Revaluating “Chaucer the Pilgrim” and Donaldson’s Enduring Persona Geoffrey W. Gust 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 reception 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 [End Page 311] ideas must have somehow come into play during discussion. In looking back through my old, messy notes, it is difficult to determine if that was indeed the case. I do not see Donaldson's name etched anywhere on my notebook, although I believe that his name did, in fact, come up. "Chaucer the Pilgrim"—which will be discussed at length below—is a concept I see in bold, black ink, and we spent a good deal of time thinking about narrative perspective. It is here where I am sure that Donaldson's ideas, if not name, were central to our class work. I am not a betting man, but if I were, I would wager that this experience rings true with many "young" Chaucerians, especially those raised in America. In this same course where I met "Chaucer the Pilgrim," I also became acquainted with William K. Wimsatt's notion of the "intentional fallacy," which is about as "New Critical" as a concept (or scholarly work) can get.1 Here again, I find that in retrospect the names of key players from this theoretical school seem to have been less important than their ideas. And we most certainly used and debated their ideas, as we also discussed such things as narrative voice and the importance of close reading. In addition, it may be said that we built on New Critical notions by addressing the arguably related ideas of narrative shifters and the author-function, and by asking, along with Foucault, "What is an Author?"2 Later that year, I took my first course in critical theory. By that time the New Criticism was long passé, so instead we examined key tenets of French Marxism, reception theory, feminist theory, post-colonialism, semiotics, structuralism (and post-structuralism), and cultural studies. I was dazzled by Derrida and other major theoretical figures, and my reading of Chaucer would never be the same. Much of this theoretical work was, and in many ways still is, refreshing and provocative. However...