Download Paul Strohm

Writing Premodern Biography
Tue 19.11. 2013, 16-18
Seminar room Tempo (Kaivokatu 12, Minerva, 2nd floor)
Basing his remarks on his forthcoming Chaucer biography, Paul Strohm will
consider several problems connected with premodern biography and life-writing.
The presentation will follow a "discussion" or seminar format, with occasions for
questions and comments. Some of the topics to be considered will be: occasions of
medieval life-writing, the problem of premodern sources, the special issues and best
focus of "literary biography," the vexed status of apparent life-evidence occurring
within a writer's own imaginary works. Professor Strohm will offer illustrative
examples from his own writing on Chaucer, and will invite questions and instances
arising from the research of other participants.
*
Professor Paul Strohm is one of the leading Chaucer-researchers. He has worked as
a J.R.R. Tolkien Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of
Oxford and Anna S. Garbedian Professor of the Humanities at the Columbia
University in the City of New York. His most famous publications are The Social
Chaucer (Harvard, 1989) and Hochon's Arrow: The Social Imagination of FourteenthCentury Texts (Princeton, 1992). His forthcoming book A Day in the Life of Chaucer
will be published next year (Penguin, 2014).