 1373 and in 1378. In the last year of his life, Chaucer leased a house within the precincts of Westminster Abbey. After his death, he was buried in the Abbey (an honor for a commoner), in what has since become the Poets' Corner.

Chaucer wrote for and may have read his works aloud to a select audience of fellow courtiers and officials, which doubtless sometimes included members of the royal family. The culture of the English upper class was still predominantly French, and Chaucer's earliest works were influenced by the fashionable French poets and by the great 13th-century dream allegory Le Roman de la Rose which Chaucer claimed to have translated. His first important original work, The Book of the Duchess, is an elegy for John of Gaunt's first wife, Blanche, who died in 1369. In a dream the poet encounters a grieving knight in black (Gaunt) who movingly recounts his love and loss of “good fair White” (Blanche). The House of Fame and The Parlement of Foules, also dream poems, show the influence of Dante and of Giovanni Boccaccio, whose works Chaucer probably encountered on his first journey to Italy.

Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde (1385?) is a poem of more than 8000 lines, and his major work besides The Canterbury Tales. It is the tragic love story of the Trojan prince Troilus, who wins Criseyde (Cressida), aided by the machinations of his close friend, her uncle Pandarus, and then loses her to the Greek warrior Diomede. The love story turns into a deeply felt medieval tragedy, the human pursuit of transitory earthly ideals that pale into insignificance beside the eternal love of God. The poem ends with the narrator's solemn advice to young people to flee vain loves and turn their hearts to Christ. Chaucer's characters are psychologically so complex that the work has also been called the first modern novel.

The Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories set within a framing story of a pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral, the shrine of Saint Thomas а Becket. The poet joins a band of pilgrims, vividly described in the General Prologue, who assemble at the Tabard Inn outside London for the journey to Canterbury. Ranging in status from a Knight to a humble Plowman, they are a microcosm of English society of the time. Host proposes a storytelling contest to pass the time; each of the 30 or so pilgrims (the exact number is unclear) is to tell four tales on the round trip. Chaucer completed less than a quarter of this plan. The work contains 22 verse tales (two unfinished) and two long prose tales; a few are thought to be pieces written earlier by Chaucer. The Canterbury Tales, composed of more than 18,000 lines of poetry, is made up of separate blocks of one or more tales with links introducing and joining stories within a block.

The tales represent nearly every variety of medieval story at its best. The special genius of Chaucer's work, however, lies in the dramatic interaction between the tales and the framing story. After the Knight's courtly and philosophical romance about noble love, the Miller interrupts with a deliciously bawdy story of seduction aimed at the Reeve (an officer or steward of a manor); the Reeve takes revenge with a tale about the seduction of a miller's wife and daughter. Thus, the tales develop the personalities, quarrels, and diverse opinions of their tellers. The prologues and tales of the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner are high points of Chaucer's art. The Wife, an outspoken champion of her gender against the traditional antifeminism of the church, initiates a series of tales about sex, marriage, and nobility (“gentilesse”).

Although Chaucer in this way satirizes the abuses of the church, he also includes a number of didactic and religious tales, concluding with the good Parson's sermon on penitence; this is followed by a personal confession in which Chaucer “retracts” all his secular writings, including Troilus, and those Canterbury tales that “incline toward sin.” The retraction is a reminder that Chaucer's genius was always subject to orthodox piety.

Chaucer greatly increased the prestige of English as a literary language and extended the range of its poetic vocabulary and meters. He was the first English poet to use the seven-line stanza in iambic pentameter known as rhyme royal and the couplet later called heroic. His system of versification, which depends on sounding many e's in final syllables that are silent (or absent) in modern English, ceased to be understood by the 15th century. Nevertheless, Chaucer dominated the works of his 15th-century English followers. For the Renaissance, he was the English Homer. Edmund Spenser paid tribute to him as his master; many of the plays of William Shakespeare show thorough assimilation of Chaucer's comic spirit. John Dryden, who modernized several of the Canterbury tales, called Chaucer the father of English poetry.

Another important literary figure is Thomas Malory.

Malory, Sir Thomas ( ?—1471?) is an English translator and compiler, who is generally held to have been the author of the first great English prose epic, Le morte d'Arthur (The Death of Arthur). It is believed that he was an English knight of Warwickshire, that he saw military service in France, and that he spent many years in prison for political offenses and civic crimes. Le morte d'Arthur (1469-1470) was supposedly composed while the author was in prison. It was published in 1485 by the first English printer, William Caxton. It is a compilation and translation from old French sources (with additions from English sources and the compiler's own composition) of most of the tales about the semilegendary Arthur, king of the Britons, and his knights. One of the outstanding prose works of Middle English, it is divided into 21 books. The work is imbued with compassion for human faults and nostalgia for the bygone days of chivalry. The poetic prose is noted for its color, dignity, simplicity, and melodic quality.

Yet many men say in many parts of England that King Arthur is not dead, but had by the will of Our Lord Jesu into another place; and many men say that he shall come again, and he shall win the holy cross. I will not say that it shall be so, rather I will say that here in this world he changed his life. But many men say that there is written upon his tomb this verse: HIC IACET ARTHURUS, REX QUONDAM REXQUE FUTURUS. (Here lies Arthur, the once and future king.)

Caxton, William (1422?-1491), first English printer, born probably in Tenterden, Kent. In 1441 Caxton moved to Brugge (Bruges), Flanders (now part of Belgium), where he opened his own textile business, and about 1471 he moved to Cologne, Germany, where he learned the art of printing. At this time Caxton was also translating into English a popular French romance, which he printed in Brugge as The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye (1474?). It is famous as the first book printed in English. Returning to England in 1476, Caxton set up a printing press at Westminster Abbey. His first publication there was an indulgence, which was distributed in December 1476. During his career Caxton printed nearly 100 publications, about 20 of which he also translated from French and Dutch. Among the more notable books from his press are The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde by the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer. Caxton also wrote prefaces and epilogues to many of the works he published, notably the preface to the prose epic Le Morte d'Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory. He displayed a lively, humorous style that considerably influenced 15th-century English literature.

• Task A. Check your understanding. Prepare extended answers to the following questions.

1. Why was Middle English poetry influenced by French literary traditions, both in content and style?

2. What is the difference, if any, between the mystery or Corpus Christi cycles and the morality plays?

3. What makes William Langland's Piers Plowman an outstanding composition?

4. Why are the following names put together: Homer, Dante, Bocaccio, and Chaucer?

5. What are the contributions made by Caxton and Malory?

• Task B. Explain the choice of dates, 1066 – 1476, for the period in question.

• Task C. Prepare 10 questions on medieval English literature to ask your group mates during a seminar.

• Task D. Read one of Chaucer's poems and say what you think of the text.

TO ROSEMUNDE. A BALADE

Madame, ye ben of al beaute shrine

As fer as cercled is the mappemunde,

For as the crystal glorious ye shyne,

And lyke ruby ben your chekes rounde.

Therwith ye ben so mery and so jocunde,

That at a revel whan that I see you daunce,

It is an oynement unto my wounde,

Thogh ye to me ne do no daliaunce.

For thogh I wepe of teres ful a tyne,

Yet may that wo myn herte nat confounde;

Your seemly voys that ye so small outwyne

Maketh my thought in joye and blis habounde.

So curteisly I go, with love bounde,

That to my-self I sey, in my penaunce,

Suffyseth me to love you, Rosemounde,

Thogh ye to me ne do no daliaunce.

Nas never pyk walwed in galauntyne

As I in love am walwed and y-wounde;

For which ful ofte I of my-self divine

That I am trewe Tristam the secounde.

My love may not refreyd be nor afounde;

I brenne ay in an amorous plesaunce.

Do what you list, I wil your thrall be founde,

Thogh ye to me ne do no daliaunce.

____________________________________________________________