Chaucer: Medieval Contexts and Modern Adaptations
Spring 2017
Student Final Projects
ABOUT
Included on this site are the final projects produced by students enrolled in English 101: Chaucer: Medieval Contexts and Modern Adaptations during the Spring 2017 semester at the University of Pennsylvania. Some students wrote essays and others created adaptations of their own. All of their projects reveal the enduring complexity of Chaucer's medieval poetry and its relationship to our social worlds.
Course Description
This course explored the transnational, social, and political contexts that informed Chaucer's 14th-century masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales, as well as adaptations of his work in contemporary literary and film productions. We considered how Chaucer's witty and poetic brilliance translates into and sheds new light on our 21st-century world.
In addition to reading The Canterbury Tales in Chaucer's original Middle English, students read and watched several adaptations: Amy Tan’s Saving Fish from Drowning (2005), Patience Agbabi’s Telling Tales (2015), the poetry and prose collection Refugee Tales (2016), Kim Zarins’s Sometimes We Tell the Truth (2016), and the 2003 BBC mini-series The Canterbury Tales; and through the digital humanities Global Chaucers Project, we also explored the non-Anglophone translation history of Chaucer’s works.
Sierra Lomuto, Ph.D. Candidate in English
University of Pennsylvania