L712 25345 LOCHRIE (#1)
Chaucer

2:30p – 5:30p T

TOPIC:  CHAUCER AND PREMODERN COSMOPOLITANISM

Scholarship has celebrated and interrogated Chaucer’s Englishness in
the form of his contribution to the establishment of the English
language as a literary language and his representation of an
emergent nationalism in his poetry.  This course aims at a very
different kind of investigation of Chaucer’s work.   Using
contemporary theories of cosmopolitanism, the “new geography,”
and “old” cartographies, we will be reading Chaucer’s dream poetry,
the Troilus, and selected Canterbury tales for their shifting
understandings of cosmopolitanism from its originary Ciceronian
sense of “citizenship of the world” to a more hybrid and
transitional understanding of that concept.  What would a medieval
cosmopolitanism look like?  Modernism offers the universalizing and
triumphalist version of cosmopolitanism that recent theorists have
sought to dismantle, and Walter Mignolo suggests as a model for the
new cosmopolitanism “a new medievalism” characterized by
a “pluricentric” rather than Euro-centric world.  David Wallace’s
Premodern Places, Kathy Lavezzo’s Angels on the Edge of the World,
and Paul Strohm’s work on premodern space will provide some of the
frameworks for our study.  In addition, we will also read selections
from Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre on theories of space, and
from Doreen Massey and scholars of “human geography.”

Some knowledge of Middle English is required for this course, but we
will also be working on translation in the seminar.  Requirements
include seminar reports, two short bibliographic papers, and one
long research paper.