MENMD2TAC: The Canterbury Tales
Credits: 20 credits
Course Director: Dr Alastair Bennett
Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are among the greatest literary achievements of the late Middle Ages. The text contains a compendium of different stories, offering wide-ranging insights into the richness of late medieval English culture and literary tradition. It is also a radical and experimental work, which places different genres in competition with one another to challenge and subvert the assumptions they encode. This module explores the Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English, and places them in their cultural context. Students will read Chaucer’s tales alongside some of his other works, and works by his contemporaries and imitators. They will encounter Chaucer as an eminent poet of both medieval England and renaissance Europe, as a serious student of the classical tradition, and as a writer of bawdy and outrageous contemporary comedy. The module will also consider the wide range of recent responses to Chaucer’s work, comparing readings by scholars from a variety of theoretical positions and literary critical disciplines.
Assessment is by two pieces of coursework (10% + 40%) and a closed-book exam (50%).