Synopses & Reviews
Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales was the subject of the first volume in the Approaches to Teaching series, published in 1980. But in the past thirty years, Chaucer scholarship has evolved dramatically, teaching styles have changed, and new technologies have created extraordinary opportunities for studying Chaucer. This second edition of
Approaches to Teaching Chaucer's Canterbury Tales reflects the wide variety of contexts in which students encounter the poem and the diversity of perspectives and methods instructors bring to it. Perennial topics such as class, medieval marriage, genre, and tale order rub shoulders with considerations of violence, postcoloniality, masculinities, race, and food in the tales.
The first section, "Materials," reviews available editions, scholarship, and audiovisual and electronic resources for studying The Canterbury Tales. In the second section, "Approaches," thirty-six essays discuss strategies for teaching Chaucer's language, for introducing theory in the classroom, for focusing on individual tales, and for using digital resources in the classroom. The multiplicity of approaches reflects the richness of Chaucer's work and the continuing excitement of each new generation's encounter with it.
Review
"A worthy and needed successor to the 1980 edition, this volume charts in comprehensive fashion the goals that Chaucerians now have when they teach The Canterbury Tales and the methods they have devised to achieve them."
--Warren Ginsberg, Knight Professor of Humanities, University of Oregon
Table of Contents
PrefacePART ONE: MATERIALS
Peter W. Travis and Frank Grady
Editions
Middle English Editions
Translations
Anthologies
Recommended Reading for Undergraduates
Aids to Teaching
Web Sites
Video and Audio Materials
Electronic and Multimedia Resources
The Instructor's Library
Background Studies
Reference Works
Critical Works
PART TWO: APPROACHES
Introduction: A Survey of Pedagogical Approaches to The Canterbury Tales
Frank Grady and Peter W. Travis
Chaucer's Language
Teaching Chaucer's Middle English
Peter G. Beidler
The Forms and Functions of Verse in The Canterbury Tales
William Quinn
Teaching the Prosody of The Canterbury Tales
Howell Chickering
Teaching Chaucer in Middle English: The Joy of Philology
Jane Chance
Worrying about Words in The Canterbury Tales
Tara Williams
Getting Chaucer's Jokes
Andrew Cole
Individual Tales and Fragments
The Problem of Tale Order
Robert J. Meyer-Lee
Chaucer and the Middle Class; or, Why Look at Men of Law, Merchants, and Wives?
Roger A. Ladd
Professions in the General Prologue
Alexander L. Kaufman
Teaching Chaucer's Obscene Comedy in Fragment 1
Nicole Nolan Sidhu
The Man of Law's Tale as a Keystone to The Canterbury Tales
Michael Calabrese
Beyond Kittredge: Teaching Marriage in The Canterbury Tales
Emma Lipton
The Clerk's Tale and the Retraction: Generic Monstrosity in the Classroom
Peter W. Travis
Students' "Fredom" and the Franklin's Tale
Robert Epstein
The Prioress's Tale: Violence, Scholarly Debate, and the Classroom Encounter
Larry Scanlon
Chaucer's Boring Prose: Teaching the Melibee and the Parson's Tale
Jamie Taylor
Strategies for Teaching
How to Judge a Book by Its Cover
Michelle R. Warren
Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales in the Undergraduate
English Language Arts Curriculum
Bryan P. Davis
A First Year's Experience of Teaching The Canterbury Tales
Jacob Lewis
Teaching The Canterbury Tales to Non-Liberal-Arts Students
Deborah M. Sinnreich-Levi
Chaucer and Race: Teaching The Canterbury Tales to the
Diverse Folk of the Twenty-First-Century Classroom
Donna Crawford
Making the Tales More Tangible: Chaucer and Medieval Culture in Secondary Schools
Kara Crawford
Producing The Canterbury Tales
Bethany Blankenship
Theory in the Classroom
Reading Food in The Canterbury Tales
Kathryn L. Lynch
Teaching Chaucer's Canterbury Tales with Queer Theory and Erotic Triangles
Tison Pugh
Chaucerian Translations: Postcolonial Approaches to The Canterbury Tales
Patricia Clare Ingham
Chaucer's Cut
Becky McLaughlin
Performance and the Student Body
David Wallace
Hidden in Plain Sight: Teaching Masculinities in The Canterbury Tales
Holly Crocker
The Pardoner's "Old Man": Postmodern Theory and the Premodern Text
Leonard Michael Koff
The Canterbury Tales in the Digital Age
Designing the Undergraduate "Hybrid" Chaucer Course
Lorraine Kochanske Stock
Public Chaucer: Multimedia Approaches to Teaching Chaucer's Middle English Texts
Martha W. Driver
Chaucer's Pilgrims in Cyberspace
Florence Newman
Translating The Canterbury Tales into Contemporary Media
Timothy L. Stinson
Digitizing Chaucerian Debate
Alex Mueller
Afterword
Signature Pedagogies in Chaucer Studies
Susan Yager
Notes on Contributors
Survey Respondents
Works Cited
Index