On Not Being Chaucer

Abstract:Chaucer's place in the canon and on the syllabus has at various times during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in various places around the world, been questioned by students, academics, administrators, and professional organizations, in response to very specific and often highly localized cultural, historical, and institutional factors. The history and nature of those factors are instructive if we want to continue to make the case for the value of studying Chaucer. In this address I consider some of the national and international contexts that have put pressure on the study of Chaucer, contexts that include US and UK responses to institutional racism, and feminist literary criticism's critique of Chaucer's sexism and of the institutionalization of feminist criticism. I consider some of the historical rejections of Chaucer, from that of the black British writer David Dabydeen in the 1970s to the brief flare of the Chaucer Wars of 2021. I argue that decentering Chaucer needs an informed critique of how canons are constructed and of the specific ways in which they are ethnocentric and non-representative. I then consider some of the ways in which Chaucer's work has been reimagined in positive political ways, such as Refugee Tales. I argue that we should continue to read Chaucer because his writings and the history of their reception continue to generate new and important ways of understanding the past history of race and racism, and thus enable the envisioning of more hopeful futures for Chaucerian scholars and our students.