Whose Voice is Heard? Understanding and Engaging the Literary Canon from Chaucer through Shakespeare and Milton

Faculty Advisor: Lecturer in English, Yale

Research Program Introduction

This program is designed around pivotal works of early English poets: Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton. Students will be offered excerpts from these canonical authors’ works and taught strategies for engaging the language, ideas, and forms of these texts, which can seem at once radically strange and deeply familiar. In doing so, this program provides students an opportunity to understand the history of English literature while developing the close reading strategies that are essential for successful engagement in any text-based discipline.

In addition, this program asks about each poet's cultural legacy in the twenty-first century. Much of the “genius” of these poets lies in the ways they reworked earlier stories and traditions. In turn, each fertilized the “genius” of future poets. It is this echo chamber of influence that determines a “canon” – and it is the “canon” that promotes or erases different voices within a society. Each author, therefore, is paired with a modern, historically marginalized voice that riffs, develops, questions, or explores old questions from a new vantage point: Patience Agbabi, a British/Nigerian spoken-word poet, revisits Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in her modern collection Telling Tales (2015); Terrance Hayes, a Black American artist and author, experiments with Shakespearean-style Sonnets in American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (2018); and Jericho Brown reflects on the legacy of the English canon in his interview for the Bennington Review.

By probing both the strangeness and familiarity of canonical authors and by engaging modern reworkings of their most famous texts, we will ask ourselves whose voice is heard and why, questioning the universality of art to express human experience.

Through this program, students will hone the critical art of close reading and strengthen academic and/or creative writing skills that are fundamentally required if they want to succeed in any of the humanities or social sciences. At the end of the project, each student will produce an academic paper or a creative writing piece.

Possible Choice For Final Project:

Students can choose to write an academic paper or a creative writing project.

• Academic Papers:

  • Select a canonical author (Chaucer/Shakespeare/Milton) and select a short poetic passage NOT discussed in class. Put your selection in dialogue with our course material. In what way does your text elaborate on/subvert/enrich one of the literary motifs of the English canon? How does this illustrate the benefits of intra-authorial intellectual play? 

  • Select a modern poet who directly quotes/retells/rewrites a canon text. In what way have they modified the original? For what purpose? Does your research suggest that the canon is suffocating/restrictive or that it encourages literary play? 

  • Select a modern poet who indirectly engages a literary motif from the canon. In what way is the poem enhanced by reading against the canonical authors taught in this class? 

  • Select a modern poet who explores any of the issues raised by Agbabi, Hayes, or Brown (the contemporary authors taught in this program). In what ways do their poems contribute to the themes discussed in the program? 

• Creative Writing Projects:

  • Be Agbabi or Hayes! Be the poet who rewrites/reworks a canonical poem in your own voice. In addition, compose a short reflective piece on the changes you’ve made. What was the point you were trying to make? How does your unique “voice” contribute to the canon? 

  • Create a “dialogue” between yourself and one of the canonical authors discussed in this course. What would you challenge them about? How would they defend themselves? 

  • Other professor-approved topics that are relevant to this program

Program Detail

• Cohort size: 3 to 5 students

• Duration: 12 weeks

• Workload: Around 4 to 5 hours per week (including class and homework time)

• Target students: 9 to 12th graders interested in English, History, Philosophy, Political Science, Law, Religion or any students who will rely on reading and writing as a critical part of scholastic or professional success