Brag Posts

If you have been paying any attention to The Toast's content this past year, you'll know already that Mallory Ortberg has been killing it with her medieval-themed spoofs and humorous material. One of her recent successes was The Wife of Bath's Prologue. So I handed this piece to this semester's Chaucer students and told them they'd get extra credit for spoofing a different Tale, a la The Toast.

Chaucer has inspired a myriad of retellings, remixes, mashups, and other literary responses, and one of the most recent -- and most sophisticated -- homages is Patience Agbabi's Telling Tales (2014). Agbabi's poetry collection reimagines Chaucer's pilgrims in twenty-first century England and retells all his tales, via the diverse idioms of contemporary Brits and in equally diverse poetic styles.

In the spring of 2010, a group of my Chaucer students convinced me that they could make a film of Chaucer's "Legend of Dido" from his Legends of Good Women that would be an interpretively sophisticated engagement with Chaucer's poetry, his encounter with his classical sources, and his narrative techniques.