English 211

Other Readings and Media

Canterbury Tales, edited by Jill Mann; Chaucer: Sources and Backgrounds, edited by Robert Miller

Description

In this course, we will read all of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, along with relevant sources and other contemporary texts. We will also read current scholarship on the Tales, with the goal of attaining a reasonably complete knowledge of the different approaches that have been used to talk about Chaucer's work. Students will learn how to read Middle English aloud and will work on translating Chaucer into idiomatic modern English, a more difficult task than it seems. Indeed, one of the themes of the course will be translation; many of Chaucer's Tales can be called "translations," and Chaucer himself makes several comments about translating and reporting the words of others. To that end, we will also explore how the words in our edited edition of the Tales came to be identified as Chaucer's, given the plethora of manuscript evidence and the many options available to the editor. No prior knowledge of Middle English is required for this course.