Room 272

Here is your open thread for our final meeting of the semester. Does White help us to draw any conclusions from our study this semester?

Reminder: we will spend the first half of tonight’s meeting discussing your final projects. Please be prepared to discuss your topic for five to ten minutes. Please present your topic in a way that will stimulate discussion.

Apologies for the tardiness of this week’s post. One of the challenges we face when discussing White is that he represents something completely different from what we are accustomed to find in the aesthetics of a modern novel. He is intentionally, defiantly anachronistic; he does not shy away from didactic discourse; he combines different generic traditions in unexpected ways; and he engages in an eccentric literary critical debate with Malory.

So what do we do with him? How do we talk about this book?

As I mentioned in a previous post, we will also be beginning our reading of T.H. White’s The Once and Future King next week. For Monday’s meeting, please read part one: “The Sword in the Stone.”

Both readings this week are about knightly education. Later portions of White are very closely related to Malory, but this part seems to resonate more with the Perceval. Discuss.

(If you haven’t responded to the previous two Perceval discussion prompts, please do so.)

We’ll make today’s discussion an open thread. What interested you about this text, particularly in comparison to our romances?

If you haven’t read it yet, please see the post immediately below this one regarding tonight’s class. For those of you who enjoyed the Perceval, have no fear: we will take time to discuss it next week.

In our discussions of Lancelot and Yvain, we have talked about the extent to which they are meta-texts, or essentially chivalric romances about chivalric romance. The Perceval seems to take this even further, as the early parts of the text depend upon the reader’s knowledge of the genre to understand the irony.

Comment on this metatextual aspect of the Perceval in relation to a specific scene or moment from the first half of the text. Also, feel free to post other ideas for discussion.

I’m making an executive decision here. I know that some of you commute, and I don’t want you to have to dodge tree limbs and flooded roads to get to class. Therefore, I am canceling class tonight.

However, so that we will not fall behind, I am proposing this alternative: each of the next three days (Monday through Wednesday), I will post discussion questions on Perceval. I would like each of you to respond in some way to each of these questions. In this way, we can plan to have a shortened discussion next week on Perceval, and we will also move on to T. H. White.

So, watch this space this afternoon for discussion question #1.

Late edit: everyone please e-mail me to let me know that you have seen this post. Thanks.

Most of us have probably read this poem before, though perhaps you read a different translation. This means that we can be more selective and less comprehensive in our discussion.

And let’s put to one side any discussion of the Green Lantern, the Green Arrow, or the Jolly Green Giant.