ENL 5216 Fall 2019 Fumo

Before Canterbury, there was Troy. The great medieval love-epic Troilus and Criseyde is Geoffrey Chaucer's one complete, profoundly realized masterpiece: a narrative of love, power, desolation, and deceit that unfolds in the final days of a doomed civilization to which several great European powers traced their origins. It is arguably Chaucer's best poem.

In this course we will intensively explore the literary texture, generic complexity, and allusive technique of Troilus and Criseyde by situating it within the European context of the Troy legend, particularly in its incarnation as a romance narrative. This constitutes an extended exercise in intertextuality. First we will acquaint ourselves with the chronicles of the late-classical Dares and Dictys (supposed eye-witnesses of the Trojan War) and medieval renderings of the Troy legend by Benoît de St-Maure and Guido delle Colonne. We will then work closely with Chaucer's most immediate source, Boccaccio's Il Filostrato, attending to the dynamics by which Chaucer radically revised, implicitly challenged, and creatively supplemented Boccaccio's narrative. (All such foreign-language materials will be read in English translation.) Our most extensive efforts will be devoted to close reading of the five books of Chaucer's Troilus, together with a healthy cross-section of 20th- and 21st-century criticism on the poem. Finally, we will explore patterns of reception in several intriguing early responses to Chaucer's poem by John Lydgate, Robert Henryson, William Shakespeare (here's your chance to read Troilus and Cressida, one of Shakespeare's most perplexing "problem plays"!), and John Dryden. Given this range of materials, the course is aimed not only at medievalists (or those desiring medieval coverage) but at early modernists as well.

N.B. We will read Chaucer's Troilus strictly in the original Middle English. No prior experience with Middle English is necessary, though learning it will be a formal expectation of the course. Translations are not permitted. Similarly, no prior knowledge of the Troilus legend or ancient Trojan epic is expected.