New takes on Chaucer

    Kathy Cawsey, assistant professor with Dalhousie's Department of English and co-founder of the Atlantic Medieval Association, is once again doing her bit for the dark ages. She has just published her first book, Twentieth-Century Chaucer Criticism (Ashgate, 2011). While Chaucer criticism is sort of the Burberry trench of English literary criticism — understated, solid, respectable— Dr. Cawsey’s volume is like a flash of colour, a fuchsia scarf lopped around the neck if you will. Her book isn’t concerned just with Chaucer, exactly, but more with the ways in which audiences and critics have responded to the middle-English icon through the years.

“My initial interest was in Chaucer’s own ideas about audiences," says Dr. Cawsey. "I discovered not only did nobody agree with me about Chaucer’s ideas of audience, but no one agreed with one another!”

Disagreement

She discovered this unrest in the Chaucerian ranks early on. “When I began my graduate studies, I faced six bookcases of books on Chaucer, all disagreeing.”

Twentieth-Century Chaucer Criticism proceeds deliberately through six Chaucer critics of the last 100 years: George L. Kittredge (“one of the first to really provide an overarching interpretation of Chaucer”), C. S. Lewis (yes, the Narnia guy: more on him later), D. W. Robertson (who, “in the ‘60s, formulated a really rigid method of reading medieval literature”), E. Talbot Donaldson (an “advocate of close reading”), Carolyn Dinshaw (who works with “feminist and queer theories”), and Lee Patterson (known for his work in “new historicism”). While there were other significant critics, Dr. Cawsey considers the group a “good snapshot.”

The study of English literature is not really a realm known for mudslinging and hair-pulling. What does the above group of critics actually find to argue about? “One of the big debates,” says Dr. Cawsey, “Was the exegetical debate, which was Robertson’s view – that all literature should be read the way the Bible is read.” 

Dr. Cawsey, for her part, focuses Twentieth-Century Chaucer Criticism on two historically key issues: whether the analysis of Chaucer’s crowd should “focus on medieval audiences or… all audiences for all time,” and whether Chaucer’s work is ironic — “do you read it relatively straight, or do you see it so the surface reading is opposite to the real meaning?” The last quarter of the 20th century has introduced a third question: whether Chaucer’s audiences are fundamentally a unified mass, or more heterogeneous? “Does a woman read differently from a man? …People now are interested in the multiplicity of audiences.”

Criticism gets personal

One of the most interesting things about the criticism of literature is that, while it frequently takes place in a professional realm, it is also often intensely personal. Of C. S. Lewis, for instance, Dr. Cawsey says, “He calls himself a dinosaur, and believes because he has this old-fashioned worldview he can read Chaucer the way the medieval people would… he’s quite happy to accept courtly love.” Lewis’ romanticism caused him to neglect some of Chaucer’s bawdier works, like the famous Canterbury Tales. “It’s a major gap in Lewis’ criticism. I counted the number of pages dedicated to the Canterbury Tales, and it was remarkably low… I think it goes back to Lewis’ preference for that ordered, structured universe.”

Examining so much criticism even affected Professor Cawsey’s personal views on the subject. “I had unspoken, subconscious opinions… this project has really forced me to re-examine.” She’s already planning her next book: a study of six medieval authors’ use of language and the ways in which they thought language worked. Professor Cawsey hasn’t nailed down all of the details yet – but, of course, one of the authors will definitely be Chaucer.