EGL 305 - Jr. Seminar (Winter): Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender

Course Units: 1

(Winter; Doyle) There’s no doubt that medieval literature, generally, had what we’d now consider a skewed perspective on both masculinity and femininity. In the later Middle Ages, however, some French and Italian authors began to write explicitly about the construction of gender. Geoffrey Chaucer was the first major English author to join this literary conversation, and in this course we’ll examine his contributions to it. As we read some of his works, we’ll be primarily investigating four questions: How does Chaucer rewrite the popular stories of his day so as to reflect on and problematize literary constructions of gender? How do his choices as an author respond to medieval theories of gender? How did late medieval audiences respond to his obvious interest in the issues raised by constructions of masculinity and femininity? And how should we, as modern readers influenced by contemporary thinking about gender, respond to his work? CC: HUL