Monday, April 3, 2017, 11:30 AM – 1 PM EDT

“Re-Inventing The Canterbury Tales:  Hypertext and ‘The General Prologue’”

Because, among the four Major English Poets from before 1700, only Chaucer wrote an English that is not modern, his work presents challenges that readers of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton do not normally face.  And because simple aesthetic justice demands that the Canterbury Tales be read in their original Middle English, one might posit an even stronger need for “reinventing” Chaucer.  But the supposed language impediment turns out to be something of a paper tiger, and readers soon discover that Chaucer is a poet of surprisingly contemporary sensibility, particularly in his use of a compositional mode that bears a striking resemblance to hypertext – a term coined fifty years ago to signify a collection of documents containing cross-references or "links" that allow a user to move easily from one document to another.  Excerpts from “The General Prologue” provide examples of such Chaucerian hypertext, which invites readers to search a richly complicated and multi-nodal network of meanings lying beyond the immediate textual site.  It turns out Chaucer needs no reinvention, but rather only a recognition that how his texts mean is entirely conducive to the way we read in the age of the Internet.