Chaucer's Dream Visions

Chaucer’s early poems, such as The Parliament of Fowls, The House of Fame and The Legend of Good Women, repeatedly stage moments of significant reading; the narrator reads himself to sleep and then experiences a dream vision, for instance, or comments upon the way his own reading has conditioned his interpretation and representation of the world around him. Similarly, the Trojan War epic Troilus and Criseyde is both self-conscious concerning its own status in a literate tradition (as a “rereading” of Boccaccio and the mythical Lollius) and original in its representation of characters formed and perhaps deformed by their own practices of reading and writing. This course aims to explore these “olde books” of Chaucer’s with a particular awareness of issues surrounding the representation of reading and writing at this s...