350:620

Index # - 75061

Distribution Requirement:  A1

Tuesday – 1:10 p.m.

Alexander Library – McDonnell Room

Larry Scanlon

Seminar:  Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales”

Geoffrey Chaucer is the oldest poet in the Anglophone tradition to be read continuously from his own time to the present. Considered the "father of English poetry" from the time of Dryden forward, in most respects he is the epitome of the canonical author as modern literary studies has construed this category.  This seminar will concentrate on his most canonical work, the Canterbury Tales, the subject of some of the most searching and provocative scholarship in Medieval Studies in the past two decades.  We will treat the poem exhaustively, from both traditional and more innovative perspectives: its textual history; its social and intellectual contexts; its critical history; its sources and intertexts; and feminist, queer, post-colonial, and other sociopolitical readings.  We will also use the vitality of recent debates to investigate the nature, effect, and durability of canonical authority.  Requirements will include an annotated bibliography and one long (20-25 pp.) paper.

Reading:

Benson, et al., The Riverside Chaucer.

Roland Barthes, "Death of the Author"

Michel Foucault, "What is an Author?"

John Guillory, Cultural Capital

Christopher Kuipers, The Canon

Glenn Burger, Chaucer's Queer Nation

Susan Crane, Gender and Genre in the "Canterbury Tales"

Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer' s Sexual Poetics

L.O. Aranye Fradenburg, Sacrifice Your Love

Mark Miller, Philosophical Chaucer

Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History

Susan Phillips,  Transforming Talk: The Problem with Gossip in Late Medieval England

David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity