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Jan 11: Introduction.
Do check out my course policies, if you don't have the copy I gave you
last semester. They're HERE.
We shall be looking at Beowulf in translation from
1/18 to 2/15. You should compare the OE text to Seamus Heaney's translation
for each day and be prepared to discuss both difficulties and triumphs
in his rendering. In addition, you should expect to be responsible
for bringing another translation of an assigned passage to class and to
demonstrating its strengths and weaknesses in comparison to the OE and
to Heaney's work. Assignments will be worked out each week for the
ensuing week; you will need to make quick and good use of ILL, the internet,
and any other sources you can muster.
From the beginning, you need to prepare to work with the
DOE corpus; this will be discussed in class. You must have full access
to the corpus by 1/25/00.
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Jan 18: Beowulf: lines
1-641. One or two persons will report on Seamus Heaney's poetry,
especially as it relates to his undertaking this translation. A
Beowulf Handbook, Ch. 4 & 18.
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Jan 25: Beowulf: lines
642-1250. One or two persons will report on theory of translation;
Conner will provide the basic bibliography, but those reporting should
be sure to augment this as necessary. A Beowulf Handbook, Ch. 5
& 6.
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Feb 1: Beowulf: lines
1251-1924. One or two persons will report on theory of translation; Conner
will provide the basic bibliography, but those reporting should be sure
to augment this as necessary. A Beowulf Handbook, Ch. 7 & 11.
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Feb 8: Beowulf: lines
1925-2509. One or two persons will report on theory of translating Old
English; Conner will provide the basic bibliography, but those reporting
should be sure to augment this as necessary. A Beowulf Handbook, Ch.
9 & 10.
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Feb 15: Beowulf: lines
2510-3182. Each member of the class should submit a statement of no more
than 500 words on the nature of translating Old English by email to every
member of the class to focus discussion on problems in translating OE poetry,
especially Beowulf. There are no limits to the areas on which
you might focus this statement: culture, semantics, rhetoric, metrics,
theories of textuality, etc. etc. A Beowulf Handbook, Ch. 13 &
17.
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Feb 22: Ælfric: Each member
of the class must submit a homily, saint's life, or other text by Ælfric
to have been read by the class and to be discussed.
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Feb 29: Ælfric: One or
two of the texts read for the 2/22 meeting will be used as focal points
for the 2/29 meeting, and basic research prepared in order to discuss them.
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Mar 7: Non-Ælfrician prose:
Each member of the class must submit a prose text to have been read by
the class and to be discussed.
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Mar 14: "The Dream of the Rood":
Everyone should translate the entire poem and prepare to discuss it, having
read a selection of critical material concerning it.
Individual projects must
have been proposed by this time, and should be under way.
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Mar 21: Texts to be chosen from
the Corpus: One half of the class must submit a text to have been read
by the class and to be discussed.
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Mar 28: Spring Break
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Apr 4: Texts to be chosen from
the Corpus: One half of the class must submit a text to have been read
by the class and to be discussed.
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Apr 11: Individual
Projects
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Apr 18: Individual
Projects
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Apr 25: Individual
Projects
INDIVIDUAL PROJECTS: The project
should be a paper of about ten pages which a clear thesis developed from
working first with primary texts in the OE corpus and secondly with the
most significant critical commentary on those texts. An obvious topic
would be "The OE Treatment of [blank]." You could fill the blank
with anything ranging from suicide to ritual spaces, from weaponry to hortaculture.
But you must be willing to check the whole corpus for your subject, and
take into account all of the salient topics which it suggests. Instead
of "The OE Treatment. . . " you could have, "Ælfric's Treatment.
. . " or "Wulfstan's Treatment. . . " or "The Treatment in Bilingual Charters
of . . . ". You might choose to read two documents together, where
one is a text most of us know and one is another text from the corpus which
allows you a way into the first text that would illuminate us all.
You could (but only if you have a background in statistics) try your hand
at stylometrics or some other quantifiable approach to the whole corpus.
You might find a drawing from the Anglo-Saxon period and try to elucidate
it from the corpus (but you'll also need special skills to do that, too).
You might even work with using the corpus in ways to address editorial
problems, if you're interested in reading about editing OE materials.
