Chaucer Gets Canceled! (part I)

Two excerpts from "Gladly wolde he lerne? Why Chaucer is disappearing from the university curriculum"
By A. S. G. Edwards

Times Literary Supplement, July 2, 2021

It was announced in January that the University of Leicester was to remove Chaucer from the English curriculum. Along with the rest of medieval literature, and some from later periods, he was to be replaced with courses on “race, ethnicity, sexuality and diversity”. The announcement prompted widespread and ineffectual protests. Several medievalists at Leicester have now lost their jobs, and incoming students will henceforward be denied the opportunity to study the father of English poetry (among much else).

The reason initially given by the University for this decision was economic: these courses were not popular with undergraduates. This assertion has been questioned and the University has not presented evidence to substantiate its claim. It has been frequently asserted in the media that the real motive is a desire to “decolonize” the curriculum, a suggestion that the University has denied.

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This is a passage from a recent essay by Samantha Katz Seal and Nicole Sidhu in the Chaucer Review, a scholarly journal:

<<<
[Chaucer’s] historical persona, his ill-hidden prejudices, drift to the surface again and again within his works. He is a rapist, a racist, an anti-Semite; he speaks for a world in which the privileges of the male, the Christian, the wealthy, and the white are perceived to be an inalienable aspect of human existence. Many feminist scholars now ask … whether the time has come for feminists to move past Chaucer, to demand a new object of study less burdened by the weight of moral insufficiency. And perhaps that will be the conversation of future years, of future incarnations of medievalist feminism.
>>>

This is critical thinking in the age of Donald Trump. (I know of one eminent Chaucer scholar who resigned from the Editorial Board of the Chaucer Review over these words.) It is also another form of the impulse felt by Leicester’s administrators: the desire to remove Chaucer from the university curriculum and find “a new object of study”. But here the motives are based on pseudo-ideological grounds that seem close to personal loathing. It is easy to respond with simple arguments that refute the simplistic assumptions of these academics: to point out that the depiction of character and event by a writer is not an invariable or necessary reflection of the author’s own assumptions. But to have to do so is a stark demonstration of the ways in which thought has been replaced by kinds of unreflective dogma in some parts of academe.

The actions of radical feminists and of the University of Leicester are different forms of political correctness, one striving for “relevance”, the other seeking to suppress literary history by the invention of grounds for seeing it as offensive. Both seek a simpler academic world shaped by the doctrinaire. The proper study of Chaucer involves the appreciation of difficulty, of complexity, as, of course, does the literary and historical analysis of any significant literary figure or work. This ought not to need to be said. But difficulty and complexity have become danger words in academe. They impose on both teacher and student the pressure of effort. In the case of Chaucer, the extent of that effort is compounded by the extent of the linguistic and cultural distance that separates us from his writings. It is attractive in various quarters to find reasons not to make such effort, to assume that students are afraid of difficulty and that teachers should not challenge them. A scholarly world where we seek not to disturb or be disturbing is one in which Chaucer will not be welcome as a subject for study

A. S. G. Edwards is General Editor (with Julia Boffey) of a new edition of The Works of Chaucer, which is forthcoming.

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/why-is-chaucer-disappearing-from-the-university-curriculum-leicester-essay-a-s-g-edwards/

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/chaucer-today/

https://theconversation.com/calls-to-cancel-chaucer-ignore-his-defense-of-women-and-the-innocent-and-assume-all-his-characters-opinions-are-his-152312 

Comments

[Bruno Anthony]

And not only that, in high school he drank a six pack and he made a pass at a girl!

[Terence Winch]

This is truly sad and unbelievable.

[David Beaudouin]

Sadly, this critical attitude, couched in current correctness, is strangely blind to the fact that folks in the 14th century simply did not behave or think the way we do today. It's thus a specious argument to expect them retrospectively to do so or else be censored. And may I add that Chaucer authored what's considered to be one of the first feminist narratives in the English Language, the Wife of Bath's Tale.