Chaganti, Seeta. "Chaucer, Virgil, and erasure poetry." Throughlines. www.throughlines.org/suite-content/chaucer-virgil-and-erasure-poetry. [Date accessed].

Chaucer, Virgil, and erasure poetry

Chaucer's anxiety of influence in The House of Fame.

Download the transcript
Seeta Chaganti
University of California, Davis

Chaucer's House of Fame is a strange poem, one that is compulsive in its use of allusions and citations. The poem is a dream vision in which a poet finds himself in a hall of images of famous people from the past, asking the reader to consider the power dynamics involved between authors who influence each other. Teaching this poem alongside contemporary poet Jordan Abel's book The Place of Scraps helps students imagine the links between influence from Chaucer to now. Abel, a Nisga'a poet from British Columbia, wrote his collection through the erasure of a 20th-century anthropological work, Totem Poles, by the white Ottowan settler Marius Barbeau. Putting Abel and Chaucer in conversation allows students to consider the issues of source, adaptation, colonization, and race in our literary lineage.

Further learning

Video

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.

Seeta Chaganti
Activity

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.

Seeta Chaganti

Recommended

Video

Premodern race as a critical canon

Heng offers insight on approaches to teaching the traditional, canonized literature of premodern Europe through the lens of premodern critical race studies.

Geraldine Heng
Video

Blackness as metaphor

The history of racial construction is long and non-linear. Unpacking Blackness within medieval epics, and examining how Black characters are treated in these stories allow us to see how medieval Europe used Blackness as a rhetorical tool.

Cord J. Whitaker
Video

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.

Seeta Chaganti