Written Arts Program, Medieval Studies Program, Literature Program, and Historical Studies Program Present

The Authorial "I" Is Always
a Fiction ... Except When It Isn't

What is to be made of the poet’s and fiction writer’s invented “I” and the potentially bogus details in which it is arrayed?  With respect to matters of biographical truth, the normal and sensible answer is normally: nothing at all.  Yet the pre-modern literary biographer—limited by a paucity of available material—can hardly afford to neglect this tantalizing source of potential life-evidence.  Author of a recent Chaucer biography, Chaucer’s Tale: 1386 and the Road to Canterbury (2014), Paul Strohm will speak about the interpretative temptations posed by the author’s elusive “I.”  He will pursue this question in writings by Chaucer, and, more briefly, in contemporary instances from gangsta rap and the “non-fiction novels” of Karl Ove Knausgaard.
        
Paul Strohm is the author of Social Chaucer (Harvard, 1989,1994); Hochon's Arrow: The Social Imagination of Fourteenth-Century Texts (Princeton, 1992); England's Empty Throne: Usurpation and Textual Legitimation, 1399-1422 (Yale UK, 1998); Theory and the Premodern Text (Minnesota, 2000); Politique: Languages of Statecraft Between Chaucer and Shakespeare (Notre Dame, 2005); and Chaucer’s Tale: 1386 and the Road to Canterbury (Viking, 2014).  He has been J.R.R. Tolkien Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford and Garbedian Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University.  He is currently Honorary Research Professor at Queen Mary, University of London.

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For more information, call 845-758-7211, or e-mail [email protected].

Time: 5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

Location: Olin Humanities, Room 204

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