English 250 - Chaucer's Canterbury Tales

A study of England's first cosmopolitan poet whose Canterbury Tales offer a chorus of medieval literary voices, while creating a new kind of poetry anticipating modern attitudes and anxieties through colorful, complex characters like the Wife of Bath. The class reads these tales closely in Chaucer's Middle English, an expressive idiom, ranging from the funny, sly and ribald to the thoughtful and profound. John Dryden called Chaucer the "father of English poesy," but if so, he was a good one. Later poets laughed with him, wept with him and then did their own thing, just as he would have wanted. Restrictions: Not open to first-years.

[CE] No FY