Scholarship is the craft of recognition, the art of attunement. Recognition, Rita Felski argues, is one of the uses of literature; self-recognition in reading is marked by a sudden epiphany of aesthetic and cognitive alignment. We are practitioners of attunement, traffickers in recognition. Even techniques of “defamiliarization” or “destabilization” are
My colleague Dr R. D. Perry, the NCS Postdoctoral Fellow (2017-18) at Saint Louis University, is hosting a series of podcasts on the state of the field in Chaucerian studies. The next podcast interview, with Sylvia Tomasch and me, is on the history of the New Chaucer Society and its
I am about to begin a new project that will examine the impact of the sexual and scatological language and content of The Canterbury Tales on the transmission of the text and on Chaucer’s reputation over the past six hundred years. My interest in this topic was sparked by the way
This is a strange moment for scholars and teachers of Chaucer in North America. There is no good option for an up-to-date, standard, scholarly edition of Chaucer’s complete works. The Riverside Chaucer (gen. ed. Larry Benson, 3rd edition, Houghton Mifflin, 1986), the edition that has long been considered the standard – for
Research into Chaucer in Russia really took off in the late twentieth century. Both the historicist and literary traditions are well represented.
In the Man of Law’s Tale the Sultaness of Syria worries over her son’s impending marriage to the Christian daughter of the emperor of Rome. At the prospect of converting to Christianity, the Sultaness exclaims to her council of conspirators:
