Chaucer
English 500
Taught by Jean Lorrah, Ph.D.
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Geoffrey Chaucer is my favorite writer of all time. I fell in love with his work when I was in college, because it has everything you could ask for: action, adventure, humor, and above all those incredible characters who walk right off the page and become your friends and acquaintances for life. There are some, of course, that you would not really want to be friends with, but you still can't get them out of your mind!
When I teach Chaucer, I hope to share with my students the same delight and excitement that I felt when I first read these works. Chaucer is one of the masters of world literature--his stories deal with human passions of love, hate, greed, jealousy, hope, fear, grief--feelings we all know and understand.
For that reason, Chaucer's work weathers every storm of criticism--as each new "ism" arrives, his poetry yields up new interpretations, and as each approach is inevitably replaced by something new and shiny (and soon to tarnish in its turn), Chaucer's work stands alongside that of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and all the other greats, impervious to either worship or attack by succeeding generations of scholars.
What do I hope students will find in Chaucer's work? The basic stories, the marvelous characters, the poetic techniques of a master. Yes, we analyze in this course--but I hope that in doing so we do not cause the souffle of Chaucer's humor to collapse. For he is above all a humorist. Even when he attempts tragedy, in a sustained work like Troilus and Criseyde he keeps us laughing throughout. And the last thing we hear of our tragic hero, Troilus, is his laughter as he gets a final perspective on humanity.
For humanity is Chaucer's subject--thus how can he be anything but a comic poet?
In class, we read Chaucer's two masterworks, the famous, well-loved, but incomplete Canterbury Tales, and his complete psychological tragedy, Troilus and Criseyde. Other works are covered in Group Projects presented to the class by teams of three students each. Students are thus given a major responsibility for bringing their own section of the course alive for the rest of the class.
Besides the Group Project, which is a modern presentation with graphics, each student also writes a traditional Term Paper for this course.
It would be absurd for me to put my own Life of Chaucer or bibliography of his works on these pages, when all of that is readily available on the WorldWideWeb, the work already done. Below you will find links to some marvelous websites that will aid you in your research on Geoffrey Chaucer.
About Chaucer at Librarius
Curious about me? Visit Dr. Jean Lorrah's Academic Home Page.
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