Gillian Adler

Allegory was integral to the composition and interpretation of stories in the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance. As a narrative form, allegory implied the original sense of allegoresis, “speaking otherwise,” and engaged readers with the literal and symbolic senses of a story. This course will examine a range of allegorical works from the sixth century to the 16th century, including poetic and prose narratives by William Langland, Boethius, Guillaume de Lorris, Christine de Pizan, Dante, Petrarch, Mary Wroth, and Edmund Spenser. By examining the specific category of personification allegory in which characters interact with personified concepts—such as philosophy, love, time, truth, and reason—we will see how this literary technique helped authors unveil, as well as complicate, the moral, political, romantic, social, and spiritual questions of their time. While some of the assigned works are available in translation, students are expected to read Middle English texts in the original language.

This course examines, through medieval texts and manuscripts, the complex imagination of animals and animality in the Middle Ages. Critical theories of the Animal Turn seek to reevaluate the relationship between animals and human beings, envisioning the history of the animal as not only environmental but also intellectual, cultural, technological, economic, and as a history of marginalization. Integrating our interdisciplinary study of medieval culture with these theories, we will consider textual and visual materials that recognize the essential, varied, and often surprising roles that animals play and that question an anthropocentric vision that has often otherized animals and animality. Online archives and other digital resources will help us navigate portrayals of animals found in bestiaries, romance narratives, and saints’ lives. In addition, students will learn about the critical importance of animal studies to current environmental justice issues. This course will participate in the Sarah Lawrence Interdisciplinary Collaborative on the Environment (SLICE) Mellon course cluster, with a focus on environmental and climate justice and an involvement with local organizations. The semester will include two interludes during which students will engage in collaborative projects across disciplines. Students will have the opportunity to develop field-based conference projects.

The saint was the celebrity of the Middle Ages. The rise of pilgrimage, the fascination with relics, and sensational tales of martyrdom and miracle popularized individual saints across Europe and England. This course will focus on texts interested in the heroism, intercession, and sacrifice of saintly figures, as well as spiritual biographies and autobiographies that made bold claims to mystical authority and described fearless navigations of a shifting religious landscape. We will consider how the paradox of saints—disembodied yet concretely present between Heaven and Earth—transformed conceptions of the spiritual life. Special attention will be given to narratives of female mystics such as Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, as well as the lives and records of heroic women saints including Joan of Arc and St. Katherine of Alexandria. Other works, such as The Life of Christina of Markyate and Chaucer’s “saintly romances,” will ask us to challenge the generic distinction between literature and saint’s life. To complement our study of the textual remains of saints, this course will encourage visits to local collections of reliquaries and other saintly artifacts, as well as explorations of digitized illustrations of medieval religious subjects.

Dante’s The Divine Comedy is, perhaps, the most creative encyclopedic work of the Middle Ages. Presenting the story of a unique religious pilgrimage through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, this epic poem envelops readers in a comprehensive education on everything from philosophy and theology to astronomy and geometry. The work teems with information on virtue and vice, as a reader of medieval spiritual texts might expect, but also surprises with debates on secular and sacred love, political theory, local and universal histories, and inquiries of ethics, epistemology, and ontology. This course will explore Dante’s “circle of knowledge,” as it emerges through the aesthetic, emotional, and intellectual dimensions of his poem. The study of intertextual figures will help to illuminate the subtle ways in which Dante promotes his understanding of the world. Works—including not only the three canticles of Dante’s The Divine Comedy but also excerpts from his New Life (Vita Nuova), Monarchy (De Monarchia), On Eloquence in the Vernacular (De Vulgari eloquentia), and The Banquet (Convivio)—will be read in translation.

The course will examine representations of exile and diaspora in literary texts from ancient epic to Renaissance drama. We will study authors who were displaced from their communities, including the antique Roman poet Ovid and the medieval Italian poet Dante, and explore how they expressed anxieties about ostracism and distance through both autobiographical and fictional forms. We also will discuss how they used their works to leverage the physical experience of exile into more empowering perspectives and positions of distance. Reading epic narratives, including Virgil’s Aeneid, the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, and Milton’s Paradise Lost, we will consider the possibilities of freedom, discovery, and transformation in exile. In these narratives, exile has the potential to instigate political foundation, creative production, and spiritual discovery. Finally, this course will look at the exilic metaphors used by female authors, including Christine de Pizan and Margery Kempe, both to articulate and to subvert positions of gendered marginalization. The study of a range of literary texts will demonstrate how authors found ways of legitimizing themselves or their characters in the face of ostracism and displacement. In the process, students will develop their ability to analyze literature and cultivate a sense of literary history, especially “genealogies” traceable across ancient and medieval texts. Students are required to attend individual conferences on a biweekly basis. During the first semester, individual conferences will alternate with biweekly group conference meetings, which will focus on cultivating research skills and theoretical frameworks. Individual conference projects should be semester-long; therefore, students will complete two research-length essays over the course of the year.

This course will introduce students to Middle English (c. 1100–c. 1500) and to various Middle English literary works. We will study the vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, and dialectical variations of the language. To understand the rise of vernacularity in England, we will also consider linguistic change against the backdrop of social, political, cultural, and intellectual events—from the Norman Conquest to the arrival of the printing press. Readings will include popular and courtly romances, the saints’ lives that sometimes circulated alongside such romances in manuscripts, and Middle English translations of the Bible. This seminar will not include conferences.

Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales were two of the defining literary works of late medieval England. In this course, we will read these works (in Middle English) closely, exploring Chaucer’s complex interlacing of medieval genres, forms, and traditions. Studying Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales will reveal the diverse preoccupations of medieval literary culture: dreams and the imagination, sexuality and antifeminism, religious morality and clerical corruption, and the transcendent possibilities of love. Our examination of some contemporary writings will help us consider how the historical developments of 14th-century London, such as the changing class structure, influenced the social, economic, and political dimensions of Chaucer’s works.

Human history has always been characterized by the forced or voluntary migration of individuals or groups of people. In this lecture, we will analyze the dialectical relationship between the concepts of “home” and “exile” in a series of works ranging from the Bible and medieval poems to German literary texts of the 20th century, a century whose upheavals led to different waves of voluntary or forced migration. Essays by Edward Said will provide us with some critical vocabulary to speak and write about the interconnectedness of notions of home, flight, diaspora, migrants, and refugees, while the primary works will invite us to analyze these themes in various fictional and autobiographical forms. Our historical range will help us uncover the voices of those who were displaced from their communities but also the modes through which many authors transformed the punitive experience of exile into more empowering perspectives and positions of distance. We will begin with selected stories from the Old Testament (Pentateuch) and Old English exile poems, while later readings will include works by Ovid, Dante, Goethe, and Herman Hesse. We will conclude with Anna Segher’s novel about the dilemma of refugees being stuck in Marseille in 1942 and a story of four emigrants by the preeminent writer Sebald.

Where do we turn to understand the human experience of time? Science and technology might tell us about the physical flow of time or how the units of seconds, minutes, hours, and days might help to order time. Philosophy and literature, however, broaden the question of what time really is, emphasizing its inscrutability and elusiveness. Works in these disciplines demonstrate not only the mystery of human temporality but also the ways in which language and art attempt to capture, represent, or escape time. This course will examine the abiding concern with time and the complexities of temporal experience by examining a range of philosophical and literary writings, from antiquity to the present, as well as several films. Readings will include works by Augustine, Nietzsche, Kant, Kristeva, and Heidegger, as well as literary texts by Boethius, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and Woolf.