New Chaucer Society Congress

July 27-30, 2026

Freiburg, Germany

Thread: Precarity

Panel: Medieval Anticlimax

This panel invites proposals for short talks that take up anticlimax as a central feature of medieval textual forms or literary experience. What might we make of all the letdowns, flops, digressions, and setbacks depicted in medieval narratives? Where does a text’s formal structure, genre, or rhetorical strategy invite feelings of disappointment or dullness from its readers? The anticlimactic here encompasses a range of affective experiences—dissatisfaction, bathos, boredom. Anticlimax might be sudden (failure or collapse) or more gradual (the slow realization that something expected will be unfulfilled). What can attention to anticlimactic styles and strategies do for our understanding of readerly experience in late medieval England? Papers might consider rhetorical techniques of interruption (aposiopesis, occupatio) or narratives of diluted intensity (the monotony of the Monk’s Tale, the abrupt ending of the Book of the Duchess, the dissolute tapering-off of the Cook’s Tale). How might “anticlimactic” convey an aesthetic choice that isn’t quite captured by terms like subversion or irony?

Email 200-word abstracts to Kashaf Qureshi (kashaf@uchicago.edu) and Joe Stadolnik (jstadolnik@uchicago.edu).