This seminar is designed to provide English majors with intensive and closely supervised work in critical reading and writing. Although sections of the course may address any literary question, period, or genre, they all provide an introduction to critical and methodological problems in literary studies.

Today Chaucer is best known for The Canterbury Tales, but in the centuries following his death, many readers considered his greatest work to be Troilus and Criseyde. In this seminar, we will engage in a sustained reading of this dazzling and self-consciously bookish poem, which unfolds against the backdrop of the Trojan War. Like the narrator who sets out to tell the story of “Troilus’s double sorrow,” we will have a double object: as we carefully read (and reread) Troilus and Criseyde, we will explore how the poem’s reception has been shaped by various turns in literary criticism, including historicism, feminist literary criticism, ecocriticism, postcolonialism, and queer theory. We will also have occasion to ask how Chaucer places Troilus and Criseyde in conversation with the literary-theoretical debates of his own day. Students will write one short and one long paper, both of which will intervene in an ongoing critical conversation about Chaucer's epic poem.

Book List:

Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde: A Norton Critical Edition

Jenni Nuttall, Troilus and Criseyde: A Reader’s Guide

Repeat Rules

Requirements class fulfills