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Instructors: Dr. Matthias Eitelmann
Event type:
hybrid: Seminar
Displayed in timetable as:
05.008.760
Hours per week:
2
Credits:
2,0
Language of instruction:
Englisch
Min. | Max. participants:
- | 30
Registration group: Engl. Ling. 760
Priority scheme: Senatsrichtlinie
Contents:
Geoffrey Chaucer’s Middle English Canterbury Tales can be truly called a masterpiece of early English literature: This collection of 24 tales told by pilgrims on their way to Canterbury comprises a diverse set of narratives, each of them told in the unique voice of the respective pilgrim as representatives of different social classes, and each of them constituting different genres fashionable at the time of composition. This is really medieval literature at its best, written by “the father of English literature” (J. Dryden): at times hilariously funny, stylistically sophisticated and of particular interest to literary scholars (after all, it is in the Canterbury Tales that we find the very first unreliable narrator in English literature!).
Apart from a literary appreciation of the Canterbury Tales, our main concern lies on their linguistic analysis, with emphasis put on an analysis of style, register, and genre. Also, crucial characteristics of Middle English feature prominently in the Canterbury Tales, such as the newly emerging use of second person plural pronouns as a politeness marker or the rising competition between the original 3rd person singular inflectional marker -(e)th and the variant -(e)s typical of Northern dialects.
Recommended reading list:
Any edition of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is fine, as long as it also contains the Middle English original. Recommended for purchase is the Penguin edition, edited by Jill Mann, or the three-volume edition by Fritz Kemmler, which has a German translation next to the Middle English text.
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