Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales

Harvard FAS

What makes stories so pleasurable and revealing but also so enraging and dangerous? How are we to think about the strong emotions they evoke and learn to resist as well as appreciate their power? This course revisits Geoffrey Chaucer's classic fourteenth-century poem, The Canterbury Tales: the deepest and most caustically entertaining analysis of storytelling ever written. The Canterbury Tales consists of a series of tales told by members of a pilgrimage on their way from London to…