Chaganti, Seeta. "Juxtaposing Chaucer." Throughlines. www.throughlines.org/suite-content/juxtaposing-chaucer [Date accessed].
Juxtaposing Chaucer
An introduction to the "untimely juxtaposition" method.
The "untimely juxtaposition" method 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. This practice intends to lead towards liberatory insights and a complex interrogation of the social issues of our present moment. Sometimes this happens through something Chaucer's text says, and sometimes it happens in spite of it. The practice is dictated much less by Chaucer's own social identity, or authorial intention, than it is by a dynamic formalism that moves across time. In Throughlines there are three demonstrations of how Seeta Chaganti employs the "untimely juxtaposition": using “Merciless Beauty” to think through the carceral system and abolitionist frameworks, and House of Fame to talk about influence, colonization, and the memorialization of the past.
Further learning
"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.
Recommended
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Spenser and his racializing influences
Comparing episodes from The Faerie Queene with episodes from the works that inspired Spenser, in particular excerpts from Ariosto’s and Tasso’s works, is a productive way to draw attention to how racialization travels and mutates across national traditions.
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La Chanson de Roland and white supremacist medievalisms
La Chanson de Roland as a national epic was a product of both European nationalist and colonial aspirations. It's important for students to understand how the poem and its histories can reiterate Eurocentric white supremacist values if not properly contextualized.
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