Epics
Introduction to Epic and Adventure
Because our intent is to teach early world literature away from standards that prioritize a western perspective, we intentionally move away from models that divide the materials historically or by regions.
Periodization, or the standard timeline that academia uses to divide time, centers European texts and events. Because the standard academic periodization is a western-inspired timeline, it inevitably led historians to create “a tidy narrative of progress and human ingenuity” that argues that Europe ushered in modernity. This narrative culminated in the argument known as “the rise of the West.” This narrative is just not true and even its first proponent has admitted that he was wrong. In other words, when we organize the class materials through this type of timeline, we are inherently arguing that the west created modernity.
Similarly, a division that separates the materials by regions also results in creating the narrative that western civilization is the cradle of modern culture. This framework often seems to argue that great civilizations begun in the “East” but they now exist in the “West.” The paradigm maintains, falsely, a sense of movement in which history, literature, philosophy, and power move from the southeast to the northwest. These models imply that modern civilization “happens” in the West because it was always meant to transpire in this way. They maintain and amplify ideologies of colonization such as manifest destiny.
Why begin with Epic and Adventure?
We want to teach early world literature differently by prioritizing a model that concentrates on communities. We do this through our restorative justice model which led us to divide the material by themes. We begin with epic and adventure because it allows us to delve into our restorative justice model in several ways. First, we explore restorative justice as a tool of analysis. Second, we ask why these texts were important for the communities that created the texts and why do they continue to be important to us as readers. Gilgamesh, for example, deals with loss and fear of death which are often themes we care about (and early world literature texts books often mention). For many students, however, the queer relationship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu is very powerful. In addition, restorative justice shows us that if all powerful Gilgamesh can make mistakes and feel suffering, then maybe it’s ok if we do too.
Defining Epic and Adventure
What is an Epic? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, an epic is defined as “A poem, typically derived from ancient oral tradition, which celebrates in the form of a continuous narrative the achievements of one or more heroic characters of history or legend.”[1] Epic is about a lot more than what this definition tells us, but what we want to focus on in this module is on texts with a narrative, a story mediated through a storyteller, that concentrate on heroes, and that help define an aspect of a culture or identity. These narratives often began as oral stories and as time went on, they were written down and have withstood the test of time. Now, not all stories that fit this definition are epics and not all epics fulfill all aspects of the definition of an epic. And this is why we have added adventure to the title of this section, as shorthand so that we can be as expansive as possible and include as many of the kinds of texts we want to teach.
In this section we want to include stories of all kinds, long stories, short stories, well-known stories, little-known stories, and stories that we love to learn and teach about within the context of early world literature. And we want to do this by focusing on restorative justice as a method of analysis.
Restorative Justice as a Tool for Narrative Literature
When we use Restorative Justice to analyze literature, we focus on the community aspects of the texts by keeping in mind why did the communities tell their stories, often for hundreds of years, and then decide to write them down. What is it about these stories that made them so important to the people that preserved them? We can also ask why do school administrators, teachers, and university instructors continue to add these stories to their curriculum and syllabus? Finally, we can ask what is it about these stories that continue to inspire us as readers in the present? The answers to these questions can change drastically, but what these questions help us think about is who are the communities that rally around these texts.
Another way to use restorative justice is by analyzing the narrative through a restorative justice framework. So, how does restorative justice work in OUR literature classroom? Let’s go back to our definition of Restorative Justice (RJ).
RJ looks to repair harm caused by “our” actions. Sometimes harm is not measurable. Harm can be physical, but it can often be emotional. Relationships and communities are also harmed, not just individuals. Restorative Justice seeks to include all the people that have been harmed in finding solutions. It holds offenders accountable and encourages them to take responsibility for their actions.
Restorative justice does not ask who did what or who deserves punishment? Instead, RJ concentrates on what happened and what actions the characters and the community have taken, and how do these actions help the characters (and the readers) repair harm. Therefore, we concentrate on the following questions:
- Who has been hurt?
- What are their needs?
- Whose obligations are these?
- What are the causes?
- Who has a stake in the situation?
- What is the appropriate process to involve stakeholders in an effort to address causes and put things right?
The answers to these questions are not always straightforward nor easy but we have found that students’ immense creativity will help them answer them well. By using RJ to frame our course we also move away from the prevalent mode of teaching these texts through Joseph Campbell’s monomyth which follows the hero’s journey. The monomyth frames our ancient stories by prioritizing an individualistic image of the protagonist; One hero, one journey. This framework eliminates the role of the community in telling, participating in, and creating the stories. We will delve deeper into these topics in the next section.
We use RJ to analyze the narrative, but we also use RJ to understand the life of the texts themselves. How did the texts end up part of our early world literature classroom? Let us use Gilgamesh as our primary example. The story of Gilgamesh is written on clay tablets written in cuneiform. The oldest known tablet to contain the Sumerian Gilgamesh poem dates from 2100 BCE (over 4 thousand years old). These are precious artifacts from civilizations that lived thousands of years ago in present-day southern Iraq. Nevertheless, Cuneiform tablets are available in many museums around the world, the University of New Mexico has cuneiform tablets at the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology for example, and British museums and universities contain a great majority of these tablets.
RJ prompts us to ask why these tablets are held in museums, mostly museums in Europe, Canada, and the United States? What historical processes made it so that these tablets were moved so far away from their original homes? The answers to these questions are complicated, but the short answer is imperial ambitions and colonization. Cuneiform is one of our most ancient forms of writing and represents human ingenuity and creativity, whoever controls access to these tablets, controls who gets to create new knowledge about these tablets. This type of colonial story has been experienced in many parts of the world. Many Pueblo artifacts are housed at museums in Washington DC and New York even though the Pueblo continue to live in their ancestral lands in New Mexico. RJ asks us to sit with these realities and the toll we continue to pay as well as the ways we contribute to these historical realities.
Epic and Adventure introduces us to many early world literature texts from the well-known Gilgamesh (Iraq, 2100 BCE) to the little known The Turke and Sir Gawain (Isle of Man, Sixteenth Century). Each chapter provides an introduction and links to the texts as well as instructions on assignments and further readings. Our aim in this section is to learn about early world narratives through a community approach that brings dignity to the history of the texts, to the communities that created the texts, and to our own communities as modern readers.
FURTHER READINGS:
For more information on epic, see:
- https://www.oed.com/dictionary/epic_n# ↵
