Part Two the Middle Ages

WORLD LITERATURE I Beginnings to 1650 Part Two The Middle Ages LAURA GETTY, PHD RHONDA KELLEY, PHD KYOUNGHYE KWON, PHD DOUGLASS THOMSON, PHD Dahlonega, GA World Literature I: Beginnings to 1650 is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. This license allows you to remix, tweak, and build upon this work, even commercially, as long as you credit this original source for the creation and license the new creation under identical terms. If you reuse this content elsewhere, in order to comply with the attribution requirements of the license please attribute the original source to the University System of Georgia. Parts of this title have been reproduced from Compact Anthology of World Literature edited by Laura Getty and Kyounghye Kwon in accordance to its CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. 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Table of Contents EUROPE 5 The Sermon on the Mount (from Matthew 5-7) 6 The Parliament of Birds and The Canterbury Tales 10 The Decameron 45 The Divine Comedy: Inferno 60 The Song of Roland 92 The Lais of Marie de France 132 Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart 147 The Song of the Cid 186 The Travels of Marco Polo 217 MIDDLE EAST 253 The Rose Garden (Golestan or Gulistan) 254 The Quran 259 Divani Shamsi Tabriz and Masnavi 284 Shahnameh 288 The Thousand and One Nights 338 Autobiography of Usamah Ibn Munqidh 358 CHINA 363 Selected Poems 364 The Romance of the Three Kingdoms 368 JAPAN 435 Noh Plays 436 Pillow Book 457 The Tale of Genji 461 SOUTH ASIA 485 Tukaram’s Selected Poems 486 BIBLIOGRAPHY 509 APPENDIX 512 Introduction Reading about any culture foreign to one’s own tends to create a form of culture shock in the reader. In a world literature class, students frequently face texts that are completely unfamiliar to them, and the typical culture shock reactions set in. We tend not to like things that we do not understand, in part because we do not like the feeling of not knowing something. I have had students complain that they did not “like” a story before we discussed it in class, and then the same students decide after the class discussion that they now like it. Again, understanding and liking go hand in hand. Give the literature a chance; something that might not make sense at first may end up being one of your favorite stories after finding a way to approach it. That being said, whether students like a story is not the point of reading that text in a literature class. We read literature in these classes to learn something. It is a nice addition to the experience if students like the works, but we can read and analyze texts that we do not enjoy just as effectively as the ones we do: In some cases, it is actually easier. Critical thinking comes from taking something that is unfamiliar, breaking it down into manageable chunks of information, fitting it back together, and using the experience to replicate the process in other situations in the future. A literature class is, of course, a perfect place to learn critical thinking skills. When interpreting a text, pre- tend that you are a lawyer in a courtroom arguing a case. Not all cases have smoking guns; most are won or lost on circumstantial evidence alone. The interpretation needs to be based primarily on evidence from the text; therefore, there can be more than one possible approach, but some interpretations can be wrong if there is no support in the text for the generalizations that the student uses. Evidence is the key; based on what the text tells us, what do we actually know? Expert opinions (secondary sources) may help, but remember that both sides in a court case usually can call some expert who will agree with them. Authorial intention is not entirely out of bounds in such an argu- ment, but it operates on the same principles: What can we actually argue, based on the evidence? For instance, any knowledge of Hemingway’s personal history makes it unlikely that the story “Soldier’s Home” could be interpreted as unsupportive of soldiers. Alternately, there are cases when the author’s life is of little or no help. Faulkner refused to tell an interviewer what the meaning of “A Rose for Emily” was, preferring perhaps that the reader not be limited by a simple (or simplistic) explanation of meaning. In every interpretation, remember to distinguish between the views of the original audience and the views of the modern reader. While a text may remind students about their grandfathers, that association does not often help when interpreting a story written by someone years ago who did not know their grandfather. (It may, of course, help students interpret their interpretations, but, except for the very best reader response theorists out there, that approach is more commonly found in a different field of study.) If the story is about a grandfather in ancient Greece, the com- parison with their grandfather would be most useful if it helped focus them on what the characters in that time period in Greek society thought about grandfathers (or treated them, or talked to them, etc.) back then that is similar to or different from modern expectations. In other words, what does the work tell us about the expectations of the original audience? Without at least a solid guess about what the original audience thought about the work, it is impossible to discuss whether the author is writing something that conforms to society’s expectations or argues against them, let alone what the original audience was expected to learn from the story, or how it expected to be entertained. The expectations of the audience bring us full circle to the issue of culture shock once again. Students in U.S. universities often feel more comfortable with American or British literature, since the K-12 school system in the U.S. usually emphasizes those works. Even if some students have not lived through the 1960s in the U.S., there is still a sense of familiarity to students raised in the U.S., although they might not understand as much of the deeper social context as they think they do. A world literature class may be the first place that some students have encoun- tered European works, let alone non-Western texts. The emphasis in this anthology, therefore, is on non-Western and European works, with only the British authors who were the most influential to European and non-Western authors (such as Shakespeare, whose works have influenced authors around the world to the present day). In a world literature class, there is no way that a student can be equally familiar with all of the societies, contexts, time periods, cultures, religions, and languages that they will encounter; even though the works presented here are translated, i World Literature I: Beginnings to 1650 students will face issues such as unfamiliar names and parts of the story (such as puns) that may not translate well or at all. Since these stories are rooted in their cultures and time periods, it is necessary to know the basic context of each work to understand the expectations of the original audience. The introductions in this anthology are meant to be just that: a basic overview of what students need to know before they begin reading, with topics that students can research further. An open access literature textbook cannot be a history book at the same time, but history is the great companion of literature: The more history students know, the easier it is for them to interpret literature. These works can help students understand the present, as well. In an electronic age, with this text available to anyone with computer access around the world, it has never been more necessary to recognize and understand differences among nationalities and cultures. The literature in this anthology is foundational, in the sense that these works influenced the authors who followed them. For Western literature, it is necessary to know something about the Trojan War (and the Trojan Horse) to understand everything from literary references to them (for almost three thousand or so years) to why a computer virus would be named a “Trojan Horse” because of what it does.

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