New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession

This issue includes two special clusters: “Teaching v. Research,” edited by Katie Little, and “The Time of Psychoanalysis,” edited by Ruth Evans and R. D. Perry. It also includes three essays on teaching and contributions to three of our columns: “How I Teach,” “Conversations,” and “Histories.”

This brief essay describes a few things I've learned pedagogically from students and colleagues in STEM, with examples of how I've brought those perspectives in the classroom. It concludes with some reflections on how those pedagogical experiences have informed my recent research.

Reading Icelandic Sagas against a medieval legal background in a First-Year Writing Seminar is a useful way to teach students the bones of academic argument. When the classroom is transformed into a courtroom through re-enactments of the legal struggles at the Althing, all students participate, and some exploratory students sign up for English and creative writing.

The essay explores a few strategies that the author has found effective for combining teaching and scholarship. First, broadly falling under the category of medievalism, adaptations, translations, and popular culture manifestations of medieval texts and authors work well in the classroom and have increasingly gained academic interest and a journal presence. Second, any aspects of digital humanities that one can manage to incorporate into teaching and scholarship benefit both students who need technical skills and graduate students/early-career faculty who may be considering alt-ac (alternaive academic) careers.

In this essay, I discuss the relationship between my teaching and my scholarship in medieval studies as a lone medievalist at a public regional instituion in the South. I argue that their are many possibilities as well as limitations associated with this role, and I offer several suggestions about how the field as a whole might better reflect those experiences in our publication venues.

This essay explores some of the difficulties in aligning one's teaching and research priorities when teaching at a small liberal arts college; it then reflects on textual editing for the classroom as one way of synthesizing these commitments.

This article describes the author's experience teaching the emerging literary genre and internet subculture called "Dark Academia" in the undergraduate classroom. The pedagogical successes and failures of this class take on new meaning when viewed in the context of the author's research on medieval manuscript culture and the reception and circulation of these books after the Middle Ages.

Traditional assumptions about the relationship between research and teaching are challenged by the trend of PhD-holding candidates with research agendas being hired into full-time non-tenure-track positions, jobs that generally lack a research component.

This is the Introduction to the cluster of essays on The Time of Psychoanalysis.

This essay surveys the continued persistence of psychoanalytic theory and practice over the past decades. It argues that the psychoanalytic understanding of “ambivalence” has been crucial (and underappreciated) in key developments in both affect theory and in the use of psychoanalysis in critical race studies. Such ambivalence, moreover, still has the capacity to prod critical conversations in more nuanced, less antithetical, directions.

For a time, if one wanted to capture the emotional landscape of late medieval literature, psychoanalysis appeared to be the most acute and persuasive analytic tool. From the subjectivity of courtly love to the identification with a suffering God to the defenses against the pleasures of others and neighbors, psychoanalysis offered illuminating frameworks in startling sympathy with medieval texts. With the ascendance of affect theory and its associated (if varied) attention to the non-discursive, the biological or natural, and the conscious or self-understood, the role of psychoanalysis has become less clear. My essay explores the productive intersections between psychoanalysis and affect theory, and especially Lauren Berlant’s suggestion that we think again about sex and sexual desire as possible sites of individual and cultural transformation. The phenomenon of repetition is a focus shared by psychoanalysis and affect theory, and I propose the reiterative conventions of courtly love as a place where the tensions between the two approaches may provide a window into medieval meditations on sex, love, and cultural change.

This essay places Sigmund Freud in a long tradition of allegorists who portray the psyche as self-disciplining. While Freud’s writings on the ego, id, and superego are reminiscent of premodern allegories, however, Freud is considerably less willing than many of his predecessors to encourage conscious self-discipline. Though he conceived of the superego as a disciplinary agent, Freud believed that analysis often calls for “the slow demolition of the hostile superego.” Psychoanalysis, in other words, entails a counter-confession: an intersubjective asceticism through which analyst and analysand discipline the discipliner within. The conclusion posits that the uncanny resemblance between Freud’s allegories and those of his premodern predecessors presents us a pedagogical opportunity to teach our students the long history of psychological allegory and help them appreciate the dynamic complexity of both Freud’s works and the archive of premodern allegory—bodies of writing that they often presuppose to be static, reductive, or irrelevant.

This paper reads the Man of Law’s Tale at the intersection of logistics, cultural capital, and psychoanalysis. It argues that Custance’s acts of religious observance participate in the late medieval culture of good wifely conduct and private devotion. Conduct is an embodied state of cultural capital in which self-improvement is indistinguishable from self-investment. In Custance’s case, her wifely conduct becomes a racialized cultural capital that she brings to distant lands and effects conversion. Her ship is the space of the Lacanian Imaginary, and her body and flesh are what Anne Anlin Cheng would term a “zone of contamination,” a psychic space in which subjecthood and objecthood are merged. As a form of governance, conduct is an effect of capitalism on the self and the collective. The racialized cultural capital that Custance traffics in, rather than offering any pure and stable technique of self-making, is at best a symptom awaiting analysis.

In this short afterword, I speculate about two scenarios in other disciplines where thinking through psychoanalytic categories might afford new historical sensitivities. In experimenting with the possibilities of psychoanalysis, I draw examples from fields that are non literary or at most adjacent to literary studies. The provocative contributions to this colloquium, "The Time of Psychoanalysis," showcase the advantages of psychoanalytic perspectives in the study of medieval literature, whether in teaching or in further research. How might we imagine these advantages in other disciplines, and indeed, how might those literary scholars who work inside the frame of psychoanalysis demonstrate its value to colleagues in other linguistic and disciplinary traditions, persuading scholars in other fields to use it?

Various practical challenges deter scholars from writing single-author teaching books, but such books have particular virtues to offer pedagogy. This article describes some of the choices made in the writing of a teaching book, How to Read Middle English Poetry. It is presented not as a set of final rulings on best practice, but as an account of decisions made, to lift the lid on the work and support the creation of more pedagogical tools in future.

Chaucer's poetic works are full of references to sound and music, incorporated variously as part of thematization, characterization, and rhetorical structure. Attending to Chaucer's repeated interest in sound in his poetry allows scholars and students to consider how the field of literary sound studies can be applied to these works, providing another point of access for students as they become acquainted with and interrogate Chaucer’s poetry. For those interested in trying this approach to teaching Chaucer in the college classroom, this essay provides resources for instructors and students, including an overview of the field of literary sound studies, its intersection with Chaucer’s poetry, and two sample activities for use in both undergraduate and graduate courses.

Scholars in the fields of medieval literary studies and composition and rhetoric are often separated from each other by their specialization. While knowledge of composition theory is necessary for many medievalists to thrive in English departments, if only with respect to pedagogy, the reverse is not often the case. Yet medieval studies, too, has much to teach critics of composition and rhetoric. In this essay, I describe a lesson on Chaucer’s House of Fame for a first-year composition course. Focusing on how students can look at the poem’s retelling of the story of Dido and Aeneas as an example of source use, I argue that medieval poetry can teach them how to combine sources with original material to create a new contribution to a critical conversation and teach us about our students’ anxieties about citation.

This essay explores how I taught, in its entirety, my Piers Plowman: A Translation of the A Version: Revised Edition (Calabrese 2023) for sophomore English majors, who had little or no prior experience with medieval literature. In the required, multi-sectioned English 3000 (called “tutorial”) students focus for an entire semester on one text of the professor’s choosing and read it slowly.  No surprise that I choose Piers Plowman in my own translation, for Piers can teach students so much about genre, poetic form, voice, allegory, and a host of other devices and key literary concepts. Plus, its critical tradition and engagement in history are robust and thus perfect for introducing the students to academic research.

Candace Barrington interviews Patience Agbabi about her relationship to Geoffrey Chaucer and his Canterbury Tales.

The International Anchoritic Society (IAS) celebrated its twentieth year in 2023. Despite its name, the IAS studies all forms of medieval religious reclusion, not just the titular anchorites, and not just within the Christian tradition. Starting in 1998, independently organized sessions at Kalamazoo gradually coalesced into a formal organization, recognized officially in 2003, that has always been inclusive and supportive of forward-thinking scholarship, with many members representing the queer community and medievalists of color.