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Revaluating "Chaucer the Pilgrim" and Donaldson's Enduring Persona

I did not know E. Talbot Donaldson. I never had him as a teacher and never benefited from his advice as a supervisor. I never even met or spoke with him at a conference. In this collection of essays on Donaldson and the legacy of New Criticism, I am an outsider of sorts. Yet perhaps I may be permitted to speak as a representative young scholar, a few short years removed from his doctoral work, whose experience with Donaldson is somehow telling. As a critic whose research does make reference to Donaldson's views, and more importantly is actively reassessing some of those ideas, perhaps my experience is in some way typical of the manner in which the "new generation" of Chaucerians are picking up and revaluating the concepts of New Criticism in the twenty- first century. Before we address the present, however, a brief look into the past may be illuminating. For as any effective application of recep- tion theory makes clear, the foundations for the present inevitably were formed on the building blocks of the past, and therefore, to assess the here and now (and perhaps project the future), we must first look to days gone by. In this case, we may start by considering my own early experiences with Donaldson and his muse Chaucer. In the United States Chaucer is not necessarily or unequivocally part of the standard curriculum. Regrettably, this is true for both high school and college students—English majors included. I myself was interested in the Middle Ages before college and knew about the Canterbury Tales, of course, but that knowledge largely may be ascribed to my having traveled to England, or perhaps being blessed with the "English" spelling of my name. Regardless, it was with some enthusiasm that I enrolled in a seminar on Chaucer during my junior year of college. Thinking back over that class, I cannot recall explicitly being introduced to any of Donaldson's scholarship. It was a course that revolved around issues of authority and authorship, and discussed both textual editing and the problems of narrative perspective, so surely Donaldson and his