Studies in Medieval Literature (422-0-20)
Topic
Chaucer
Instructors
Susan E Phillips
Meeting Info
University Hall 418: Tues 2:00PM - 4:50PM
Overview of class
From the fifteenth-century glossators to twenty-first century critics, readers of the Canterbury Tales have sought to interpret and contain Chaucer's constantly shifting, experimental poem. The text poses numerous interpretative puzzles—the myriad objects of the poem's irony, the cultural politics of its author, the "identities" of its characters, and the demographics and ideologies of its intended audiences, to name a few—puzzles that have been "solved" in strikingly different ways at different historical moments. This course takes as its subject the Canterbury Tales and its reception history, exploring of both the poem's multiple interpretative contexts and the hermeneutic conundrums it poses to them. As we read the Tales, we will consider the narratives (and narrative conventions) that Chaucer translates and transforms and the contemporary voices with whom he is in dialogue—both in the fourteenth century and the twenty-first. We will investigate the ways in which the tales circulated both individually and as a collection (which tales were the most popular? how and by whom were they published? with which other texts did they travel?) and analyze the various paratexts that accompanied them (glosses, prologues, illustrations, and "spurious" links and tales). Alongside this early publication context, we will explore current conversations in Chaucer criticism and the scholarly history and contemporary publics debates to which it responds. Analyzing the Tales through a wide array of methodological lenses, we will use Chaucer's experimental poem as methodological and interpretative testing ground, placing its multivalent narratives in dialogue with feminist and queer theory, critical race studies, disability studies, animal studies, and the Global Middle Ages, in addition to new and old materialities and historicisms. Seminar members are encouraged to treat the course as an interpretative lab, bringing their own methodological interests and questions to bear on the Tales in both seminar discussion and their final projects.