If you have seen a movie or read a book about King Arthur, you have probably had a few basic questions: Did King Arthur really exist? Where did the legend start? How many different versions are there? The course is designed to examine the second two questions (we will discuss the first briefly). We are going to work backwards in time, starting with Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, a major influence on future generations of writers of Arthurian literature, and work backwards in time to the earliest versions of the Arthurian legend. We will be proceding by themes or by characters (the quest of the holy grail, Tristan, Gawain). The bulk of our material is from the medieval period (pre-1500). These versions vary greatly in genre, focus, character depiction, and in the languages in which they were originally written. Some of the languages represented include English, Welsh, French, German, Latin, and Italian. Some of the genres represented include the Romance, the epic, and the chronicle. The genre and purpose of the text have a great influence of the depiction of the various characters represented, making Arthur, for example, merely background in one tale while a strong but flawed leader in another. There is usually not one answer to a question like, isn’t this true about such-and-such a character?

Can you really spell the word “fish” as “ghoti” in English? If the plural of tooth is “teeth,” why isn’t the plural of booth “beeth”? If you say you “wrote” a letter, can you say you “bote” your tongue? Is there such a thing as a “gruntled” person or a “requited” love? The answers to some of these questions can be found by studying the history of the English language. The class will cover the development of English from its roots in Indo-European through Old English, Middle English, and Modern English. Some grammar of Old and Middle English will be studied, as well as transcription of sounds in Modern English. Along with regular exams, students will construct a language journal identifying changes or recent developments in the language. This course is particularly recommended for students in secondary education.

The purpose of the course is to explore various issues related to the concept of human rights through literature. Issues we will discuss include genocide, women’s rights, justice and punishment, political repression, torture, disability rights and methods of protesting human rights abuses. These issues extend all over the world, including the U.S. The cases extend through time up to the present day. To talk about human rights, we talk about abuse of human rights; therefore, the conversation is not usually a happy one. However, the hope is that by exposing the abuses and discussing what standards need to be upheld, that the abuses happening now will stop and abuses that happened in the past will be redressed. It is not a hopeless quest.