Date/Time
Date(s) - 7 Mar 2013
5:30 PM - 6:15 PM
Location
CUNY Graduate Center
Category(ies) No Categories
The Medieval Studies Certificate Program at the CUNY Graduate Center is sponsoring a talk on Thursday, March 7, 5:30 PM, in room C201, by the distinguished medievalist Stephanie Trigg of the University of Melbourne (http://www.culture-communication.unimelb.edu.au/about/people/academic/stephanie-trigg). Professor Trigg will speak on work-in-progress, as follows. Chaucerians, Coleridgians, and everyone in between (and beyond) welcome!
“Especially delicious and exquisitely tender’: Chaucer, Coleridge, Emotion and Affect”
Abstract: The most common narratives in Chaucerian reception history use broad brushstrokes to contrast discrete phases of Chaucerian readership and interpretation. We customarily say that in the sixteenth century, for example, Chaucer was prized as a courtly poet; in the eighteenth century, as a bawdy or satirical poet; and in the nineteenth century, as a poet of sentiment. Coleridge described his ‘unceasing delight in Chaucer’ as an ‘exquisitely tender’ poet, a reading that would have been unrecognisable a hundred years earlier, and that is now marked primarily by its own historicity as a ‘romantic’ construction, or reading, of Chaucer. Such shifts are usually read through the history of taste and changing fashions in medievalism and the readerly constructions of different Chaucers. But this reception history might also function as an important source for the history of emotions; and the representation in critical discourse of changing patterns of affect and feeling in response to literary texts. In this paper I will use Coleridge’s reading of Chaucer to test ways in which the history of emotions and the study of these longer patterns of Chaucerian reception might inform and illuminate each other.