MEDI 360 topic: Geoffrey Chaucer

Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is a collection of poetry and prose whose mixture of formal complexity, generic experimentation, and social satire excites admiration and imitation to this day. This term is devoted to studying the many animating features of Chaucer's work: the multiplicity of voices and social visions; the uses and abuses of moral rhetoric; the instability of gender and genre; ideas of authorship and audience; and the emergence of the vernacular as a literary medium in the fourteenth century. Ultimately, the course should enable you to sharpen your sense of the vitality, historical difference, cultural dynamics, and ethical demands of early English literature.

Instructor: Dr. Allan Mitchell