LTWL 172 Parzival

Thinksheet for 1/12: Question 5. 

Books I and II

1.  Who is Gahmuret?  Why must he leave home and where does he travel?

2.  How are Moors portrayed in this text?  How does this compare to other Christian authored texts we’ve read?

3.  Who is Belacane and why is she under siege? Why does Gahmuret eventually leave Belacane?

4.  Look at the opening paragraph of the text and consider the focus on black and white.  What difference does skin color make in this text?  Is this racism–why or why not? 

5.  Throughout the text we are getting a picture of the poet/narrator, often associated with Wolfram himself (and the narrator does identify himself as Wolfram).  What type of narrative voice is this? How does this narrator seem to relate to women?   Do you accept his statement on page 65– “Ine kan decheinen Buochstap” –I don’t know a single letter of the alphabet?”  Why or why not? 

6.   I want to try to consider the genre of romance itself.   Consider these two quotes in light of Parzival:

“A self-portrayal of feudal knighthood with its mores and ideals is the fundamental purpose of the courtly romance” Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask, Princeton UP, 1968) 131. [original German text written in Istanbul between May 1942 and April 1945].

“It has been suggested that romance is an evasion of history (and thus perhaps attractive to a people trying to evade the recent past).  But I am more persuaded by arguments that find in it the head-on encounter with very real, pressing historical forces and the contradictions inherent in them as they came to be experienced by writers.  Romance, an exploration of anxiety imported from the shadows of European culture, made possible the sometimes safe and other times risky embrace of quite specific, understandably human, fears...” Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.  Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1992, page 36.  Cited in Geraldine Heng, “Cannibalism, the First Crusade, and the Genesis of Medieval Romance,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 10.1 (1998): 98-174.