Samenvatting
Summary Complete LECTURE notes: European Literary History
- Instelling
- Universiteit Van Amsterdam (UvA)
A complete overview of all my notes taken during the lectures of the course: European Literary History. ENGLISH.
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European Literary HistoryLECTURES
Important terms Books or Writers
Lists of important stuff
Extra notes about something
non-substantively
Notes from the texts in the reader
- Mandatory Cinema visits → see
in the schedule > PART OF THE
EXAM
- Weekly questions you need to
make and bring printed to the
seminars
There is a chronology but during the lectures we are zooming in on themes which we
will look at back and forward in time.
Lecture 1| 3 February 2020 Adventure, Heroes and Heroines
“History does not exist, it only exists as far as you tell stories about it, as narratives.”
History is something we create, we tell ourselves. We decide together what is part of
our history?
Storytelling, images. > So what we read and from where is important for our history.
Translation is therefore very important for the European History.
A series of masterpieces?
- Impossible
- too many pages
- How about forgotten/neglected texts?
- How about less canonical, but no less important texts?
The canon is something that changes overtime and that has to do with the
preferences of the here and now.
For a European literature we have to look at the world at large.
,Goethe (1827) he was interested in poetry from all over the world. He wanted to
make sense of everything emerging in his age. He was one of the first who started to
think about translation systematically.
Too much emphasis on chronology suggests an organic development. You want to
avoid chronology! Because it limits the way you read.
The literary text (with their own ‘time mechanism’, such as repetition of older texts)
enables us to both look forward and back from a given point in time.
You’re a different reader than someone from another age or from another
country/region. It differs all in perspective.
Literature (or perhaps culture at large): a memory machine – it remembers itself, and
also provides a unique insight in how each age constructs its own image and that of
others.
Some type of stories seem to be coming back all the time: Recurrent stories.
F.a. the Romeo and Juliet story. Love that can’t exist because of some reasons.
➢ Is literature timeless? No, it is double-historical.
➢ Is literature place-less? No, it always reflects the cultural geography of its age.
➢ Reading is a performative act, a text starts to live once it is being read. You
have to make reading alive.
Several possible reading attitudes, how to approach a text:
➢ A distanced, critical, scholarly approach
➢ Le plaisir du texte (Roland Barthes)
➢ Real presences (George Steiner)
The impact of historical figures is huge.
Narrative texts: a hero(ine) attempts to reach his/her goal by overcoming certain
obstacles.
What do you need to have a story?
- You need a subject. F.a. a person/character
- You have to achieve something to reach a goal. F.a. escape a war.
You see that things in literature change → From using sea/boats to rockets and cars.
,From sea travel to space travel. The structure remains the same. Heroes, obstacles
etc. So in that case there’s a lot of continuity.
Heart of Darkness > Joseph Conrad > colonial enterprise about Congo. Old story
about colonialism. Was this novel a critique against colonialism or does it the exact
opposite?
Wrath goes with tribal societies. Like the icelandic stories.
Pre-Courtly culture
Archaic: society of warriors (tribal)
● Honor and privilege
● Mutual rivalry
● Warrior’s virtue: undaunted, lack of fear “pre-courtly”
examples:
- Homer, Iliad (ancient-Grieks)
- Beowulf (old-English), Nibelungenlied (old-German), Icelandic sagas,
Chanson de Roland (see the reader)
Late echoes: mobster culture of “respect”, (The Godfather); neo-barbaric films
(Schwarzenegger etc.)
Chanson de Roland And: Lancelot, Knight of the Cart > about the Honour of a
Women. Often stated in virtue-ness.
Main role of courtly nights is to protect the virtue of women.
‘Pre-Courtly’ barbarism increasingly located outside Europe in the 19th and 20th
century, often justified as a civilizational mission:
a critique of this in Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) About one of the first
spanish conquestadores in Peru. Outside the European continent but still important
in European history.
Uncontrolled violence.
The afterlife of colonialism.
The anti-hero. F.a. : from Julien Sorel to Bardamu
Suddenly we see (most often young men) who are really wanting to become and
hero but then they go to the battlefield and fail: this is a starting point for the
anti-hero. He is HUMAN. And therefore not perfect and always heroic.
Movie: 1917. About 2 soldiers who have an impossible task.
, SAM: The theme Adventure accentuates the literature of medieval times, in
particular chivalric narratives. Starting from the Song of Roland with its rude warriors
and unrelenting loyalty to the Christian god and king, followed by Lancelot, Knight of
Chart, a fine example of courtly love, the theme addresses Cervantes’ famous
parody of the genre Don Quichot. It identifies traces of the chivalric romance even in
the 20th century, when the notion of adventure is thoroughly redefined and the
anti-hero makes his/her appearance; we therefore close this theme with Jeanette
Winterson’s postmodern reversal of roles between men as heroes and women as the
object of affection in The Passion, a story set in Venice and Russia, with Napoleon’s
rise and fall as background.
Lecture 2 | 5 February 2020 The cult of the holy virgin Mary
Focus on the female heroine (in medieval times)
Mainly focussed on western Europe (and to some extent southern Europe)
christianity and christian tradition.
Greek and Roman antiquity: a wide variety of female characters, visible in the genre
of the Catalogue of Women (Hesiod, 700-650 BC).
Also: Medea and Electra
Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, a comedy (446-386 BC) Ongoing war about sparta in
Athens. About women telling the guys to stop the war or otherwise they will not share
beds anymore and it worked. This says a lot about the powerplay men-women.
At about 1100: the chivalric attitude is redefined. Rise of female characters.
Simultaneously: a new position for women as literary characters – and to a very
narrow extent also as authors.
Virgin Mary
- Global character and one of the most widely travelled characters
- Mother of Jesus (/god)
- One of the key figures in the gospels that tells us about the life of Jesus
Western = Roman catholic church > later protestant
Eastern/Balkans/Egypt = Various orthodox churches
Has a lot to do with geopolitics
1054: the Great Schism, as of then increasing importance of the annunciation in
Western iconography (as opposed to Eastern Orthodoxy).
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