Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Advanced study of specific aspects of Medieval literature. May be defined by author, genre, or critical approach. Reserved for English honors, major, joint major and minor students. Students with credit for ENGL 404 may not take this course for further credit. Writing.

COURSE DETAILS:

The Canterbury Tales and Its Afterlives

Geoffrey Chaucer needed an extension. His final work, The Canterbury Tales, was supposed to consist of 120 stories told by 30 pilgrims on a round trip from Southwark to Canterbury; Chaucer managed only 24 stories before his death, and while his pilgrims are able to see Canterbury on the horizon just before the collection ends, they never make their way back to the Tabard Inn to complete their journey. It’s possible, of course, that this ragged state is what Chaucer intended all along (one critic has declared the work “unfinished but complete”); whatever he had in mind, however, later writers, both medieval and modern, have taken the unfinished state of The Canterbury Tales as an open invitation, working to complete, revise, sanitize, scandalize, and otherwise re-voice Chaucer’s enigmatic collection and its oddball characters.

This course will consist of three sections. First, we will focus on Chaucer’s poem itself, attending to a cross-section of its tales and to the historical, ideological, and literary contexts that shaped them. Second, we will consider the Tales’ reception in the decades following its author’s death, especially the additions and revisions of fifteenth-century writers eager to position themselves in relation to “maistir Chaucer, flour of eloquence.” Finally, we will jump to the twenty-first century and consider several new responses to the Canterbury Tales: a hip-hop inflected “remix” by a British performance-poet of Nigerian descent; a collection of meditations on the ongoing refugee crisis framed as a Chaucerian cycle; and a young adult novel that reimagines the Canterbury pilgrimage as a high school field trip to Washington D.C.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

Of studie tak ye moost cure and most heede.
Noght o word spak ye moore than ys neede,
And that is seyd in forme and reverence,
And short and quyk and ful of hy sentence;
Sownynge in moral vertu ys your speche,
And gladly wolde ye lerne and gladly teche.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING: