Literary Studies SE:
Geoffrey Chaucer: Poet of the Late Middle Ages,
in English and European Context
Summer Semester, 2012; Mondays 17:30 - 19:00, SR 11.11
Office hours: Mondays 16:30 - 17:30, Room 408, Institut für Anglistik
Professor Richard Newhauser; e-mail: richard.newhauser@uni-graz.at
Web Site: http://www.public.asu.edu/~rnewhaus
Description
In this class we will focus on the genres, narrative and lyrical techniques, and cultural contexts of some of the works by Geoffrey Chaucer. The Canterbury Tales, one of the most influential narrative collections produced in the English language, will be at the center of our attention, but we will also refer to Chaucer’s dream visions and lyrics. Our major concentration will be on the comparative study of his poetry in two contexts: first, that of the parallel transmission of closely related material in various versions throughout medieval Europe, and second, that of the interrelation of tales and their tellers within the fragments of Chaucer’s fiction of a Canterbury pilgrimage.
Reading List
The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson et al., 3rd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1987.
Besserman, Lawrence, “Ideology, Antisemitism, and Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale,” The Chaucer Review 36.1 (2001): 48-72.
Boitani, Piero, “‘My Tale is of a Cock’ or, The Problems of Literal Interpretation,” in Literature and Religion in the Later Middle Ages. Philological Studies in Honor of Siegfried Wenzel, ed. Richard G. Newhauser and John A. Alford, Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 118 (Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1995), 25-42.
Donaldson, E. T., “Chaucer the Pilgrim,” in Speaking of Chaucer (New York: Norton, 1970), 1-12.
Donaldson, E. T., “Idiom of Popular Poetry in The Miller’s Tale,” in Speaking of Chaucer (New York: Norton, 1970), 13-29.
Finlayson, John, “Art and Morality in in Chaucer’s Friar’s Tale and The Decameron, Day One, Story One,” Neophilologus 89 (2005): 139-52.
Kruger, Stephen F., “Dreaming,” in A Concise Companion to Chaucer, ed. Corinne Saunders (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 71-89.
Lynch, Kathryn, Chaucer’s Philosophical Visions, Chaucer Studies, 27 (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2000), 83-109 (chapter 4: “Choice Without Preference, Preference Without Choice in the Parliament of Fowls”).
Mann, Jill, “The General Prologue and Estates Literature,” in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: A Casebook, ed. Lee Patterson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 23-47. Reprint from Jill Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire. The Literature of Social Classes and the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1973).
Patterson, Lee, “Chaucerian Commerce: Bourgeois Ideology and Poetic Exchange in the Merchant’s and Shipman’s Tales,” in Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 322-66.
Patterson, Lee, “‘No Man His Reson Herde’: Peasant Consciousness, Chaucer’s Miller, and the Structure of the Canterbury Tales,” in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380-1530, ed. Lee Patterson, The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics, 8 (Berkeley: University of California Press 1990), 113-55.
Wallace, David, Chaucerian Polity. Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 182-211, 443-50 (chapter 7: “‘Deyntee to Chaffare’: Men of Law, Merchants, and the Constance Story”).
Wetherbee, Winthrop, “Romance and Epic in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale,” Exemplaria 2.1 (1990): 303-28.
Extra Reading
Blamires, Alcuin, Chaucer, Ethics, and Gender (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 46-77 (chapter 2: “Credulity and Vision: ‘The Miller’s Tale’, ‘The Merchant’s Tale’, ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’”).
Cooper, Helen, The Canterbury Tales, 2nd ed., Oxford Guides to Chaucer (Oxford: Oxford University press, 1996), 27-60 (“Fragment I(A). The General Prologue”).
Dinshaw, Carolyn, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 113-31 (chapter 4: “‘Glose/bele chose’: The Wife of Bath and Her Glossators”).
Sources and Analogues of The Canterbury Tales, ed. Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel, 2 vols., Chaucer Studies, 28, 35 (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2002-2005).
Spearing, A. C., Medieval Dream-Poetry (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 89-101, 223-24.
For Middle English Help
METRO (Middle English Teaching Resources Online): http://metro.fas.harvard.edu
The Canterbury Tales online
http://www.librarius.com/cantales.htm
Requirements:
Participation and preparation of reading assignments; presentation + handout / discussion paper; term paper (12-15 pages in English; or 10-12 pages in German). The topic of the presentation and term paper must be approved by me in advance.
Syllabus:
1. March 5: Introduction: Chaucer’s Life; Middle English 1
2. March 12: Middle English 2; Chaucer, The Parliament of Fowls; Kruger; Lynch
3. March 19: no class
4. March 26: Middle English 3; Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, “The General Prologue”; Donaldson, “Chaucer the Pilgrim”
5. April 23: Middle English 4; Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, “The General Prologue”; Mann
6. April 30: Middle English 5; Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, “The Knight’s Tale”; Wetherbee
7. May 7: Middle English 6; Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, “The Miller’s Prologue and Tale”; Patterson, “‘No Man His Reson Herde’”
8. May 14: Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, “The Man of Law’s Introduction, Prologue, Tale, and Epilogue”; Wallace
9. May 21: Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale”; Dinshaw
10. June 4: Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, “The Friar’s Prologue and Tale”; Finlayson
11. June 11: Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, “The Shipman’s Tale”; Patterson, “Chaucerian Commerce”
12. June 18: Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, “The Prioress’s Prologue and Tale”; Besserman
13. June 25: Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, “The Nun’s Priest’s Prologue, Tale, and Epilogue”; Boitani
Papers must be sent to me (at Richard.Newhauser@asu.edu) as e-mail attachments composed in Microsoft Word by July 19.