Course Description
Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, and minor poems.
Additional Requirements for Graduate Students:
Graduate students will be responsible for a more extensive syllabus, for secondary reading, and for more ambitious, sophisticated writing.
Athena Title
Chaucer
Equivalent Courses
Not open to students with credit in ENGL 4240W
Undergraduate Prerequisite
Two 2000-level ENGL courses or (one 2000-level ENGL course and one 3000-level ENGL course) or (one 2000-level ENGL course and one 2000-level CMLT course)
Graduate Prerequisite
Permission of department
Semester Course Offered
Offered every year.
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Course Objectives
The purpose of this course is to familiarize students with the work of one of the most important writers of the Middle English period and to enable them to read, pronounce, and understand late fourteenth-century London Middle English with facility. At the end of the course, students, having read a representative selection of texts chosen from Chaucer's principal works (and occasionally other authors too), will be able to discuss these works (orally and in writing) with a considerable degree of sophistication. Students will further have acquainted themselves with a variety of medieval narrative forms and structures, and the function of traditional genres, particularly, romance, fabliau, and sermon writing, and how Chaucer exploits these in his poetry, and they should be able to evaluate him within the socio-historical context of the late-fourteenth century. They should also be aware of major scholarly debates in the field of Chaucer criticism.
Topical Outline
The choice and sequence of topics will vary every semester depending on the instructor. The topics will consist of selected primary and secondary texts to be read outside of class and discussed in class, examined individually and comparatively in the context of the times and the circumstances of their production as well as in the light of recent scholarly opinion. Periodically during the semester, students will perform a number of graded tasks that may include, but is not restricted to, tests, out-of-class papers, and class examinations. A possible series of topics and assignments might resemble this: Chaucer and English inheritance: Derek Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer; Essays in Idea of the Vernacular, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne et al.; Christopher Cannon, The Making of Chaucer's English; Laura Hibbard Loomis, "Chaucer and the Breton Lays of the Auchinleck MS"; "Chaucer and the Auchinleck Manuscript: Thopas and Guy of Warwick." Chaucer and Continental inheritance: Piero Boitani, Chaucer and Boccaccio; Chaucer's Imaginary World of Fame; Chaucer and the Italian Trecento; Nicholas Haveley, Chaucer's Boccaccio; Charles Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition; David Wallace, Chaucer and the Early Writings of Boccaccio; James Wimsatt, Chaucer and his French Contemporaries. Chaucerian Polity: Barbara A. Hanawalt (ed.), Chaucer's England; David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity; David Aers, Chaucer, Langland, and the Creative; Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History; Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer Boethius, Neo-Platonism: Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy; Seth Lerer, Boethius and Dialogue; A.J. Minnis, Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism; Medieval Boethius; Chaucer's Boece and the medieval tradition of Boethius; Winthrop (Pete) Whetherbee, Chaucer and the Poets. Chaucer's Sources: Larry Benson and T.M. Andersson, Literary Context of Chaucer's Fabliaux; Germaine Dempster, W.F. Bryan et al, Sources and Analogues of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; Barry Windeatt, Chaucer's Dream Poetry: Sources and Analogues. Chaucer's Readers: Seth Lerer, Chaucer's Readers; Ruth Morse & Barry Windeatt (ed.), Chaucer Traditions.
Syllabus