LITERATURE OF THE MIDDLE AGES: Höfische Epen - 520

Professor Marlene Ciklamini
Fall 2006
Wednesdays 4:30-7:10
Seminar Room, 172 College Avenue

The classical courtly romances, Hartmann von Aue’s Erec and Íwein, Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan and Isolde, Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, will be situated within the European literary, political and social context. Each author, Wolfram humorously, if defiantly, acknowledges a deep or abiding influence of French literature. Nevertheless, their visions of courtly life are also so highly individualistic that they are often at variance with each other.

Emphasis will be on oppositional or idiosyncratic visions of the courtly world and on the structural and stylistic shaping of the narrative as dictated, or influenced, by an idealistic and critical view of life in the realm of King Arthur and by the authors’ training. A correlative area will be literary criticism, explicit and implicit, within Gottfried’s and Wolfram’s opera. This will include the reception of French literary models and of courtly topoi, the adaptation of typological thought prominent in learned and ecclesiastical circles, as well as critical evaluations of the works and their influence, in part or in toto, by their predecessors and contemporaries.