I’d like to pick up on the keyword used by Jonathan Hsy in his retrospective blog on the Third International Congress of the John Gower Society, posted on “In the Middle” (July 9, 2014), and apply it to the experience of moving from the Gower conference in Rochester, N.Y., which
The entries in this blog so far have been exemplary in asking fundamental questions about Chaucer, concerning the fragmentary structure of the Canterbury Tales and how, if at all, we can locate Chaucer’s voice in that polycephalic text. I want to ask another fundamental question, one so basic I’m worried I don’t
There are several passages in his canon where Chaucer’s voice seems clearest to me, where I can imagine sitting in the same room with him, where I hear him read his lines aloud. In The Canterbury Tales, these passages are not all associated exclusively with either the narrating voice or
I love it that Arthur presents his post as an “enthusiastic taking-up of Bobby [Meyer-Lee]’s exhortation that we engage in a thorough and collective rethink of how we use the term fragments in reference to the Tales, as both codicological designation and literary-critical concept.” I strongly agree that there needs
How do we represent the state of the manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales? Arthur Bahr, Associate Professor in Literature at MIT, responds to Robert J. Meyer-Lee’s recent essay, “Abandon the Fragments.”[1]
