ENGLISH 330: Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales
Geoffrey Chaucer (?1340-1400) performing for a courtly audience (Cambridge Corpus Christi MS 61)
Spring 2011: Tuesdays,
9:30-12:00
Instructor: Arnie Sanders
Department of English,
Goucher College (Page last updated
09/02/2011 01:28:12 PM)
Recent site news: 12/3/10--The site is currently inactive until 2013 when the seminar is next scheduled to be offered. If you are interested in taking the course, please email me for further information. This will help me estimate the class size.
Click here for the Tale Presentation Schedule. Before the second seminar meeting, 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).
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.
Please visit the Writing Center for assistance in developing and polishing all written assignments for English 330. At first, working in Middle English will pose additional, unfamiliar interpretive challenges that may push you out of your comfort zone for writing literary analysis. Later, as we see more of the great construction that the "Tales" create, you will have more to say than you are used to, and it will take time and conversation to figure out what would be best to say now.
English 330 students who will still be taking Goucher courses in Fall 2011 and who are interested in learning to work with rare books and manuscripts, should consider taking English 241 ("Archeology of Text"). It will teach you the other side of literary research, the physical examination of literary works in the forms in which they were read by their authors and first readers. 241 offers hands-on experience in both archival and rare-book research, and places the modern emergence of digital literacy into perspective by comparing it with the previous transition from manuscript to hand-press printed books, and from the scroll to the codex (what you think of as a "book"). Students who have taken 241 have won internships at the Library of Congress and the Folger Shakespeare Library, and five members of the Fall 2007 class were accepted to study in graduate programs in English literature and library science. Click on the link to see the course's web site.
Medieval Institute Talk, Kalamazoo, MI, May 13, 2010
Other images: Medieval Music in MSS; Glossa ordinaria (Justinian's legal code); Midrash Shoher Tov on Psalms; Annunciation MS illumination (Met. NYC) London Gazette
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!
Seminar Description
The seminar will read Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in Middle English, as well as some of the tales' known sources and analogues. We also will examine the growth of Chaucer's Renaissance reputation by consulting early print editions of his works located in Goucher's Rare Book Collection and those of other area libraries. Our primary purpose is to understand how the Canterbury tales work, individually and as parts of a grander conception bound together in various possible orders by the pilgrimage "frame narrative." Periodically during the semester we will compare the tales we are reading in the current scholarly edition (the Riverside Chaucer) with the versions in Renaissance editions to discover how Shakespeare and other early readers constructed their "Chaucer" as "the father of English literature." We will have more fun doing what we're doing than any other seminar at Goucher College because we will get to handle (with well-washed hands) rare books and manuscripts of the sort that other literature courses hide from their students, relying upon false certainties inspired by modern print editions. We also will be reconstructing another cultural context in which we can read "the naughty bits" without the FCC's prohibition on profanity.
"Academic Honor Code: Reference to the academic honor code is required of all course syllabi as a reminder to students. Suggested wording includes: Reminder: All students are bound by the standards of the Academic Honor Code, found at www.goucher.edu/documents/General/AcademicHonorCode.pdf." I distinguish between accidental forms of plagiarism, in which the author obviously intended to cite sources but cited them at the wrong place, from pure carelessness (no citations, even if sources are listed at the back) and outright theft of intellectual property intentionally passed off as one's own. The first type of cases usually are opportunities to teach and learn. The second type are more troubling and may go to the Honor Board if they happen late in the semester, after we have discussed source use and its importance to your readers. The last will be sent to the Honor Board without hesitation. Students also are increasingly content to cite sources long after their prose has begun to borrow ideas from those sources. That is technically plagiarism, too, but it has become so common that I must spend gallons of ink and hundreds of keystrokes un-teaching it. Never make me guess whose ideas I'm reading. Cite sources when you first depend on them. I want to know how well you can think, not how well your sources can think, which is a matter of historical record for anyone who reads them. Let there be a bright line of fire between ideas that are originally yours and those of other writers to which you refer.
|
|
since 2/5/07 reset.
