Seeta Chaganti

Erasure poetry exercise: Chaucer’s The House of Fame

A student exercise using erasure poetry to interrogate Chaucer's text. By redacting Chaucer's poem, students can reimagine their relationship to premodern literature.

Teaching "Merciless Beauty" in juxtaposition

When teaching "Merciless Beauty" alongside the film The Prison in 12 Landscapes, discussion questions can help students engage with topics of incarceration and justice.

Teaching Chaucer and justice

A list of contemporary readings on critical theory and justice frameworks that help us reimagine ways to teach Chaucer in the 21st century.

Deplatforming Chaucer

By using the untimely juxtaposition method outlined by Seeta Chaganti, Chaucer's House of Fame can act as a catalyst to a discussion about the removal of Confederate monuments.

Chaucer, Virgil, and erasure poetry

Teaching Chaucer's House of Fame alongside contemporary Nisga'a poet Jordan Abel's The Place of Scraps allows students to consider the issues of source, adaptation, colonization, and race in our literary lineage.

"Merciless Beauty" and carceral justice

“Merciless Beauty” is a poem written in a late 14th-century English that may or may not be Chaucer’s but is highly comparable to Chaucer’s usage. Reading the poem alongside the film The Prison in 12 Landscapes, students are asked to make connections between the poem and the film and their formal examinations of time, incarceration, and repetition.

Juxtaposing Chaucer

Seeta Chaganti offers an introduction to her "untimely juxtaposition" method, which places Chaucer's texts next to modern artifacts like film, visual art, and contemporary literature to open new avenues of exploration and discussion with students.