Carolina Weatherall

On Tuesday, students and community members gathered in the Massachusetts Hall Faculty Room for a talk by Professor Robert (Bobby) Meyer-Lee titled “Why Chaucer—Still?” The event was sponsored by the Alpha Delta Phi Society Visiting Writer Series.

Meyer-Lee is a professor of English at Agnes Scott College, specializing in Early English literature, particularly from the late medieval period. He is the author of various books on English poet and author Geoffrey Chaucer, including his upcoming release “Reading Geoffrey Chaucer: An Introduction.”

His 2023 book “The Problem of Literary Value” helped frame and inspire his talk and influenced Associate Professor of English Emma Maggie Solberg, who teaches a Chaucer seminar, to bring him to campus.

“At the end of the Chaucer class, we always end with asking, ‘Why have I taught this class? And why have you taken it, and what have we learned?’” Solberg said. “This book is explicitly about that, where he asks, ‘Why Chaucer?’ It’s unusual to find someone addressing that question explicitly for an entire book-length study, so I thought he’d be perfect.”

As he began, Meyer-Lee explored the key tensions surrounding Chaucer’s work.

“The position as the father of English poetry carries with it a set of values that has served and continues to serve as a legitimizing framework for some deeply entrenched injustices. Many of those injustices [continue to have a deeply detrimental impact] encapsulated by the phrase white, male, Eurocentric canon and the social, cultural and political and institutional sources that have created that canon in their own image and have stalled Chaucer as its English fountain ahead.” Meyer-Lee said.

However, as a scholar of Chaucer himself, Meyer-Lee noted the nuance of this conversation as he continues to engage with his works as an educator.

“The obvious incoherency here is that I could write these sentences and yet continue to actively choose to teach Chaucer, right?… The curricular problem with Chaucer is an epiphenomenon of the more general problem of literary value,” Meyer-Lee said.

Meyer-Lee further debated the literary and ethical value of Chaucer’s works.

“A curricular environment that typically no longer demands that Chaucer be taught and in which there are some good reasons not to teach him, prompts us to inquire not just into why we teach him but also why we believe his works remain worth reading in and of themselves, regardless of their historical or literary historical significance,” Meyer-Lee said.

In his talk, Meyer-Lee highlighted the opening lines of  “The Canterbury Tales,” exploring the ambiguity often noticed in the work, what he called “laconic profundity.”

“By ‘laconic profundity,’ I mean that the way his writings so often invoke weighty, even fraught issues with very little fuss or difficulty. These issues frequently seem to arise as a sort of side effect of a particular moment of narration or dialogue, rather than striking us as a calculated underlying motivation,” Meyer-Lee said. “The issues manifest in a readily perceptible manner that nonetheless typically remain half-submerged and almost always lack accompanying definitive explanations, and so leave open not only the presumed proper responses, but also precise nature and reach of the issues themselves.”

When setting up Meyer-Lee’s visit to campus, Solberg hoped to add a new dimension to her class discussions on Chaucer with the dialogue between Meyer-Lee and professor of English at Colby College Megan Cook, who is also an expert on Chaucer.

“I wanted [my students] to have the opportunity to hear an authoritative voice that’s not mine and to meet a real Chaucerian and to be able to interact with him, ask questions of him,” Solberg said. “Listening to [Meyer-Lee and Cook] go back and forth about Chaucer—that’s something I wanted my students to be able to hear: two Chaucerians arguing.

Meyer-Lee echoed this goal, pushing for a more nuanced understanding of Chaucer.

“In my connection to Chaucer and wanting to be a missionary for Chaucer, I hope I can probably make Chaucer more interesting for [these students],” Meyer-Lee said.

He further emphasized the value of Chaucer and his literary legacy at schools like Bowdoin.

“Liberal arts colleges need to stick together and amplify the kind of environment in which we talk, think and work,” Meyer-Lee said.