Course No: 350:611
Index #: 17960
Distribution Requirement: A1
Mondays - 2:00 PM
MU 207
Reading Chaucer Now
Scanlon, Larry
Geoffrey Chaucer was the first English poet to be read and edited continuously from his own time to the present. The Canterbury Tales was the most widely distributed vernacular poem in later medieval Britain, and that by a wide margin. With the likely exception of Paradise Lost, it is arguably the single most influential poem in the entire Anglophone tradition.
This course constitutes a reworking of the traditional Chaucer seminar—one of a handful of single-author seminars that long formed the backbone of the graduate curriculum. Its recent disappearance reflects a number of factors, some of them scholarly, some of them institutional. Chief among the scholarly factors: Chaucer has become a slightly less dominant presence in Middle English studies in the past two decades, as the field, like most period-fields in literary studies, has undergone a substantial expansion of its canon. Nevertheless, Chaucer still attracts the largest plurality of scholarly attention in the field. Remarkably, this slight scholarly waning has roughly coincided with notable upsurge of interest in Chaucer and the Canterbury Tales in contemporary culture at large among both contemporary writers and filmmakers. That includes writers and filmmakers of color. I have redesigned the conventional Chaucer seminar to accommodate both of these shifts.
As a traditional seminar would, this seminar will cover the basics of the Canterbury collection’s textual history and social and intellectual context as well recent trends in its scholarly reception. These include ecocriticism, cosmopolitanism, the New Formalism, affect studies, studies in medievalism, and in visual culture, as well as more established but still influential approaches such as critical historicism, feminism, queer theory, and psychoanalysis. However, instead of examining the entire collection, we will concentrate on eight of the most canonical tales: the General Prologue, Knight’s Tale, Miller’s Tale, Man of Law’s Tale, Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, Clerk’s Tale, Pardoner’s Tale, and Nun’s Priest’s Tale. These will be supplemented with two to four tales that attracted less interest from modern scholars. Four weeks will be devoted entirely to modern and contemporary works: Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods along with its 1948 precursor, John Huston’s Treasure of the Sierra Madre; Gloria Naylor’s Bailey’s Café; Graham Swift’s Last Orders; and William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (on the grounds that Swift reads the Canterbury Tales through Faulkner’s novel). Shorter works—Zadie Smith’s The Wife of Willesden, Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls and selections from Patience Agbabi’s Telling Tales—will be read along with the particular tale they draw upon.
Requirements: 15-20 pp. paper and two presentations.
Reading List
Poetry:
Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales (ed. Benson).
Patience Agbabi, Telling Tales (selections).
Drama:
Caryl Churchill, Top Girls.
Zadie Smith, The Wife of Willesden.
Novels:
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying.
Gloria Naylor, Bailey’s Café.
Graham Swift, Last Orders.
Film:
John Huston, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
Spike Lee, Da 5 Bloods.