The Paul Gottschalk Memorial Lecture: 

Prosopopoeia and Defacement: Fictions of Voice in The Canterbury Tales by Julie Orlemanski

This lecture takes up the fragile but irrepressible relations among language, voice, and person as these are figured in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. I focus on two tales and their defaced protagonists—the murdered schoolboy in the Prioress’s Tale and the slain maiden Virginia in the Physician’s Tale. In each case, the narrative centers on the interplay of utterance and animation and how fictions of voice both figure and disfigure their speakers. I place these speakers within the wider problematic of voice in the Canterbury Tales as well as recent developments within literary studies, in the treatment of character, narrator, and poetic speaker. 

Julie Orlemanski teaches and writes about medieval literature and theoretical and methodological questions in present-day literary studies. She is Associate Professor of English at the University of Chicago. Her monograph, Symptomatic Subjects: Bodies, Medicine, and Causation in the Literature of Late Medieval England, appeared from the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2019. From 2021 to 2024, Orlemanski was co-editor-in-chief of postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies. She also co-edited the Norton Anthology of English Literature, Eleventh Edition, Vol. A "The Middle Ages" (2024) and will be editor for the volume's twelfth edition. She is currently completing a book manuscript entitled Making Literary Persons: A Poetics of Voice in Chaucer. Other research interests include fictionality, periodization, and medieval "discourse networks" (a la Friedrich Kittler). Her work has appeared in New Literary History, Respresentations, ELH, JMEMS, Florilegium, and Exemplaria, among other venues. 

Q & A to follow lecture.

FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Masking is encouraged.

We strive to host inclusive, accessible events that enable all individuals, including individuals with disabilities, to engage fully. To be respectful of those with allergies and environmental sensitivities, we ask that you please refrain from wearing strong fragrances. The venue is wheelchair accessible and equipped with assistive listening technology. If you need additional accommodations to participate in this event, please contact us as soon as possible.

For more information about this event visit english.cornell.edu or email englishevents@cornell.edu. 

The Gottschalk Memorial Lecture was established in memory of Paul Gottschalk, Professor of English at Cornell, scholar of British Renaissance literature and author of The Meanings of Hamlet (1972). He died in 1977 at the age of 38.

This event is presented by the Department of Literatures in English.