New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession

This essay examines questions around teaching allegory to undergraduates in a liberal arts setting, with a focus on the uses for both reading and inviting students to write contemporary adaptations of premodern works. The complexities of literary character are sometimes reflexively disallowed to the personified figures of premodern allegory. A better tack, without assimilating medieval literary modes into modern ones, might have us attend to the variety of ways in which concepts are given embodied, social life in allegory. Adaptation assignments can invite self-involving hermeneutic engagement, analytic rigor, and creative response from students. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's Everybody, a recent adaptation of Everyman, is looked to here as a model conversation partner for such a pedagogical approach.