LIT 5038-Fall 2025-Fumo

An intensive study of Geoffrey Chaucer’s great story collection, The Canterbury Tales (in the original Middle English), in light of the literary-historical and intellectual interests of late-medieval England. Our primary goal is to explore Chaucer’s artistic goals and strategies while becoming familiar with the textual and cultural conditions that shaped the early circulation of Chaucer’s text.

Our concerns will include: the status of the Tales as a (mostly poetic) story collection that bears both a closural framework and a brazenly open textuality; the poet's use and abuse of his sources and influences in designing individual tales; medieval theories of authorship as they inform Chaucer's various authorial and narratorial guises; and the generic multivalence of the tales and of Chaucer's artistic design. We will reflect on how the Tales, which Chaucer himself largely denounced—tongue quite possibly in cheek—in his “Retractions,” contribute to Chaucer's status as the first canonical English vernacular author. We will read nearly all of the Tales as well as a healthy cross-section of 20th- and 21st-century criticism on them, paying attention to the work’s (highly problematic) overall structure as well as the dynamic of its internal components. Instead of advocating for any one critical or methodological position, this course promotes a balanced, integrated view of various influential scholarly perspectives, so that seminar participants will emerge as versatile and analytically sentient readers of Chaucer’s most important narrative poetry. No prior experience with Middle English is expected, although learning to read and pronounce Middle English is a formal expectation of the course and will involve a collective effort