Seth LererRezensionen

8. The Life and Writings of Geoffrey Chaucer (The Great Courses) by Seth Lerer
published: 2013 (?)
format: 6:10 audible audiobook
acquired: audible unlimited listened: Jan 25 – Feb 1
rating: 4
genre/style: Lectures theme: Chaucer
locations: 14th century England
about the author: A Distinguished Professor of Literature at the University of California, San Diego, born in Brooklyn, 1955.

Seth Lerer is notable expert on Chaucer, cited, for example, by [[Marion Turner]] in a recent biography of Chaucer. This is a nice fast-paced entertaining overview. He gets to the heart of Chaucer without getting sidetracked by details. He reads Chaucer out loud in a very charming accent, which might be worth listening by itself, and he teaches the listener how to read Chaucer out loud. He stays big picture and selective. So don't expect much depth. I would liked to have learned a little more about Chaucer's contemporary poets and how his writing accent fit in with the different English dialects of the time. (Turner touches on this). But these are beyond the scope. I did get a sense of his language, and his themes, and that was terrific.

Also, I really enjoyed listening to Lerer. Recommended.

2023
https://www.librarything.com/topic/348551#8066945

I read this book as the main text for my History of Children's Literature class for my master's class. This is definitely a Euro-centric text without really acknowledging that, and sometimes Lerer's discussions of racism and colonialism are definitely clunky and cringeworthy. Also, although often enlightening and the area of the author's expertise, either the first chapters were written more circuitously or it took a while to get used to his writing style. I definitely enjoyed the back half of the book a lot more. Lerer is a professional philologist, and he filters his history through that lens (what the "reader's history" part of the title means), but overall a broad and enlightening introduction to Western children's literature.½

Lowest rating I've ever given to a Great Courses program. Now this, granted, is strictly an audiobook and not a video (even if it runs in the GC video player), but that's not the point. First of all, it's too short – just twelve half-hour lectures (a mere six hours) for the greatest poet. And too much of it is taken up with the lecturer's reading from the poetry. One ought to assume that anyone interested in Milton would at least take the effort to read the poetry oneself.

Contrast this with the superb GC course on Augustine's Confessions, which is substantially longer but, more importantly, consists of commentary and not primarily textual reading.

There are some good moments in this Milton course, primarily the instructor's close readings (in the style of explications de texte) as well as some references to particular imagery (e.g., hand-holding in Paradise Lost). But overall, just read the poetry for yourself and then go to some of the criticism. You might try the Norton Critical Edition for a good sampler.½

An excellent scholarly work on the subject. This book traces the idea of childhood through Western history (Ancient Greece to now) via selected literature read by those children. Engagingly written, it is a serious work and not to be confused with an encyclopedia or nostalgia for your favorite book. Mostly this book was like carrot cake: tremendously exciting before you start, a bit more carroty than you had imagined, but plenty of frosting and quite satisfying overall. Would be five stars on its own, but 4 for general readership (it does require a specific interest).

This feels surprisingly like a bunch of kids getting together and saying, "Hey! Let's have a show!" Only, here, it's "Hey! Let's publish some scholarly essays on Chaucer!" There is that same air of disorderly spontaneity.

In all, there are seven items here -- an introduction, five essays, and a postscript. They are a very miscellaneous lot. The first essay, "What is a text?" is relevant to Chaucer, given the unfinished state of the majority of his major works, but it has the unfortunate side effect of encouraging one of the worst movements in textual criticism: The stress on the changes in a text over time as opposed to trying to figure out what the author originally wrote. (For those who have some idea what I'm talking about, "Thus do I refute Jerome McCann." For those who don't... go ahead, use the Riverside Chaucer and forget I ever said anything.)

The first essay, "Rothelay, the De Vere Circle, and the Ellesmere Chaucer," is a useful attempt to wring information out of the material copied into the flyleaves of the Ellesmere Chaucer over the centuries, but it sadly cannot prove anything; it can only suggest.

"Proverbial Chaucer and the Chaucer Canon" looks at the way an author's "authority" could might apply to a canon of works other than what the author actually wrote. It's an interesting thesis, but I find that I remember almost nothing about the essay, so it obviously didn't teach me much....

"Mise-en-page in the Troilus Manuscripts: Chaucer and French Manuscript Culture" is perhaps the essay closest to the topic of the introduction: How the presentation of a piece affects how we respond to it. A valid point, but none of us are reading Troilus and Criseyde in a medieval manuscript.

"Social Texts, Bodley 686, and the Politics of the Cook's Tale" was perhaps the most interesting essay to me. Chaucer never finished the Cook's Tale in the Canterbury Tales, and that fact gave scribes a lot of trouble. Some admitted defeat and left blank space on the page. Many inserted another story, the romance of Gamelyn. Bodley 686 managed to pad out the Chaucer fragment into a short but coherent (if much too moralizing) tale. This essay discusses that process.

"Phylum-Tree-Rhizome" should have been my favorite essay, since it talks about the stemmatic method of textual criticism, which we use to try to reduce the mass of manuscripts into a coherent text. But author David Greetham's goal seems to be to introduce as much irrelevant science as possible (the only thing Murray Gell-Mann's hypotheses about quarks have to do with copies of Chaucer is that Chaucer manuscripts are, at a fundamental level, made of quarks and leptons. The mention of quarks in this essay is at best irrelevant and at worst obfuscation; my considered judgment would file it with "balderdash").

The postscript, "The Bindings of the Ellesmere Chaucer," is interesting in its way -- there is a lot of information about the manuscript here -- but is not in any way unique to this volume. I say that because I literally chanced, at the very time I was reading this volume, to be reading another one, The Ellesmere Chaucer: Essays in Interpretation, which happens to contain another summary of the conservator's report. If you haven't seen the report, then this is useful. But if you have, obviously, then having a second, not-too-different, copy is not helpful.

The bottom line is that there is no coherence to this volume. It feels as if the editor had high hopes and couldn't get anyone to deliver. I really think at least one of the items should have been left out, and probably two or three. Or get more essays and publish two books, one on the text of Chaucer and one on the way it has been presented. Something. This was no doubt a fun idea, but it needed a stronger script.

This is an enjoyable way to learn the basics about the Canterbury Tales, some of Chaucer's other works, his life (of which not enough is known), and his place in the history of English poetry. Lerer reads passages in Middle English before translating them to modern English. This is essential as it gives you a feel for the real poetry in Chaucer's language, even if you can't understand all of it. It makes me want to read the tales in more detail, and perhaps some of his more notorious work as well. I think a translation that presents the Middle English on one page and modern English on the facing page would be idea. I'm sure there must be one out there.

As a Teaching Company professor, Lerer rates in the top quartile. His delivery is smooth with very few stumbles and he doesn't sound like he's reading from a script. He also has a pleasant voice. (I listened to the audio edition. I don't even know if there is a video version of this one.)

Recommended for all English majors with gaps in their Chaucer education!

This was a CD course from the Teaching Company, which I listened to while driving to and from work. The course was fairly well done, although I got a bit annoyed with Seth Lerer telling us what he was going to say, then say it, and finally telling us what he did say. Okay, it is good teaching practice, but in 30 minutes, I think it was a waste of time.

The topics covered where the origins of Anglo-Saxon, through the Middle Ages, then past the Great Vowel Shift, and on to modern English. It was a fairly thorough overview, with some details. I would have liked a bit more in depth information for some topics of special interest to me. One thing I thought was interesting is that it conflicted in part with some of the ideas in The Story of Language, also by the Teaching Company.

Now I want to do more reading in linguistics.

Reading Professor Lerer’s overview of children’s literature throughout history was an education. I think of children’s literature as Charlotte’s Web. Lerer takes us on a journey much farther back, to “Aesop’s Fables” and The Iliad, which was foundational to children’s learning in the Western tradition. The real question ends up being: where do children fit in history? At what point did literature written specifically for children enter the canon?

Surprisingly, it’s much more recent then we may anticipate. Children’s literature only became such once children were accepted as different from adults.

I began a project of writing a post for each chapter I read in this book; I was trying to read the key foundational books that children, through history, used as their formative texts. When I got the chapter on Robinson Crusoe, Treasure Island, and so forth, I slowed down and I have not gone back and continued this project for the subsequent chapters.

My current thoughts about this book, having finished it, revolve somewhat around the first half, since that is the part I read two or three times. It’s a testimonial to me of classics. What amazed me is that children were able to read and learn from Robinson Crusoe in the 1800s. Why is it considered too advanced in language and concept for ten-year-old children today? In some respects, in reviewing the history of what children read, I realized that children are underestimated today. The fast-paced world of television and computer games has built generations of children that feel most comfortable with Captain Underpants and Diary of a Wimpy Kid. (Although I’ve read neither of these, they are the best-sellers and not Robinson Crusoe, so I feel safe making a stereotyped generalization.)

After reading about the history of children’s reading, my overall impression is that we need to offer our kids more. True, it’s okay to let them be kids: it took thousands of years to recognize the need for that stage of life. Professor Lerer’s chapters about the more recent themes in children’s literature are also important, because they illustrate the changing needs of children. After all, their role as children has only recently been created for them! It’s okay to have a separate children’s literature that they can best relate to. But at the same time, we need to believe in their abilities to understand, cope, and appreciate depth. It’s okay to give them a classic book we may consider “adult.” Chances are, two hundred years ago, it would have been a child’s favorite.

My (ongoing) project page on my blog

This is a chronological account of the development of the genre, with some thematic discussions and pointers as to the subjetcs raised on some key books. It was very useful as to the didacticism of the genre, the issues behind some of the works mentioned, authorial intentions and historical background.

This books has been used as 'further reading' for my Open University course EA300 'Children's Literature', it was quite good with essays too, provided I also used e-journals in my bibliography, to go further in the various debates raised.

From Indo-European to modern scientific language, this is an overview of the English language, with particular focus on England, the United States, and examples from literature that show not only the language itself, but attitudes about proper usage and grammar.

I cannot pretend to be an expert, but I enjoy popular works on language, and this audio lecture series was no exception. Professor Lerer presents 36 college-level lectures. His delivery is smooth without sounding stilted or droning. Some audience response is also audible, making you feel like you're really sitting in on a lecture. I found the lectures extremely accessible, and found little overlap between the information presented and the Intro to Linguistics class that I took in college several years ago. I especially enjoyed the way in which Prof. Lerer uses literature to back up his points, quoting from such works as The Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare, the King James Bible, and Moby Dick. In fact, I was a little surprised to find that, yet again, reading leads to more reading and my TBR list has grown as a result.½

Yet another history of the language, this time approached through literature. It takes examples from the writing of the day, from Caedmon through Shakespeare to rap. The author goes into considerable detail on some points, including the Great Vowel Shift. Well worth reading, even if you have read many other histories of English.

Anyone interested in a concise, engaging history of English, look no further than Professor Seth Lerer's "Inventing English." This splendid little book (266 pages plus appendices) has superb, easily-digested detail when the subject warrants it, and glosses over long periods when they provide no instructive changes. I had the sensation while reading it, of flying over the subject at 35,000 feet, and then plunging to the surface of minute detail at strategic stops along the way.

We have a simple, straightforward section on Old English (or Anglo-Saxon), one of a family of Germanic and Scandinavian languages. I had not understood in such clear terms the extent of post-Conquest class difference which one's language indicated: if you spoke Anglo-Norman (William's language), you were privileged; if you spoke Anglo-Saxon, you were the newly bereft, untouchable. The chapter on Chaucer gave me a better understanding of this brillant and sardonic poet than any past study. He did not invent Middle English, but he did perform a stunning conflation of its mix of sources, syntax, politics, and mutability. While doing so, he hearkened back to some Old English structure and practices. He also understood the subject of post-Conquest language in England to be a highly charged political issue.

Prof. Lerer provides no dry, date-giving overview. He includes spicy, provocative exegeses along the way of anonymous Anglo-Saxon versifiers, and in turn, Chaucer, Shakespeare (to a somewhat lesser depth, however), Milton, Dr. Johnson and Emily Dickinson in a particularly head-turning juxtaposition, Mark Twain, and Ralph Ellison. (I will never think of the quote "I yam what I am!" in the way same again.)

Professor Lerer (he's the Avalon Foundation Professor of the Humanities at Stanford) engages us throughout this book; this was its principal surprise for me. He takes his reader along for a joyous ride, full of wisdom and telling anecdote. I found myself assiduously taking notes, with a lot more enthusiasm than ever I did in linguistics class. Some exposure to linguistics, in fact, would be helpful as you approach this book, but is certainly not essential. This book is made for the language-loving lay person.

I generally get my books at the library. But his one, I'm thinking, I'm going to have to go out and buy. I'm going to want to return to it pretty often. It's full of intriguing information, engagingly presented. Lovers of the English language will love this. I did and do.

This took a while to finish--I read a chapter a day. Most of the chapters end like the grand finale of a book--Lerer writes in his intro that chapters don't need to be read in sequence. Lerer loves his subject and language in general, but sometimes I (maybe peevishly) think that his great enjoyment comes a little bit at his reader's expense. There is a glossary in back, but for me it could be twice as long. It doesn't include all the many polysyllabic words with Latin and Greek roots ending in "-ology", or "-graphy", or etc., that (for me) clog up the text and make reading sometimes have the cumbersome feel of translating. Lerer uses dramatic figurative language, and like early English poets he loves alliteration. (It's a lively lexical landscape!) His words bristle with so much life and almost self-aware purpose that sometimes his pages feel noisy and crowded. And then there are the sentences like, "Behind them lies a conception of vernacular character and the character of the vernacular." (P 116)

Those mild complaints aside, this is a fascinating subject and Lerer is a knowledgeable and enthusiastic guide. I really love his Teaching Company lectures on the history of the English language and it's nice to have some of that information in book form.

I am no linguist, and not particularly skilled at finessing the subtleties of sounds we humans speak into meaning: monopthongs versus dipthongs, vowels held long in the front versus short in the back. But I am a person endlessly fascinated by the English language, and the way its history reflects the greater history of the people who have spoken it and shaped it over the years. As a passionate non-specialist, then, I found Seth Lerer's Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language highly satisfying: Lerer's essays on English lingual history are clear and juicy, with just enough patient explanation of technical linguistic terms to enable the casual reader to follow along easily. More than that, he analyzes the unexpected ways in which social and political movements have influenced the course of the language's evolution.

The theme that struck me most, through all of Lerer's chapters, was how fundamentally political language is, and how double-edged. From the very beginning of our history as English speakers, we've been engaged in a complicated relationship with how (or whether) our language should expand to include outside influences, and what lingual "purity" would even look like. This may sound familiar: it's still being played out in the fight to establish English as the official language of the United States, a move motivated by fear of the growing Spanish-speaking populations here. But it's nothing new. In one early section I found particularly fascinating, Lerer discusses the first known rhymed poem written in English. Some background for those who don't know: Anglo-Saxon or Old English poetry didn't generally rhyme; instead, it was organized around principles such as alliteration, kennings (novel compound words that expressed a single concept, like the coinage "whaleroad" for the ocean), and numbers of stressed syllables per line. Rhymed poetry was typical of Latinate literature, and began to filter into English after the Norman (French) invasion of 1066. But what I found so striking was that this poem, which incorporated a brand-new verse technology learned directly from the French, was in content a protest poem against those very same invaders, a lyric composed on the death of William the Conqueror, which catalogued his atrocities:

Castelas he let wyrcean,

7 earme men swi∂e swencean,

Se cyng waes swa swi∂e stearc,

7 benam of his underþeoddan manig marc

goldes 7 ma hundred punda seolfres.

Det he name be wihte

7 mid mycelan unrihte

of his landloede

for littelre neode.

He waes on gitsunge befeallan,

7 graedinaesse he lufode mid ealle.

He saette mycel deorfri∂,

7 he laegde laga þaerwi∂

þet swa hwa swa sloge heort o∂∂e hinde,

þet hine man sceolde blendian.



[He had castles built

and poor men terribly oppressed.

The king was very severe,

and he took from his underlings many marks

of gold and hundreds of pounds of silver.

All this he took from the people,

and with great injustice

from his subjects,

to gratify his trivial desire.

He had fallen into avarice,

and he loved greediness above everything else.

He established many deer preserves,

and he set up laws concerning them,

such that whoever killed a hart or a hind

should be blinded.]

This poem strikes me as so poignant. The author (a monk at the outlying Peterborough monastery) must have consciously chosen to write it in rhyming form, as the vast majority of the English poetry of the period wasn't rhymed. I can't resist speculating on why, therefore, he didn't take the more obvious route of a defiantly Anglo-Saxon verse form to protest the Norman tyranny. Was it a melancholy gesture away from the poetic forms he felt were his own, looking toward a period of colonization? Or did the mixed messages of the poem reflect his own conflicted feelings, his resentment of Norman oppression battling with admiration of the new French styles in verse and culture? Lerer points out that the very first word in the poem, "castelas" or castles, was an importation from Norman French: Anglo-Saxons didn't build in stone, but in wood, and readers of Beowulf will remember their vast-timbered halls. The Normans, on the other hand, peppered English soil with stone castles as part of their program of commandeering the land for royal use. In this poem, then, we can see the simultaneous transformation of language, landscape, and ways of thinking. Fascinating stuff.

And this tension between the old and new, between expansive cosmopolitanism and protective nativism, continues through nearly every essay in Lerer's book. There are intriguing debates, in the centuries after his life, about whether Chaucer's popularization of so many French-derived words was a boon or a curse: Edmund Spenser wrote that Chaucer had tapped "the well of English undefiled," whereas early philologist Alexander Gil said that he "rendered his poetry notorious by the use of Latin and French words," going on to call the resulting English an "illegitimate progeny" and a "monster." Interestingly, in both these cases the "undefiled" English is perceived as of a higher class: to Spenser, the addition of the colonizer's French-derived words raises the language to new poetic heights, whereas by Gil's time it's possible to complain that "everyone [e.g., even the commoner] wishes to appear as a smatterer of tongues and to vaunt his proficiency in Latin, French (or any other language)." Gil, therefore, as a mark of educated difference, advocates a return to the "purity" of Anglo-Saxon-derived words. (The irony? His anti-Latinate treatise is written in...Latin.)

But Lerer makes the point, again and again, that attempts to restrict the growth of the language are both misguided and doomed to failure. From the huge influx of foreign-derived words during the commerce and exploration boom of the sixteenth century, to the formation of Atlantic creoles as a product of the slave trade, to the jargon introduced into our speech by the soldiers of successive wars, Lerer insists that our language reflects the way we live, and that to expect anything else is foolhardy. I strongly agree with this idea: modern English is not debased, any more than Anglo-Saxon English encapsulated some mythical "purity." We should revel in the richness and diversity of our language, not fight it.

One of the most touching chapters of Inventing English deals with Samuel Johnson's personal transformation over the course of writing his Dictionary. Beginning the task with the goal of "fixing" the language in place, of ascertaining proper usage and recording it for all time, he gradually came to appreciate the untameable flow of the English tongue:

[A]fter years of false starts, failures, and impediments - he was unable to complete the task in the three years he set himself; his wife died in the process; his amanuenses found his work almost impossible to follow; he abandoned Chesterfield's patronage - after all this he realized that it is impossible to fix a language. In the preface to the Dictionary that finally appeared in 1755, he saw a language not imperial but "sublunary," mutable and transitory. Like Caxton, who saw English living under the "domynacioun of the moon," Johnson found himself incapable of fixing usage. His purpose, now, had become "not to form, but register the language; not to teach men how they should think, but relate how they have hitherto expressed their thoughts."

I was cheering Johnson on here. His journey was not an easy one - he spent eight years basically despondent - but to me, the outcome was so worthwhile: an appreciation of the strength, richness, and changeability of his mother tongue.

Inventing English was full of fascinating little tidbits; I was constantly reading this or that juicy anecdote out loud to David as I perused it. "Did you know," I would say, "that 'hubbub' was originally an onomatopoetic term based on what English people heard in the speech of the Irish and Welsh?" Or "Wow, did you know 'dude' originated as a term for a citified dandy? I always thought it originally described cowboys!' These little insights are fascinating and thought-provoking, but Lerer also does a good job of taking his history beyond the anecdotal, and tying these small examples into a larger context of social and political change. I ardently enjoyed it, and might even follow up a few of the chapters with some more in-depth reading.