Medieval Literature Research Articles

Die Kunst der Intrige: Studien zur höfischen Epik des 12. Jahrhunderts

Die Kunst der Intrige: Studien zur höfischen Epik des 12. Jahrhunderts

Diebstahl und Raub in den Isländersagas: Einfallstore in die norröne Erzähl- und Vorstellungswelt

Diebstahl und Raub in den Isländersagas: Einfallstore in die norröne Erzähl- und Vorstellungswelt

Heinrich Wittenwilers ›Ring‹ als Krisenexperiment: Erwartung und Störung didaktischer Kommunikation

Heinrich Wittenwilers ›Ring‹ als Krisenexperiment: Erwartung und Störung didaktischer Kommunikation

A Companion to Chivalry

A Companion to Chivalry

Liberality as a Fiscal Problem in Medieval and Renaissance Thought: A Genealogy from Aristotle's Tyrant to Machiavelli's Prince.

This article explores the legacy of Aristotle's advice for the preservation of tyrannies found in Politics Book 5, Chapter 11 on the formation of medieval and Renaissance fiscal literature. The tyrant's economic techniques for preserving his regime established commonplaces of fiscal governance in the medieval commentary and mirrors-for-princes tradition. Authors' engagement with the legacy of this passage led to controversial treatments of a ruler's disposition toward the moral virtue of liberality. Machiavelli's intervention over the danger of liberality to the fiscal governance of the state needs to be placed in this longer context.

Play time. Gender, anti-semitism and temporality in medieval biblical drama. By Daisy Black. (Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture.) Pp. xii + 234 incl. 5 figs. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020. £80. 978 1 5261 4686 1

Play time. Gender, anti-semitism and temporality in medieval biblical drama. By Daisy Black. (Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture.) Pp. xii + 234 incl. 5 figs. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020. £80. 978 1 5261 4686 1 - Volume 73 Issue 3

Ideas about fate and predestination in the culture of the Turkic peoples: folklore and literary context

The article analyzes the motive of «fate» taking into account its linguocultural specificity, reveals the components of the motive of fate in the Tatar traditional culture. The mythological roots of the folk idea of fate are revealed, the ethno-cultural contexts that influenced its formation are considered. The purpose of the study is to study the mental essence of the motive of fate in its projection in Tatar literature, folklore and traditional culture. In the ideas of the Tatar people about fate, mythological, pagan and Muslim values and traditions are intertwined. The image of the deity of Fate-« Ala atiyɣ jol tӓnri mӓn» is recorded in one of the early runic manuscripts of the ancient Turks «Yryk bitig» (VIIIIX or IX-X centuries). The earliest examples of folklore about fate are presented in the dictionary of Mahmud al-Kashgari «Divan lugat at-Turk» (XI century], the motif of fate is reflected in the Turkic literary monuments: «Kutadgu Bilig» («Blessed Knowledge») by Yusuf Balasaguni (XI century BC), in the medieval Tatar literature «Kyssa-i Yusuf» («The Legend of Yusuf») by Kul Gali (XIII century), «Tukhfai Mardan» («Gift to young men») by Muhammedyar (XVI century], etc. Yazmysh is the future, which is written by the Almighty to each person before birth, in folklore it is revealed as inevitability, predestination. The word «yazmysh» is derived from the word «yaz» (to write). In the poem «Tuhfai Mardan» by Muhammedyar, the image of scribes «betkuchelar» is created, who write down the predestinations of the Almighty. The main categories in the mental behavior of the Tatar people are «fate» («yazmysh», «kadar», «tәkdir», «өlesh», «yazu», «kүrәchak», «nasyp»), «patience» («sabyr»), «noble behavior» («adep»). The motive of fate, both in folklore and in ancient and medieval literature, is revealed in several aspects: the predestination of fate and the impotence of a person in front of it, and at the same time the desire to know and change fate with the help of various rituals and ceremonies.

Teaching Medieval Literature and Culture in Contemporary Universities Challenges and Opportunities from Past to Present. Exemplary Case Studies of the Roman de Silence and Mauritius von Craûn

In face of an ever-changing academic framework, all scholars working with pre-modern literature, art history, philosophy, are currently deeply challenged to explain and justify their fields of investigation. More and more foreign and language departments in the United States decide to cut out the Middle Ages and the early modern period as irrelevant to their teaching and research portfolio. Nevertheless, medieval research continues strongly, as the wealth of relevant publications indicates, coupled with energetic conferences, symposia, and other activities. But there are hardly any academic job opportunities, which make it harder and harder to convince graduate students to pursue a degree in medieval literature, for instance. The present study does not promise to offer a panacea against this general malaise, but will indicate, through the close reading of two literary examples, the enormous potentialities of this primary material to attract students and to provide meaningful, relevant, and perhaps even transformative seminars on the undergraduate and graduate level.

Once a physicist …

I appreciated Charles Day’s introduction to Physics Today’s most recent careers issue (October 2021, page 8). I am always delighted to see attention drawn to the wide range of satisfying careers that can be entered with a physics degree.The “Spotlight on Hidden Physicists” series in Sigma Pi Sigma’s Radiations magazine is very special to me as a matter of inclusion and personal perspective. I vividly recall reading letters in Physics Today around the time of the cancellation of the Superconducting Super Collider in 1993. Much was made of how the cancellation was (or wasn’t) the demise of US physics and how difficult it was for new PhD physicists to find proper jobs at the time. Industrial and other “hidden” physics jobs were not given much respect, and I don’t recall many letters that discussed the struggles of those with bachelor’s degrees in physics during that time.A few years later, I had the privilege of being elected to the National Council for the Society of Physics Students and Sigma Pi Sigma. Under the leadership of Gary White, the director from 2001 to 2012, I participated in developing the broad outline of the Hidden Physicists program. One of our goals was to combat the prevalent misconception that the only thing a physics degree was useful for was a career in academic or government research.That attitude is a great insult to the majority of physics degree holders, because only a relative few wind up in the business of publishing physics articles. Every year the country produces many more students with bachelor’s degrees in physics than with PhDs. For example, data from the 2019–20 academic year show that 9296 students received bachelor’s degrees in physics, while 1830 earned PhDs in the subject.11. S. Nicholson, P. J. Mulvey, Roster of Physics Departments with Enrollment and Degree Data, 2020: Results from the 2020 Survey of Enrollments and Degrees, AIP Statistical Research Center (September 2021). For the classes of 2019 and 2020, only about a third of physics bachelors pursued graduate degrees in physics or astronomy, and not all PhD graduates in those years ended up in “publish or perish” jobs.22. AIP Statistical Research Center, Initial Employment—Physics Bachelors and PhDs: Classes of 2019 and 2020 (March 2022).I espouse the view that completing any degree in physics alters a person’s worldview and influences them for the rest of their life, whether they wind up with a PhD in physics or a PhD in medieval literature (a path one of my students followed).Yes, it is a viewpoint akin to that of Aslan’s in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis: “Once a king or queen in Narnia, always a king or queen.” I concede that not everyone will be so inclusive. I strongly contend that someone who regularly uses their physics background is still a physicist, even if they are not publishing physics papers. That includes someone like the editor-in-chief of Physics Today, who must rely on a strong background in physics to be effective. So Charles, I recognize you as a physicist, and in your role at Physics Today, you were perhaps the most visible “hidden” physicist that I could imagine!ReferencesSection:ChooseTop of pageReferences <<1. S. Nicholson, P. J. Mulvey, Roster of Physics Departments with Enrollment and Degree Data, 2020: Results from the 2020 Survey of Enrollments and Degrees, AIP Statistical Research Center (September 2021). Google Scholar2. AIP Statistical Research Center, Initial Employment—Physics Bachelors and PhDs: Classes of 2019 and 2020 (March 2022). Google Scholar© 2022 American Institute of Physics.

Historical Anecdotes About Dimitry of Rostov: Biographical Legends and Hagiography

The article offers an analysis of historical anecdotes, or biographical legends, dedicated to St. Dimitry of Rostov. These texts were discovered in the collection No. 828 in the Rostov Museum. Like most historical legends about outstanding personalities of the 18th century, they differ significantly from modern folklore and literary anecdotes. However, they do possess the features characteristic of the term anecdote as a moralizing unfamiliar story about an amazing act, often with an unexpected ending. A claim to historicity and a connection with historiography were their hallmark. Most of the biographical legends about Dimitry of Rostov, both in the collection No. 828 in the Rostov Museum, and in the Life of St. Dimitry, certainly fit into the historical and cultural context. However, they have another genre-related characteristic: they were not only a part of hagiographic texts (as the first of Dimitry’s biographies), but have also transformed into another genre, becoming a narrative about the miraculous, with parallels in Medieval literature.

The Gift of Narrative in Medieval England by Nicholas Perkins

Reviewed by: The Gift of Narrative in Medieval England by Nicholas Perkins Walter Wadiak nicholas perkins, The Gift of Narrative in Medieval England. Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture Vol. 39. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021. Pp. xi, 270. isbn: 978-1526139917. $120. While medieval English romances have inspired readings in terms of 'the gift' since at least the early 90s, Perkins ambitiously reads the entire genre as structured around an ideal of generous exchange. In this remarkable study, the gift figures as nothing less than the founding gesture of romance and the impulse that drives these stories forward, in the process drawing readers themselves into the cycle of generosity and giving rise to responses in the form of new texts. Perkins concedes near the outset that such an approach might seem 'dreamily optimistic' (p. 31), yet the book feels bracing and even revelatory in its insistence that we attend to the ethical work of a genre that has often been dismissed as mere ideology. Chapter One reads a group of early romances (about a figure called Horn) as enacting the delay that makes the gift as opposed to the commodity. In romance, Perkins observes, it is often 'in the very delay or frustration of the return, in the gift's continuing journey, that narrative suspense and pleasure … is contained' (p. 44). The argument here is structuralist in its emphasis on the larger narrative picture, but Perkins adroitly zooms in to focus on, for instance, how the Romance of Horn plays on the idea of Horn as both a found object on the beach (le truvé el graver) as well as an inscribed or graven textual object, with a plausible pun on truver as poetic making (p. 33). Chapter Two extends the argument to the romances housed in the celebrated Auchinleck manuscript, though the links here are somewhat looser and more thematic, as Perkins admits. The last half of the chapter explores Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as a story in which, as Perkins reminds us, 'the forme to the fynisment foldes ful selden', and in doing so he challenges what he sees as overly determined readings of the poem's many gifts and games. Perkins' writing here and elsewhere is frequently delightful, as when he describes Gawain, setting out for what he thinks will be his doom all trussed up in his sumptuous armor, as 'gift-wrapped for delivery' (p. 98). Those buoyant touches suit an argument that registers awareness of the darker possibilities lurking in romance but ultimately invites us to read the genre in recuperative terms. Chapters Four and Five, dealing with Chaucerian texts, feel a bit less fresh, but here, too, there is nuanced interpretation, as when Perkins remarks upon the limits [End Page 110] of our knowledge about the small keepsakes that Troilus and Criseyde exchange (as opposed to the public and ostentatious gifts—e.g., that heart-shaped brooch!—that tend to draw readers' attention). The notion of 'distributed agency,' first introduced in Chapter Four, helps Perkins to complicate the boundary between person and object in ways that bear upon gender-focused readings of, for instance, Chaucer's Knight's Tale, while Chapter Five outlines an intriguing notion of performative speech-acts as gifts, a return with interest on previous uses of this kind of 'citational' language. Since this is a book about how narrative returns with interest in subsequent retellings, both within and between texts, it makes sense that the final chapter, on Lydgate's Troy Book, is the richest in both close reading and theoretical heft. Hector's 'cyborg corpse' (p. 212), preserved by King Priam (via a weirdly intricate system of gold tubes) in a bid to raise the morale of the Trojans, becomes in Perkins' incisive reading an 'aureate body' (p. 228) that speaks both to the elaborate quality of Lydgate's own writing and to the blurred lines between people and things in Lydgate's narrative (this blurring being, as Perkins reminds us, a hallmark of the gift). That troubling of the boundaries between the human and the non-human is central to Perkins' effort to imagine what he calls a 'speculative anthropology,' one that might allow us to...

The First Riverside Chaucer

ABSTRACT This article highlights the accomplishments of a nineteenth-century American editor of Chaucer’s works, Arthur Gilman. It describes the nature of those accomplishments and situates them in respect to the Chaucer editorial activity of the time and to Gilman’s background. When Gilman’s Chaucer edition appeared in 1879, it was unprecedented in several ways, and for fifteen years it was the best mostly complete Chaucer ever produced. In particular, the edition, the first newly edited collection of Chaucer’s verse published by an American press, was also the first to make use of the outpouring of Chaucer Society materials that had appeared in the ten years leading up to it, resulting in an edition with a sounder text and more coherent, up-to-date introductory apparatus than any other available at the time. This achievement was all the more impressive given that the man who managed it was a largely self-taught student of medieval literature.

Turkish History on the Early Stuart Stage

This article explores the role of the strange and spectacular in early modern dramatic (re)presentations of the Islamic world by discussing two sixteenth-century tragedies by Thomas Goffe that engage with Turkish dynastic history. No longer employing the fantastical elements used in medieval literature to mark the East as a spectacular space, Goffe presents a vision of Turkish otherness based on a new (mundane) notion of strangeness that relies on the staging of ‘unnaturally’ excessive behaviour and strangely hyperbolic passions. This strategy emphasises the supposed antagonistic alterity of the Muslim other. However, it also (inadvertently) undermines conventional Ottoman stereotypes by offering points of (emotional) contact and recognition between the audience and the Turkish characters on stage.

The Face and Faciality in Medieval French Literature, 1170–1390. By Alice Hazard

This book is a challenging and inventive study of the face and faciality in medieval French literature. Alice Hazard’s core project is to rethink faciality, defined here as ‘the quality of being a face’ (p. 202), in a way that destabilizes and uncouples this concept from its associations and apparent affinities with the physiological face. Hazard also challenges the traditional view that the human face in medieval literature might offer any kind of reliable guide to individual subjectivity or interiority. She is more interested in the philosophy of faciality and the shifting planes and patterns of perception in medieval literature — its ‘engagement with the productive illusion of interiority’ (p. 146) — than, for example, the face as the site of gesture, physiognomic character, the expression of emotion, or the marker of ethnic or racial difference. The book’s conclusion makes it clear that, for Hazard, the face is not a text to be deciphered; but, in its mutability and instability, it is a ‘literary motif, a cultural model and a philosophical construct’ (p. 206). Four core chapters consider the face in Arthurian romance, in ‘doodles’ in the decorated margins of manuscripts (p. 82), in the opening scenes of Le Roman de la Rose, and in selected fabliaux. All four chapters explore the inherent and productive instability of faciality. Hazard draws her theoretical inspiration variously from Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Lacan, Silvan S. Tomkins, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Judith Butler, and others, while also engaging with recent scholarship and criticism on medieval French literature. Most of her primary texts and her theoretical approaches are oriented towards secular literature. This means that her reading of Levinas, for example, is somewhat selective, as she interprets his conception of otherness through the face primarily as a relationship with another subject, not with the divine. Throughout this book, Hazard consistently steers us away from the face as a stable sign that might be confined to or co-extensive with the physiological features on the front of our heads. For instance, her reading of the armed and helmeted combatants in Old French romances leads to a very subtle argument about the dispersal of faciality onto ‘codified facial surfaces’ such as the knight’s helmet and shield which both constitute the ‘facing surface’ of the knight and therefore, his face (pp. 148, 207). The chapter on Le Roman de la Rose uses Deleuze and Guattari to read the wall around the garden of Deduit as an example of faciality, while the discussion of the relationship between faces and genitalia in the fabliaux affirms how little one needs, in the surreal and improbable world of these stories, to make a face (p. 176). This book reads like a PhD that has been adapted — not entirely successfully — for publication as a monograph. It is somewhat weighed down by the burden of its theoretical material, and its prose is careful and dutiful rather than elegant or lively; nevertheless, it is a strikingly original book that makes a powerful intervention into contemporary theories of the face and faciality.

Beefy Outlaws: Beef Consumption in Water Margin and Its Song-Yuan Antecedents

Abstract When it comes to the favorite food of the outlaws of Mount Liang, beef is the undisputed champion. The 120-chapter edition of Water Margin has nearly 50 scenes that depict the heroes feasting heartily on beef. The next most frequently evoked type of meat is mutton, but the number of times it is mentioned is only half that of beef and the relevant scenes are depicted with far less detail. Because cattle slaughter and the sale of beef were strictly forbidden during the Song dynasty, an expanding community of researchers considers this choice of food as a subtle reflection of the bandits’ defiance of law and order. However, this school of thought has yet to sufficiently take into account several elements, including the extent to which this law was enforced during the Song dynasty, when the adventures of Song Jiang and his sworn brothers took place; society’s attitude toward beef consumption during this same period; the compilation of the novel in the Ming dynasty and the author’s awareness of historical facts; and the limited presence of beef in the Song-Yuan antecedents of the novel. Taking these points into consideration, this article reexamines the motif of beef consumption in Water Margin and the development of this theme through a historical lens. To do so, it first focuses on the legal issues pertaining to cattle slaughter and the sale of beef during the Song dynasty. Particular attention is paid to the enforcement of relevant laws and the circulation and popularity of black-market beef during this period. Then, it highlights the discrepancies between the way in which beef consumption is presented in the Ming novel and historical facts, followed by a discussion of the portrayal of meat consumption in Yuan dramas featuring Song Jiang and his gang of outlaws. In the end, by thoroughly considering the presentation of food in the developmental history of Water Margin, from Yuan dramas to the Ming novel, this article sheds light on the importance of this subject as a literary motif in medieval Chinese literature.

CẢNH QUAN VÀ CON NGƯỜI MIỀN NÚI TRONG TRUYỆN ĐƯỜNG RỪNG CỦA LAN KHAI TỪ GÓC NHÌN PHÊ BÌNH SINH THÁI

Lan Khai's forest fiction is especially loved by contemporary readers, not only because of the “exotic flavor” but also because of the writer's new and unique perspective on the landscape and people of the mountainous region. The ideal view of the unity relationship between man and nature in medieval literature or the illusion of harmony and unity between man and nature in romantic literature were all eroded in his work. This study shows that mountainous people and nature in Lan Khai's forest fiction no longer carry the polarization between “center” and “margin”, “civilized” and “barbarian” as in medieval literature and travelogues in Nam Phong Journal.

Маркеры этничности в песнях бурят о Чингис-хане

Introduction. The article analyzes legends and songs about Genghis Khan recorded in expeditions across Buryatia, Mongolia and China — to further compare them with related archival and published materials. Goals. The work aims at identifying distinctive features inherent to folklore texts dealing with Genghis Khan in different linguistic and ethnic environments. The issue of revival of ethnic consciousness actualizes insights into ethnic culture and its peculiarities. Methods. The paper is first to consider local versions of Buryat songs about Genghis Khan in a comparative aspect. Semantic contextual analysis proves instrumental in revealing ethnic markers. Results. The article discusses songs about Genghis Khan of both local and general Mongol significance. Songs about kinship with Genghis Khan and the ancestral homeland of Buryats — Nayan Nava — have a local and specifically tribal meaning being connected to the history of the Khori Buryats proper. Songs with a motif of chase contain parallels with plots of all-Mongol toponymic legends. The song titled ‘Two Steeds of Bogdo’ (Bur. Bogdyn hoyor zagal) and known among the Mongolic peoples dates back to the Mongolian medieval literature — The Tale of Two Steeds of Genghis Khan. The songs are examined in comparison with legends and The Secret History of the Mongols. Conclusion. Contextual analysis of songs about Genghis Khan along with legends and The Secret History reveals a hidden deep layer in the semantics of texts. The songs of Russia and Mongolia’s Buryats identify ancient roots of the motif of kinship with Genghis Khan that date back to the historical homeland. The Shinehen Buryats of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (China) have shown a perfect preservation of authentic materials in an isolated environment, while Mongolia’s Buryats experienced a transformation and song borrowings in the close ethnic culture. The paper also concludes there are virtually no such songs about Genghis Khan among modern Buryats of Russia. In general, the comparative analysis of Buryat songs about the legendary warlord proves those had been created in their historical homeland of present-day Russia to be further preserved both in the alien (China) and kindred (Mongolia) ethnocultural environments.

John Fowles and Marie de France

In 1974, John Fowles creates a prose retelling of Marie de France’s medieval lai of Eliduc and includes it in his collection The Ebony Tower. The translation is prefaced with ‘A Personal Note,’ where Fowles reminisces about his student days in Oxford, where he was studying Old French, medieval literature and the lais of Marie de France. The article is concerned with identifying the reason for Fowles to choose this particular text for translation. To this end, the authors conduct a comparative analysis of the original and the translation. The alterations of the lai show that Fowles selected this text for his collection due to plot similarities with his own books. The article proceeds to explore the significance of bigamy, the core plot of the lai, for Fowles’ works. The scholars suggest that, via his translation, Fowles starts a simultaneous conversation with medieval literature and his own earlier output. The naivety and simplicity of Eliduc, rendered by Fowles with kind but undisguised irony, stand in stark contrast to overwrought and confusing postmodernist writings, and as such draw attention to the complexity and uncertainty of human life.

Cultural Memory and the Epic in Early Chinese Literature: The Case of Qu Yuan 屈原 and the Lisao 離騷

Abstract The present essay combines the theory of Cultural Memory with ideas about textual repertoires, composite text, and distributed authorship that in recent years have been advanced in studies of early and medieval Chinese literature. In its first part, the essay introduces in detail the historical development and key features of Cultural Memory theory. In its second part, it applies this theory to the study of Qu Yuan 屈原 and the Lisao 離騷, the greatest poem of early China. Through detailed philological analysis, the Lisao is described not as a single text by a single author but as a composite, authorless artifact that participates in a larger Qu Yuan discourse distributed across multiple texts in both prose and poetry. This distributed “Qu Yuan Epic” is an anthology of distinct characteristics attributed to the quasi-mythological Qu Yuan persona—a persona that itself emerges as a composite textual configuration into which are inscribed the nostalgic ideals and shifting aspirations of Han imperial literati. This Han social imaginaire recollects the noble exemplar of the old Chu aristocracy; the dual prophecy of the fall of Chu to Qin and of Qin's subsequent collapse; the religious, historical, mythological, and literary traditions of Chu; the embodied paradigm of the ruler-minister relationship; and the gradual formation of the ideal of authorship through the transformation of poetic hero into heroic poet.

Undergraduate Research and Information Literacy in the English Classroom

The previous special issue of Pedagogy, “Undergraduate Research as a Future of English Studies,” featured institutional and pedagogical strategies for helping undergraduate students make original intellectual and creative contributions to the fields of literary studies, writing studies, and linguistics. Authors in this special issue described large-scale, multi-institutional strategies for promoting undergraduate research, and they used traditional definitions of undergraduate research from the Council on Undergraduate Research: students are mentored by faculty or more experienced researchers, they use research methods widely accepted in their discipline, they make at least modest contributions to their discipline, and they circulate their work beyond a classroom audience (Hakim 1998: 190). These characteristics are part of what marks undergraduate research as a high-impact practice, and this cluster of articles highlights how the spirit of undergraduate research—original, primary, and secondary research that aims to answer meaningful, authentic questions in a discipline—invigorates individual courses.Undergraduate research offers students and institutions clear benefits around success and retention: students who participate have higher retention rates, grade point averages, and graduation rates (Bowman and Holmes 2018). It further promotes student learning as students make demonstrated gains in independent critical thinking, the ability to integrate theory and practice, and oral and written communication. The articles in this cluster highlight the ways in which course-based undergraduate research can also foster learning gains in information literacy, particularly the information literacy practices required in English studies. Information literacy is often associated with first-year writing courses, but these courses are simply the beginning. Information literacy should extend vertically through undergraduate majors, and it can be effectively paired with undergraduate research experiences.The authors in this cluster demonstrate how novel, course-based undergraduate research experiences can foster growth in information literacy. First, Angela Laflen and Moira Fitzgibbons, a composition professor and a medieval literature professor, describe how a multimodal, digital research project—the Graphic Narrative Database—gives students an authentic context in which to develop writing, literary analysis, and information literacy skills. Second, Laci Mattison and Rachel Tait-Ripperdan, a literature professor and an academic librarian, share their work in the digital archives with the Journals of Queen Victoria. By working with this archive, students deepened both their knowledge of Victorian culture and their primary research skills, including the skills needed to navigate an extensive digital archive. And finally, Michael Gutierrez and Sarah Singer argue for the value of primary and secondary research in the creative writing classroom, demonstrating how an autoethnography assignment is deepened with attention to information literacy. At Pedagogy, we hope this cluster provides readers with examples of innovative, course-based undergraduate research projects that can be adapted to multiple contexts and that promote information literacy in the undergraduate English curriculum.