ENGL 313 - Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales

FDR: HL
Credits: 3
Planned Offering: Fall 2014 and alternate years

Prerequisites: ENGL 299. This course considers the primary work on which Chaucer’s reputation rests: The Canterbury Tales. We pay sustained attention to Chaucer’s Middle English at the beginning of the semester to ease the reading process. Then we travel alongside the Canterbury pilgrims as they tell their tales under the guise of a friendly competition. The Canterbury Tales is frequently read as a commentary on the social divisions in late medieval England, such as the traditional estates, religious professionals and laity, and gender hierarchies. But despite the Tales’ professed inclusiveness of the whole of English society, Chaucer nonetheless focuses inordinately on those individuals from the emerging middle classes. Our aim is to approach the Tales from the practices of historicization and theorization; that is, we both examine Chaucer’s cultural and historical contexts and consider issues of religion, gender, sexuality, marriage, conduct, class, chivalry, courtly love, community, geography, history, power, spirituality, secularism, traditional authority, and individual experience. Of particular importance are questions of voicing and writing, authorship and readership. Lastly, we think through Chaucer’s famous Retraction at the “end” of The Canterbury Tales, as well as Donald R. Howard’s trenchant observation that the Tale is “unfinished but complete.” What does it mean for the father of literary “Englishness” to end his life’s work on the poetic principle of unfulfilled closure and on the image of a society on the move? Kao.