Laura Getty, PhD

Rhonda Kelley, PhD

Kyounghye Kwon, PhD

Douglass Thomson, PhD

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.

NOTE: The above copyright license which University System of Georgia uses for their original content does not extend to or include content which was accessed and incorporated, and which is licensed under various other CC Licenses, such as ND licenses. Nor does it extend to or include any Special Permissions which were granted to us by the rightsholders for our use of their content. To determine copyright status of any content please refer to the bibliographies and appendices for original source information to further research specific copyright licenses.

Image Disclaimer: All images and figures in this book are believed to be (after a reasonable investigation) either public domain or carry a compatible Creative Commons license. If you are the copyright owner of images in this book and you have not authorized the use of your work under these terms, please contact the University of North Georgia Press at ungpress@ung.edu to have the content removed.

ISBN: 978-1-940771-32-8

Produced by: University System of Georgia

Published by: University of North Georgia Press, Dahlonega, Georgia

Cover Design and Layout Design: Corey Parson

For more information, please visit http://ung.edu/university-press

If you need this file in another format please email us at ungpress@ung.edu

Table of Contents

Europe

The Sermon on the Mount (from Matthew 5-7)

The Parliament of Birds and The Canterbury Tales

The Decameron

The Divine Comedy: Inferno

The Song of Roland

The Lais of Marie de France

Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart

The Song of the Cid

The Travels of Marco Polo

Middle East

The Rose Garden (Golestan or Gulistan)

The Quran

Divani Shamsi Tabriz and Masnavi

Shahnameh

The Thousand and One Nights

Autobiography of Usamah Ibn Munqidh

China

Selected Poems

The Romance of the Three Kingdoms

Japan

Noh Plays

Pillow Book

The Tale of Genji

South Asia

Tukaram’s Selected Poems

Bibliography

Appendix

Editor’s Note

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, pretend 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 argument, 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 comparison 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 encountered 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, 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. In India, the characters in the Mahabharata and the Ramayana still show up in regular conversations, and it would be impossible to read modern Indian literature without a basic knowledge of these texts, which are referenced frequently. Chinese literature is infused with Confucian concepts, which influenced Chinese culture for thousands of years. These are just a few of the examples of why these texts are important to this day, and the introductions will explain the influence of each work.

A word to the instructor: The texts have been chosen with the idea that they can be compared and contrasted, using common themes. Rather than numerous (and therefore often random) choices of texts from various periods, these selected works are meant to make both teaching and learning easier. Students often learn better when there is a theme or a set of themes that they can use to make sense of the stories. For example, the differences among cultures and time periods in the definition of a hero are found throughout the anthology. As the time periods progress, the type of hero changes as well: warriors in the ancient world, knights and samurai in the medieval period, and soldiers in works set in the Renaissance. Many of the works examine the role of women in society, and each time period contains numerous works of social commentary. There are epics across world literature to compare, belief systems from the Greek pantheon of gods to Native American origin stories, and philosophical questions about ethical and moral behavior.

It is by comparing similar topics and themes that students are most easily able to see the significant differences in the cultures. If I ask students to discuss a work such as the Analects of Confucius, they often do not know where to begin or what to say. If I ask students to suggest what would happen if Gilgamesh were dropped into the environment of the Analects, they immediately see the problems: Gilgamesh is not a “gentleman” by Confucian standards, nor does he have the temperament to attract gentlemen retainers, who would expect courteous and proper behavior from him.

While cultural expectations are not universal, many of the themes found in these works are. Human beings have always cared about friendship, love, and finding their place in the world; we still read and watch stories of heroic journeys, bravery in its many forms, family relationships (good and bad), and the triumphs and tragedies of people who are not so different from ourselves.

As an example, the following assignment is one possible way to compare the texts in the Ancient World section.

Culture Shock Essay: take a character such as Achilles and place him in a story with a culture that would be completely foreign to him (such as the Mahabharata). How would he react to the people around him, and what would they think about him/his behavior? This topic could be mixed and matched: Hector in Gilgamesh, Arjuna in the Aeneid, Aeneas in the Art of War, etc.

Again, by asking the students to compare cultures, it is easier for them to identify differences. Obviously, a similar type of essay would work in the medieval period and the Renaissance, and Ancient World texts could be compared to medieval or Renaissance texts as the term progresses.

A note about calendar systems: The anthology uses B.C.E. (Before Common Era) and C.E. (Common Era). As a world literature text, it seeks to be as inclusive as possible of belief systems around the world. Of course, the numbering system used comes from the Christian calendar’s B.C. (Before Christ) and A.D. (Anno Domini—in the year of our Lord); basically, Christianity is the determiner of what is Common Era and before. Since there needs to be a way of comparing time periods across these cultures, and today’s world uses the numbering system that stems from the Christian calendar, it is the system used throughout. It would be too unwieldy to use all of the relevant calendar systems, although it is worth noting to students that they exist. For instance, 2015 C.E. is the year 5776 in the Hebrew calendar, the year 4713 in the Chinese calendar, and 1436 in the Islamic calendar. For Hinduism, the current Epoch of this cycle of the universe (which is destroyed and remade numerous times) started in 3012 B.C.E., and the current Era in that Epoch started in 78 C.E. Obviously, it would be both difficult and confusing to employ more than one system.

Introduction

The term “Middle Ages” is primarily a Western construct: It is the middle because it comes between the European Ancient World and the European Renaissance (also a Western construct, since it means the re-naissance, or rebirth, of ancient Greek and Roman ideals and literature). The European Renaissance was self-named by writers of that time (a fact that will be discussed in greater depth in the Renaissance section of this anthology), and they labeled everything that came between them and the Ancient Greeks and Romans as “the Middle Ages.” Renaissance writers in Europe had a vested interest in portraying that time period as somehow lesser than their own; as the readings in this section will demonstrate, there is nothing lesser about the works in this time period.

Some parts of the world have middle periods in their literature, but not with the same connotations as the European term. In China, for example, the Middle Period is considered the Golden Age of poetry, although the “middle” in this case means the middle of the dynastic period, which starts in 221 B.C.E. and ends in 1911 C.E. To the extent that the term itself means anything on a worldwide stage, it is used here to compare time periods in a chronological manner. Readers can see what is happening in literature in roughly the same times around the world.

In Japan, the Heian period (794-1185 C.E.) saw the flowering of Japanese literature. In the Japanese Imperial Court, men were expected to learn Chinese; aristocratic women, who were expected to write poetry and take part in the culture of the court, began writing in Japanese. The first novel in world literature dates to about 1000 C.E. and was written by Lady Murasaki Shikibu.

In China, Li Bo wrote some of the best poems of the Golden Age of poetry, while in the Middle East Jalal al-din Rumi wrote Persian poetry that is admired on a worldwide stage to this day. In Korea, sijo poetry flourished and continued to be a vibrant poetic form to the present.

Epics remained important in the medieval period, although in altered form. Dante wrote his Divine Comedy as Christian epic, playing on previous epic conventions. Ferdowsi’s Shahname includes an epic section, as well as mythological, heroic, and historical material. In many cases, epic literature was evolving into heroic literature. Previously, although scholars now believe that the Trojan War did happen, the events in the Iliad were the stuff of speculation, rather than history. In medieval times, both the Chinese Romance of the Three Kingdoms and the Spanish Song of the Cid were based on historical events in recorded history. The characters in the Romance and the Cid are based on historical figures; they are the strongest, the smartest, and the best that humans can be, but they are nonetheless humans, without the supernatural characteristics of ancient world epic heroes.

In Europe, social commentaries and the role of women took on particular prominence in this time period. Both Dante’s and Chaucer’s works showcase those themes dramatically and insightfully. Marie de France and Boccaccio examine the workings of courtly love, often to comic effect, as does Chrétien de Troyes in a more serious tone.

For students:

The works in this section are meant to be compared and contrasted. Consider the following questions while reading:

• What is the definition of a hero for each society, and why? How do the heroes in The Romance of the Three Kingdoms compare to the heroes in the Shahname and the Song of the Cid? How are they similar to or different from earlier epic heroes?

• What is the definition of a leader for each society, and why? How is it/isn’t it different from the definition of a hero? How is leadership in the Golestan different from leadership in The Romance of the Three Kingdoms?

• What role does romantic love play in the medieval period? How are the romantic relationships in the works of Chaucer, Boccaccio, and Marie de France different from the romantic relationships in the Shahname and the Tale of Genji?

The texts also can be compared and contrasted with earlier time periods:

• In what ways have the depictions of women changed from the ancient world to the medieval period?

• How is an ancient world warrior different from and similar to a medieval knight?

• How has the role of religion in these societies changed, especially where pantheons of gods have been replaced by monotheism in its various forms?

• How do Li Bo’s poems continue and develop themes in earlier Chinese poetry? How are they similar to and different from the Korean sijo in this section?

Written by Laura J. Getty