from 16 - Postscript: How to Talk about Chaucer with Your Friends and Colleagues
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 August 2020
The dialectical relation of long-form scholarly work and short-form blogs, social media and other contemporary public writing about how the political meanings of sex in Chaucer’s time speak vividly to our own experience cannot simply be dismissed as crudely instrumentalist or naively transhistoricist. Such approaches can provide a powerful justification for why we teach Chaucer and for his cultural significance today. Flagging the Canterbury Tales as “our cultural legacy” in the context of current considerations of “rape culture” is a rhetorical move that makes a claim for the continued liveliness and urgency of past literatures by showing how the past still inheres in the present, how present discourses can suddenly make the past newly familiar, how the past is still lively.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.