PS

Posted on July 2, 2007 by jordan

This is really stating the obvious, but our dear Knight of the Cart is (what a coincidence!) the epitome of our chaste girly-knight. He lies with the damsel strictly out of a sense of duty, suffering internally all the while. This virtuous knight is not only obeying our rules on love, but also obeying the theory put forth in a prior reading that this courtly literature relies heavily on unrequited love to suit its purposes: the knight grudgingly lies with this damsel out of a sense of duty, despite the fact that his heart belongs to another.

It would seem then, that this particular work is placing duty above even love, and perhaps this also follows the idea of literature of this tradition actually serving as a critique of love for anything other than one’s God. During this time period especially, one’s God goes hand-in-hand with one’s duty. It is because of duty alone that the knight is persuaded to sleep with the damsel, preferring however to keep himself chaste, to avoid betrayal of his beloved, and to honor his God, all on varying levels.

Of course it doesn’t hurt that the damsel turns out to be the ultimate nagging “I-was-just-testing-you” psycho. All else pales in comparison to the knight’s true love, especially this nutjob. As difficult as it is to be painfully irritating within such simple sentence structure, the damsel manages; the only acceptable acts she performs are offering to leave the knight’s bed and offering to return home.

That said, I’ve only read the first chunk so far, so if I’m missing something huge that’s relevant to all of this, you know why.

Posted in Adultery, sexual identity | Comments Off on PS

The Age of Excess.

Posted on July 2, 2007 by jordan

As I told Dr. Kennedy this morning, I wanted to see Arabic influences in the description of Camilla’s tomb in Eneas. While this may or may not be reaching, the description of the elaborate jewels and materials used to create the tomb, as well as the exotic fabrics adorning Camilla in death seem to have an Arabic flair to them. In fact, they reminded me much of the elaborate descriptions we have already encountered (time and time again) in Arabian Nights, not only in the actual physical detail, but also in the over-the-top rendering of the tomb. This brings to mind a reading from last week– it may have been one of the first chapters of Menocal– that talked of Arab culture as being characterized as over-the-top, the very definition of excess, and recalling Arabian Nights illustrates this concept.

More interesting, to steal from Dr. K, is that this Arabic-influenced scene is how the author/translator chooses to handle Camilla’s death. As Dr. K says, Camilla is a woman warrior. She is powerful, and yet beautiful. For the time, this was impossible to wrap one’s mind around, so the author not only places her in a tomb, distanced by death, but an elaborate, flamboyant structure at that, which is tinged with the exotic, thereby placing Camilla just out of reach. This elaborate description, not only of materials but also the ever-present bow-and-arrow and the destruction of any stairs allowing access to the tomb, sets Camilla apart as a phenomenon more than a person, discouraging any attempt to “understand” the woman warrior by exalting her and doing so through “foreign” practices.

Posted in Cultural Connections, translation | Comments Off on The Age of Excess.

Gay Spain and Cross-Dressing Satan

Posted on July 1, 2007 by badspellar

I am so friggin’ confused about the reading right now. I’m not sure what is due tomorrow but I read “The Sodomitic Moor” and “Chaste Subjects.” Hopefully they were the right choices. If not, meh. I’m going to read Eneas tomorrow morning since my eyes are starting to cross again.

To begin with, “TSM” made Spain sound like one of those angry kids in highschool who beat up all of the gay kids because he himself was gay. The two cultures seemed to get along for a while until Spain freaked out about its cultural instability. I love that it is the homosexual’s fault for all of Spain’s problems. But the real ringer was the idea that homosexuality was a “Virus Oriental” and therefore curable. Now where have we heard that before?

What strikes me as odd is the fact that some Arabs were just as disgusted with the idea of same-sex intimacy as the Spanish Christians. However it seems that the Sodomitic Moore became too strong of a bad guy. It was the potent signifer of cultural, sexual, and racial diference that the two cultures recognized.

There is also the idea of the Moors being too indulgent (Moor+heaven=tons of food) so they become homosexual pagans. I’m still a little muddled as to how the image of the gay Moor came to be but from the reading I have gathered that it was mainly the evils of propaganda that forever soiled their image. There was a deliberate confustion of cultural and sexual differences in Sodomy. My favorite line from this work is that the image of the Sodmitic Moors was a “by-product of the forgoing sexual, cultural, and gender difference into a servicable discourse by which the Christians might expose the “enemy within.” I thnk that pretty much means point and gasp at the homosexuals and they’re bound to give in.

Now onto “Chaste Subjects” which I think was a stretch and a half on the author’s part. It was like she was looking at a poem about flowers and analyzing its affect on the price of oil. I mean, come on. Yes, a chaste knight is odd. And yes, the devil did dress up as beautiful woment to try and seduce the pious young knights. But to insinuate a homosexual undertone and quesitoning of sexuality was a bit much.

I am totally on board with the oddness of having Chaste knights. It defeats the whole purpose. A knight goes for adventure to get sex from the greatful dame later on. To not accept the sex disrupts the cycle in which chivalrich prowess is rewarded. Sex is a reward for the exploits and battles are a way to prove chivalric prowess. to overcome the temptations of flesh demonstrates the defining relationhip of gender and desire. These ideas make sense. I can see them in my head and they connect quite well.

But then suddenly, the author pulls this ide out of her hat that the shifting, uncertain gender of the devil is an object of deire for the poor knight. At one point she states that the knights establish that fighting is with men, sex is with women. But then she does this whole analysis about the devil chanign sexes and how that maesses with gender  roles and yadda yadda yadda, something about using the figure of women to verbalize the concerns of the church and I’m scratching my head. She may not come out and say it but I felt that she was hinting to the confusions of sexuality with this devil and the relationship the knight feels toward it. I think that was just a bit much. These men deire to not deisre. That’s that.

Posted in engl445h, sexual identity, storytelling, transformation | Comments Off on Gay Spain and Cross-Dressing Satan

menocal 71-111

Posted on July 1, 2007 by bford

origin – In the first chapter from this reading Menocal makes it obvious from the outset that the origins of the modern vernacular lyric has a much debated history. One in which many Europeans theorists have accounted for the rise of courtly love poetry as a phenomenon and ignore the elements that were almost certainly intertwined with that of literature from Andalusian, Hispano-Arab influences. The arabic precursors of the troubadour poetry exhibit many of the common themes such as unrequited love and the role of gender. But the unwillingness of western scholars to give credit where it is due has led to a constant debate between those who support the Arabist theory and those who refute it; creating what Menocal refers to as, “…the problems of the origins and formal characteristics of the vernacular lyric.” Menocal both questions and condemns the nearsighted views of western scholarship that dismiss the Islamic influence in poetry that became so popular so summarily within the Christian world. She also discusses that fact that regardless of the opinions concerning the origins of troubadour poetry that it is no secret that troubadour poetry provided the rudiments for all European literary forms thus being the origin of modern day works.

revolutionary- The antecedent texts of the muwashshahat are shown in a light which paints them as being integral influential texts for the troubadour poetry that followed in the western world. It made use of revolutionary form where a single poem displayed both elements of the old guard of literary pursuits as well as the previously dismissed vernacular tradition that began to creep to the forefront. These works used two different styles within the same poem and two different poetic voices, the first being a man in the classical form and the second being a woman relaying the poem in the vernacular. This marked a severe change in the discourse of popular literature, openly accepting the variable forms that the written/ spoken word could take. These two very different portions of the muwashshahat were known to have been compiled as a single text because of the elements of rhythm, meter, and song the remained constant throughout their relaying even when poetic voice changes.

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Monday’s reading.

Posted on June 30, 2007 by jordan

I’m looking for the “Chaste Subjects” reading on the blog and not seeing it. Am I being a moron? Is anyone else finding it?

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Readings from Thursday, June 29

Posted on June 28, 2007 by islammedlit

I am copying the handouts from today’s class below:

Rules of Love

The following set of rules is based on the De Amore of Andreas Capellanus, as adapted in Appendix 1 of Ann S. Haskell’s A Middle English Anthology (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1985). To find out more about Andreas Capellanus, click here.

1. Marriage should not be a deterrent to love.

2. Love cannot exist in the individual who cannot be jealous.

3. A double love cannot obligate an individual.

4. Love constantly waxes and wanes.

5. That which is not given freely by the object of one’s love loses its savor.

6. It is necessary for a male to reach the age of maturity in order to love.

7. A lover must observe a two-year widowhood after his beloved’s death.

8. Only the most urgent circumstances should deprive one of love.

9. Only the insistence of love can motivate one to love.

10. Love cannot coexist with avarice.

11. A lover should not love anyone who would be an embarrassing marriage choice.

12. True love excludes all from its embrace but the beloved.

13. Public revelation of love is deadly to love in most instances.

14. The value of love is commensurate with its difficulty of attainment.

15. The presence of one’s beloved causes palpitation of the heart.

16. The sight of one’s beloved causes palpitations of the heart.

17. A new love brings an old one to a finish.

18. Good character is the one real requirement for worthiness of love.

19. When love grows faint its demise is usually certain.

20. Apprehension is the constant companion of true love.

21. Love is reinforced by jealousy.

22. Suspicion of the beloved generates jealousy and therefore intensifies love.

23. Eating and sleeping diminish greatly when one is aggravated by love.

24. The lover’s every deed is performed with the thought of his beloved in mind.

25. Unless it please his beloved, no act or thought is worthy to the lover.

26. Love is powerless to hold anything from love.

27. There is no such thing as too much of the pleasure of one’s beloved.

28. Presumption on the part of the beloved causes suspicion in the lover.

29. Aggravation of excessive passion does not usually afflict the true lover.

30. Thought of the beloved never leaves the true lover.

31. Two men may love one woman or two women one man.

Selections from troubador poets (Provencal)

>When I See The Lark Beating (From the Original Language, Provencal) When I see the lark beating Its wings in joy against the rays of the sun That it forgets itself and lets itself fall Because of the sweetness that comes to its heart, Alas! Such great envy then overwhelms me Of all those whom I see rejoicing, I wonder that my heart, at that moment, Does not melt from desire.

Alas! How much I thought I knew About love, and how little I know, Because I cannot keep myself from loving The one from whom I will gain nothing. She has all my heart, and my soul, And herself and the whole world; And when she left, nothing remained But desire and a longing heart.

I have never had power over myself Nor been by own man from the very hour When she let me see into her eyes, Into a mirror that pleases me so much. Mirror, since I saw myself in you, I have been slain by deep sighs, That I have lost myself just as the handsome Narcissus did in the fountain.

I despair of ladies; I will never trust them again; As I used to defend them Now I shall abandon them, Because I see no one who does any good for me Against her who destroys and confounds me, I fear and distrust them all, Because I know very well that they are all alike.

She really shows herself to be a woman in this, My lady, for which I condemn her; Because she does not want what she should want, And what she shouldn’t do, she does. I have fallen on an evil grace, And I have indeed acted like the fool on the bridge And I do not know how this happened to me, Unless I tried to climb too high on the mountain.

Mercy is indeed lost, And I never knew it, Because she, who ought to have most of it, Has none, and where will I look for it? Ah! It would never seem, when looking at her, That she would let this love-sick wretch, Who will never be well without her, To die, without helping him.
Since these things will never bring me good from my lady, Neither prayers, pity, nor the rights I have, Nor is it a pleasure to her That I love her, I will never tell her again. Thus I part from her and give her up. She has slain me, and through death I will respond, And I go away, since she does not ask me to stay, Wretched, into exile, I know not where.

Tristan, you will have nothing more from me, For I go away, wretched, I know not where. I will withdraw from singing and renounce it, And I hide myself from joy and love.

Quan chai la fuelha (When the leaf sings) When the leaf sings from the highest peaks and the cold raises, withering the kernel and willow, of its sweet refrains I see the wood grow dumb; but I’m close to love, whosoever might leave it.

Everything is iced, but I cannot freeze because a love affair makes my heart lush again; I should not shake, because Love covers and hides me and makes me preserve my merit, and leads me.

Life is good, if joy holds it, though some, whose things do not go well, complain; I don’t know how to accuse my lot since, by my troth, I have my share of the best.

As of flirting, I don’t know what to blame, and of the others I spurn the togetherness; since, of all her peers, no one is like mine, since there doesn’t seem to be one who comes not after her.

I don’t want my heart to join another love lest she flees me and turns her head elsewhere: that even the one from Pontremoli has one worthier of her, or that so seems so.

She’s so kind, that the kindest thirty she wins by her fair look: that’s a good reason for her to hear my songs, because she’s so noble and so preciously deserving.

Go, then, song, show before her: if it were not so, you wouldn’t deserve Arnaut’s toil.

Anc ieu non l’aic, mas elha m’a (I don’t hold it, but it holds me) I never held it but it holds me all the time in its bail, Love, and makes me glad in anger, fool in wisdom as one that never can fight back, because one who loves well cannot defend himself. ’cause love commands that men serve and soothe it: for which I expect, suffering, a good reward, whenever it is granted.

I tell little of what’s in my heart: fear makes me silent and scared; tongue hides but heart wants what on which, in pain, broods so: I languish, but I do not complain because so far as the sea embraces the earth there’s none so kind, actually, as the chosen one for whom I long.

I so know her value, certain and true, that I cannot turn elsewhere; I do so that my heart aches, when the sun sets and rests: I don’t dare say who inflames me; my heart burns but my eyes are fed, because only seeing her has been left to me. See, you, what keeps me alive!

Foolish is he who, for the sake of speech, turns his joy into pain, because slanderers, God curse them, never have a nice tongue: one whispers, the other brays, and so withdraws a love that would be great; but I fight back, disguising, their blame, and love with no hesitation.

That’s why it keeps me happy and fine with a favour with which it has raised me; but it will never pass trough my throat, for fear that she gets gloomy, since I still feel the flame of Love, that orders me not to spread my mind: I swear it, frightened, because I’ve seen many a love deleted by its fame.

Many a light and easy song I would have made, had she come to my help, the one who gifts me with joy and takes it away, ’cause now I’m glad and now she turns me: I am bound to her will. Nothing asks my heart, nor does it flee her, but, earnestly, I surrender to her: if she then forgets me, mercy is dead.

Tell Better-Than-Good, if she takes you, gracious song, that Arnaut does not forget. Ab gai so cuindet e leri (On a nice, gleeful and happy melody) On a nice, gleeful and happy melody I write, and polish and plane words that will be true and certain when I have filed them smooth, since Love soon levigates and gilds my song, which moves from her upon whom Worth wakes and rules.

Every day I improve and polish, because I love and crave for the kindest one in the world: here I tell you openly I’m hers from head to heel, and even if the cold wind blows, the love that rains in my heart keeps me the warmer the colder it is.

I attend and offer a thousand masses, and burn candles of wax and of tallow for God to gift me with success with her with whom fencing is useless; and when I see her blond hair, her body lean and fresh, I love her more than [I would] one who’d give me Luzerne.

So much I love her and want her in my heart that I fear to lose her out of excessive desire, (if one can lose something out of excessive love) because her heart overcomes mine and doesn’t part from it: so, indeed, she holds me like the inn holds the worker.

I don’t want the throne of
Rome nor to be made Pope if I can’t find refuge near her for whom my heart burns and flares; and if she doesn’t correct the wrong with a kiss within a year, she kills me and damns herself.

In spite of the pain I endure, I don’t sway from loving well; even if she deserts me, I write melody and rhyme for her: I suffer more loving than one who labours because, compared to me, the one from Moncli didn’t love Audierna more than an egg.

I am Arnaut who hoard the air and hunt the hare with the ox and swim against the flow.

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Orientalism

Posted on June 28, 2007 by badspellar

It was a late night last night so I was only able to get through Orientalism and most of that there “The Arabian Nights.” But seeing as how some other intellectual minds have covered “Nights” I’ll just move on to Orientalism.

Overall I thought that Said did a wonderful anthropological analysis of what the “Orient” is with regard to how man perceives it. The west is a geographical area, the Orient is a man-made concept. I didn’t realize before this work that as Americans we have a completely different concept of what the Orient entitles. But for both Europe and the United States the Orient is a way for people to dominate a seemingly harmless and exotic culture without feeling like jerks. It made me think of our reasoning for having slavery back in the day here in the US of A. We decided that Africans LIKED the hard labor. So therefore we were being helpful.

I also liked that Said pointed out that there is a difference between the academic and imaginative meanings of Orientalism. Academically we understand their culture through texts and history. But imaginatively they are different and less than us, despite the evidence that refutes this perception.

One thing that needs a bit of clarification for me is the idea of the 4 elements that Said points out: Expansion, historical confrontation, sympathy, and classification. I understand that these concepts go with the idea of Orientalism but I had issues distinguishing them. He also brings up the idea of a new discourse versus an old discourse. Aren’t they more or less the same or is there some underlying difference that I am just not getting? I understand that the old discourse had to do with the Crusades and the racism involved with that. Isn’t there still a sense of racism but this time with relation to the greed for oil? And don’t both discourses involve the colonial mentality?

I really like the questions Said raised. They made me think, which is a dangerous thing. How does one represent other cultures? I realized that there is never really an objective way. people are influenced by their own culture and there is no real way to be completely open-minded. I think that the notion of the “other culture” is dangerous depending on the level of education and “open-mindedness” people have. It is a very touchy subject and can easily turn sour.

I didn’t see where the whole industrial revolution speech a few days back was going but hey, guess I got told.

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Late on Dronke.

Posted on June 28, 2007 by jordan

It is due to my frustration regarding all things “computerized” that I am just now posting on Dronke. My apologies.

When Dronke goes into the issue of translation, I perk up. In hindsight everything is a phenomenon, and we are able to distance ourselves sufficiently to “study” the past. The warnings that history is doomed to repeat itself if we don’t pay attention the first time around is crap; we’re going to repeat it, it’s just a matter of time before we get cocky enough to think that certain events and practices are simply of the past and that we are now more sophisticated.

Certain tendencies are part of “human nature,” if you’ll excuse the cliché. One of these tendencies is stealing ideas from another group (ahem, culture) due to their exotic appeal, among other things. (I realize I’m being reductionist and that there are a million and one reasons to steal from other cultures, but bear with me.) Another extremely significant tendency is storytelling. Therefore, it is only natural, not to mention inevitable, that one culture should appropriate the stories (among other things) of other groups or cultures, and what’s more that they should alter these ever-so-slightly to make them relevant to their daily life.

Case in point: I made a feeble attempt at translating “The Angel of Death With the Proud King and the Devout Man” for my boyfriend. Not in a grand display of my mastery of Spanish, but as a necessity as he is low on his English. He is a devout Christian, and upon reading this story I thought I have so got to show this to him. The characters involved are Muslim, but the moral is universal… or so I thought. As I was translating, which took much longer than I could ever have imagined, I came upon the first mention of “Allah”. Hmm. While I could have simply translated it to Dios to serve my purposes, I left it at Alá for the sake of staying as close to the “original” as possible. When I later shared my rough translation with my boyfriend, I was quite proud of the time and effort I had put into the small project and I thought for sure that he would fall in love with the story and the moral like I had, maybe tack it up on his wall. I warned him, “It’s from Arabian Nights so they’re using ‘Allah’ but I think it’s pretty universal.” As I finished reading my translation aloud, I looked to my Christian friend for a reaction, fairly proud of myself… whereupon he wrinkled his forehead and said, “There is no God but God; Allah is the devil.”

So it seems that he has some sort of block against even acknowledging elements of another faith. And what if I had simply translated the word “Allah” to “Dios“? And what if I even threw Christ in the story somewhere? I was amused when I realized that I was doing the very same thing that probably goes into these collections of stories in the first place, only I wasn’t quite as smart. While I was asking for an opening of the mind and an acceptance of the ideas of another culture as parallel to our own, it seems that what I should have done in order to get my point across would have been to take the story and change the necessary elements to make it a Christian story. Tah-dah! Then it still means the same thing, but my oh-so-devout boyfriend could accept and appreciate it.

While this feels only slightly disingenuous to a student of English literature accutely aware of the issues in translation, the same has been occuring for centuries. The borrowing of stories is nothing new, and even the stories

Posted in Cultural Connections, storytelling, translation | Comments Off on Late on Dronke.

Guns don’t kill people, Husbands who come home from work early kill people…

Posted on June 28, 2007 by ebarn4wv

I stole that title from a one-liner I heard on The Blue Collar Comedy tour, but I feel it applies quite well to our readings. The knee-jerk reaction of the husband who discovers that his wife is sleeping with another man – as found in The Arabian Nights – is to kill them both, and with one stroke if possible. As you can probably guess, I’ve been wondering with exceeding wonder about the way adultery is portrayed in The Arabian Nights, and how that contrasts to the way we tend to see it in the west. In a traditional western story, when a wife commits adultery, it’s usually because her husband isn’t satisfying her. So she looks elsewhere – oftentimes to the village priest or some other “unlikely” figure – for gratification, and we all share a laugh over how she was able to get away with it. In the few eastern stories we’ve read, the prevailing trend is that the women sleep with other men – usually black slaves as Kathryn pointed out – with no apparent motive. Unlike the western story, where the circumstances of the adultery contribute to the humor, the eastern story robs us of this background, and makes us accept that the woman is sleeping around merely because she can. I’ll probably come back to this topic later, after we have a little more foundation to base our conclusions on, but for now, I’d like to return to the matter of the wive’s overwhelming lover of choice.

Why a black slave? The answer to that is simple: because in arabia, africans were foreigners, and every culture attributes some sort of sexual supremacy to outsiders. Don’t believe me? Look at our own culture. Black men are supposedly “gifted” in certain areas of the anatomy. Asian women are supposed to possess some innate skill in the bedroom that will fulfill a man beyond his wildest dreams. The list goes on and on, and many of these same stereotypes existed in the Islamic world of which we read. So the fact that the wife of a sultan is seeking her pleasure with a black slave serves one main purpose: to establish the wife as a faithless nymphomaniac. Since the sexual prowess of black men is so legendary, naturally, that’s who she will choose as her lover. The fact that he is a slave just reinforces the fact that she cares for naught but her satisfaction, flingling class and social taboo to the wayside.

I’m not necessarily sure what any of this means – if anything – and I realize that I may just be reading too far into a minor detail, but while the jury is out on that, I leave you with this:

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Shahrazad’s Magic

Posted on June 27, 2007 by kathryn

You have to hand it to Shahrazad.  She tells one very compelling story.  And she does this by telling a story within a story within a story.  Think about it.  The main story of The Arabian Nights, is her own.  She reminds us of this with some small word or phrase found within the text.  She then goes on to tell stories to King Shahryar. And in her stories, she had her characters tell stories to each other.  And so the stories and storytellers come full circle.

The stories themselves deal with magic and things that would be outside the experiance of the average Muslim of the time period.  Now they most likely believed in things like magic and jinnis.  This was so that they would have something or someone to blame when the unexpected happened.

One of my favorite stories so far is “The Tale of the Ensorcelled Prince.”  Which is told to the king from “The Fisherman and the Jinni.”  In this story, the prince marries his cousin (lots of intermarrying going on amoung cousins and siblings it seems) and he is as happy as a lark with his wife and he thinks that she feels the same way about him.  When he overhears two servants talking about how his wife drugs him every night so that she can be with her lover, he gets angry and decides to kill him.  (Also the lovers are almost always black slaves, wonder why that is.)  Instead he only managed in maiming the slave and cause the slave to loose his voice.  Now the wife goes into mourning and has her lover put inside a shire of some kind so she can take care of him.  After three years of this, the prince gets pissed about all her moaning and wailing and tells her to shut up already and get over it. 

When the wife realizes that her husband is the one who hurt her lover she casts a spell on him that turns the bottom part of his body to stone and all the people within his kingdom to fish.

Enter the king from the Fisherman’s story. The king finds the prince and listens to the entire sorid affair and then decides to help this prince.  He goes and kills the wife’s black slave lover and takes his place within the shire.  When the wife comes back she does not seem to notice that her lover is now a white man and is able to speak now.  The king tricks the wife into freeing the prince and his people and is then killed by the king.

As in a lot of Shahrazad’s stories, the women are all beautiful (and only 5′ tall) and the men, and the majority of the men are either royal or in positions of power. (Which only make sense, as Shahrazad is telling the stories to a king and he would want to here about other kings and princes.)   She uses magic to explain the unexplainable and to further the idea that such things do happen and that there is a reason for most magic and that magic has a logic all its own.

Shahrazad manages to keep King Shahryar enthralled by her stories for three years and in that time she gives birth to two sons, thus continuing both her bloodline as well as the kings.  And she gets to keep her head at the end of it.

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