Geoffrey Chaucer is one of our grandest and most enduring poets; an architect of our vocabulary and our literary style. By examining the English writer's texts, from his short love lyrics to the copious profusion of character and incident that is The Canterbury Tales, these 12 lectures will prepare you for the challenges of Chaucer's oeuvre, and will provide an understanding of what makes him the true "father" of English poetry. With Professor Lerer as your expert guide, you'll plumb the richness and depth of Chaucer's poetry and explore his life, the range of his work, and his impact on English language and literature. You'll examine Chaucer in virtually all the varieties of literature available to him: classical epic, domestic farce, ribald comedy, saint's life, beast fable, romance adventure, personal lyric, devotional prayer, and religious prose. You'll learn how Chaucer uses relationships between men and women, humans and God, social "insiders" and "outsiders," and high and low desires to explore our "ticklish" world, and the way life takes shape from literary forms-be they marriage vows, the verses of Scripture, or stories told by plain folk. You'll also meet some of the most vibrant characters in all of literature, including: the bawdy Wife of Bath, the manipulative Pandarus (whose very name gave rise to the term "pandering"), the upright Knight, and the ambiguous Pardoner. Professor Lerer leads you deeply into the texts, so that you learn about their sources and syntax, and the rich repertoire of poetic techniques they display. And while he makes it clear that these texts remain eminently worth reading today, he also does full justice to their medieval context.
The Life and Writings of Geoffrey Chaucer
Take a fascinating look at Chaucer's life, his world, and the language in which he wrote.
01: Introduction to Chaucer's Life and World
This introductory lecture places Chaucer's work and life in the contexts of medieval English literature and social history. We look forward to the approach of the course, focusing largely on "The Canterbury Tales" and on the poet's later impact on English literature and literary history. This course of lectures seeks to understand how and why we think of Chaucer in these ways, and why we still continue to read and value his poetry today.
02: The Scope of Chaucer's Work
This lecture surveys the range of Chaucer's literary production. It identifies and describes the five kinds of modes in which Chaucer wrote, and summarizes the content of his major poems other than "The Canterbury Tales."
03: Chaucer's Language
This lecture introduces the student to Middle English. It identifies key features of Chaucer's language: historical contexts in the development of the English language, and local contexts in the particulars of Chaucer's regional dialect, level of education, and blend of literary and intellectual discourses. The lecture concludes with a close reading of the first sentence of "The General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales" to illustrate his language at work.
04: Chaucerian Themes and Terms
In this lecture, we explore some vocabulary and narrative stances Chaucer uses by examining closely two short poems. "Truth" was the most popular of his short poems in the centuries after his death, and "Adam Scriveyn" has long been taken to exemplify the problems of the author in an age before print, in a manuscript culture. These poems help us understand the conditions of that manuscript culture: what it meant to be an author in a time of handmade manuscripts, when language and texts were more variable than they are now.
05: "Troilus and Criseyde"—Love and Philosophy
This is the first of two lectures on Chaucer's long, classically inspired, deeply humanist poem "Troilus and Criseyde." This lecture shows how Chaucer explores the problem of love from a philosophical perspective. It illustrates how Chaucer appropriates material from mythology and from near-contemporary Italian poets to create a rich synthesis of the inheritance of European literature.
06: "Troilus and Criseyde"—History and Fiction
This lecture looks more closely at "Troilus and Criseyde" to understand Chaucer's controlling interests in the way history works. It attends to Chaucer's narrative reflections in the poem on how the passage of time changes language and social habits. In this lecture, the poem will be framed by discussions from medieval intellectual texts, which inform his discussions and help us place Chaucer's project in his time.
07: "The Canterbury Tales"—The General Prologue
This lecture introduces the student to "The Canterbury Tales". It begins with the "General Prologue" introduction and the portraits of the 29 pilgrims who will make up the tale-telling structure of the pilgrimage. Central to this poem, and to its opening, is a sense of order. We will look at three representative portraits.
08: "The Canterbury Tales"—The First Fragment
This lecture describes the major features of the first section of "The Canterbury Tales": the Tales of the Knight, Miller, Reeve, and Cook. The theme of this so-called First Fragment is language and control: how language comes to degenerate in the course of the sequence of tales, and how all hope of controlling human social and linguistic behavior ultimately fails in the face of individual desire, aggression, anger, and wit. Finally, this lecture explores how Chaucer is funny: where the humor goes right and where it goes wrong.
09: The Wife of Bath
This lecture presents Chaucer's Wife of Bath as a central character in "The Canterbury Tales." Her General Prologue portrait, her own long Prologue to her tale, and her tale itself, come together to describe a lusty, willful woman. But these elements also illustrate what Chaucer sees as central problems of relationships among men and women. She has been taken by some modern critics as a proto-feminist; by others as Chaucer in drag. Whatever or whoever she is, she is one of the most memorable characters in all of literature.
10: The Pardoner
In this lecture, we meet the Pardoner in full, who is, along with the Wife of Bath, another of Chaucer's memorable, infamous, challenging, and perhaps disturbing creations. Is he a "gelding" or a "mare" (a eunuch or a homosexual)? Is he a drunkard, too, and is his story of the revelers at the tavern also a story about the link between inebriation and inspiration? And just why does his final address to the Host bring forth such a wild, angry, and obscene response? We will confront the very essence of Chaucer's literary art itself, and its power to move, anger, and productively disturb us.
11: “God’s Plenty”—The Variety of "The Canterbury Tales"
This lecture surveys the range of "The Canterbury Tales" to illustrate the richness and variety of Chaucer's literary imagination. It also points the student to some particular problems and perspectives in Chaucer's work to provoke him or her to read more in Chaucer and appreciate the power of his verse and the compelling quality of the worlds he has created.
12: Chaucer's Living Influence
Chaucer's importance in the 15th century was so great that, at introduction of printing into England, he was one of the very first writers printed. Spenser and Shakespeare. This course of lectures closes with both an invitation and an injunction for the student to return to Chaucer as the founder of English vernacular literary culture itself.
Overview Course No. 304
About
Dr. Seth Lerer is the Dean of Arts and Humanities at the University of California, San Diego. Before taking this position, he was the Avalon Foundation Professor in Humanities and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He also taught at Princeton University, Cambridge University, and Washington University in St. Louis. Professor Lerer earned his B.A. from Wesleyan University, a second B.A. from Oxford University, and his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Professor Lerer's research interests include medieval and Renaissance studies, early Tudor literary culture, textual criticism, Old and Middle English literature, and children's literature. He has published 10 books, including Chaucer and His Readers and Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language. Professor Lerer won the 2010 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in Memory of Newton Arvin for his book Children's Literature: A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter. The book also won the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award. He is also the author of more than 100 scholarly articles and reviews. Professor Lerer received many awards for his scholarship and teaching, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation, the Beatrice White Prize of the English Association of Great Britain (for Chaucer and His Readers), and the Hoagland Prize for Undergraduate Teaching at Stanford.
