ENGLISH 330: Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, and Works by Other Medieval Poets
Geoffrey Chaucer (?1340-1400) performing for a courtly audience (Cambridge Corpus Christi MS 61)
Spring 2009: Mondays,
9:30-12:00
Instructor: Arnie Sanders
Department of English,
Goucher College (Page last updated
11/17/2009 09:49:51 AM)
Recent site news: 8/16/09--The site is currently inactive until 2011 when the seminar is next scheduled to be offered.
Other images: Medieval Music in MSS; Glossa ordinaria (Justinian's legal code); Midrash Shoher Tov on Psalms; Annunciation MS illumination (Met. NYC)
To help you continue to teach yourself to read Middle English aloud, check out this web page on Modern and Middle English open vowel sounds. It gives you the pronouns (I, you, he/she/we, they) as examples of how to sound the open vowels which went through the Great Vowel Shift (ca. 1400-1500): It also includes two priceless diagrams illustrating where you would sound the Modern English and Middle English open vowels. Copyright is strictly enforced!
Click here for the Tale Presentation Schedule. Before the second seminar meeting (2/9), each of you should have signed up for one presentation before Spring Break and one presentation after Spring Break. If you need help picking a tale, I would be happy to provide guidance about content, genre, degree of difficulty, etc. Feel free to trade presentation topics with each other to make your schedules easier or to pursue a personal interest. Just tell me when you do so. For a guide to what I am looking for in tale presentations, click here.
Click here for Middle English training for English 330. Click here for my own "hard word" glossary for Middle English words which typically pose problems for Modern English speakers. Click here for a discussion of the "three estates," the way medieval Anglo-European culture understood its social organization (by birth and occupation vs. "the three classes," by wealth).
Unlike previous years' Chaucer seminars, Spring 2009's syllabus will compare individual Canterbury Tales with other poets' attempts to write in the same genres to determine stylistically "what makes Chaucer Chaucer." Go to this syllabus for the 2007 seminar if you are seeking the syllabus of previous Chaucer seminars, in which we read the tales in a manuscript order and interpreted them "dramatically" as told by their pilgrim tellers rather than by Chaucer. In the 2009 syllabus, to support a departmental initiative, we will alter the order of the readings and omit several tales in order to make room for reading other medieval authors' works. If comparative analysis of authors' works is foreign territory to you, help is available at this web page describing how style and content an be analyzed in poems of the same genre to enable comparisons that will produce scholarly insights about their authors' abilities and values.
A useful background resource for the non-dramatic reading of the poems will be C. David Benson's Chaucer's Drama of Style (Chapel Hill: U North Carolina P, 1986). Benson argues against the dramatic reading of the tales, which attempts to identify the pilgrims assigned to each tale as the "author" of that tale, and points out that a number of the tales are strikingly difficult to reconcile with the character of the pilgrims assigned to them as they are represented in the General Prologue and in tale prologues and epilogues. We do not have to abandon completely considerations of the dramatic reading, especially in cases like the Knight's, Wife of Bath's and Pardoner's tales, which richly reward a little thought about how they might reveal the characters' of their tellers. Nevertheless, comparing Chaucer's handling of the tales as experiments in genre will help us remember that, ultimately, Chaucer is their author, whatever that may mean to medieval readers. Moreover, it will help us become familiar with a wide range of other medieval authors whose works "represent" Middle English literature in their own ways. Consider the distorted reading of our era's American literature which would be produced by an English class in 2609 if they read only the books by a single author, perhaps even one who won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, but ignored everything else!
Annotated Bibliographies: For the basic requirements, click here. For more advice about selecting articles and preparing annotated bibliography entries, click here. To read bibliographic notes from the previous seminars' students, click here. It is permissible to re-annotate an article someone else already has done, but your annotation must remain your own. Consider re-doing annotations that seem deficient in one or more areas to improve upon them.
Seminar Description
The seminar will read Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in Middle English, and we will read other medieval authors' attempts to work in the same genre Chaucer was working in. Our purpose is to compare his artistic style with the styles of other medieval authors' in order to figure out what made Renaissance and later readers consider Chaucer a "father of English literature." And we will have more fun doing what we're doing than any other seminar at Goucher College because we are headed for another world where we can read the "naughty bits" without the FCC's prohibition on profanity.
since 2/5/07 reset.
