MLS 579 - Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

Credit(s): 4
This course will focus on the crowning achievement of Chaucer’s poetic career. It is the first work to gather the entire spectrum of English folk and to give them voice. The carnival and the controversy that it plays out on the stage of pilgrimage allows Chaucer to create a complete library of medieval genres and an enduring statement about the human condition. Students will learn enough of the language to do a close reading of each tale, place the author’s achievements in the context of our contemporary theories, and, adopting one of the tales, produce a paper that is linked to their own version of the tale. We will end the term, then, with a story-telling pilgrimage of our own.