Lerer, Seth 1955–

PERSONAL:

Born October 10, 1955. Education: Wesleyan University, B.A., 1976; Oxford University, B.A., 1978, M.A., 1986; University of Chicago, Ph.D., 1981.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of English, Bldg. 460, Margaret Jacks Hall, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-2087. E-mail—lerer@stanford.edu.

CAREER:

Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, former assistant professor of English; Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, faculty member, 1990—, professor of English and comparative literature, Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities, and chair of Comparative Literature, 1997-2000. Visiting professor, Washington University, St. Louis, MO, 1996; visiting scholar in medieval studies, Cambridge University, 2002; visiting scholar, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA, 2007-08.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Hoagland Prize for Undergraduate Teaching, Stanford University, 1993; Dean's Award for Graduate Teaching, Stanford University, 2003; Harry Levin Prize, American Comparative Literature Association, 2005, for Error and the Academic Self; Beatrice White Prize, English Association of Great Britain, for Chaucer and His Reader; fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies.

WRITINGS:

Boethius and Dialogue: Literary Method in the Consolation of Philosophy, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1985.

Literacy and Power in Anglo-Saxon Literature, University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE), 1991.

Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in Late-Medieval England, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1993.

(Editor and contributor) Reading from the Margins: Textual Studies, Chaucer, and Medieval Literature, Huntington Library (San Marino, CA), 1996.

(Editor) Literary History and the Challenge of Philology: The Legacy of Erich Auerbach, Stanford University Press (Stanford, CA), 1996.

Courtly Letters in the Age of Henry VIII: Literary Culture and the Arts of Deceit, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1997.

Error and the Academic Self: The Scholarly Imagination, Medieval to Modern, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 2002.

(Editor and contributor) The Yale Companion to Chaucer, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 2006.

Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 2007.

Also contributor to Classical Skepticism and English Poetry in the Twelfth Century (microform), Library of Congress. Author of scholarly articles and reviews.

SIDELIGHTS:

Seth Lerer is an English professor whose academic interests include medieval and Renaissance studies, early Tudor literary culture, textual criticism, and Old and Middle English literature. He is also the author or editor of several books focusing on many of these areas. In his 1991 book, Literacy and Power in Anglo-Saxon Literature, Lerer examines the role of texts, such as Beowulf and the Exeter Book of Riddles in influencing the Anglo-Saxon literary mind. ‘The book's approach is to take various ‘scenes’ relating to literacy in Old English literature or in the Latin literature of Anglo-Saxon England, and to examine their significance in, and their representation of, the culture they were written for,’ explained D.G. Scragg in the Review of English Studies. For example, Lerer examines scenes within various texts that help alter a reader's conception of what is mythical and what is historical, as well as commonplace and fantastic. Calvin B. Kendall, writing in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology, called Literacy and Power in Anglo-Saxon Literature a ‘provocative examination of … issues of great contemporary theoretical interest in Anglo-Saxon studies."

Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in Late-Medieval England looks at how Chaucer influenced certain English writers and readers of the fifteenth century and how they, in turn, helped to reinvent the Chaucer that is known today despite the fact that their readings of Chaucer were immature at best. Writing in the Renaissance Quarterly, Andrew Welsh explained it this way: ‘The focus is not on poetry and poetics but on canon formation and the ‘construction’ of a major poet, on self-reflexiveness and self-fashioning by the writers who followed him, on ideas of authorship and authority, and on the conditions of patronage and production that surround and control literary texts.’ Critics praised Lerer for his new approach to analyzing Chaucer's works and the influence that Chaucer had on his contemporaries. In a review for the Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Susan Schibanoff argued: ‘In Chaucer and His Readers, Lerer sets himself a difficult task: to revisualize fifteenth-century writers and poetics as both interesting and important. On both counts, he succeeds magnificently.’ Medium Aevum contributor John M. Bowers similarly believed that ‘this volume offers a brilliant reassessment of the Chaucerian tradition during the fifteenth century."

As editor of Reading from the Margins: Textual Studies, Chaucer, and Medieval Literature, Lerer presents a series of six essays that look at new ways to approach the textual study of medieval manuscripts. ‘Reading from the Margins articulates a number of issues that have concerned recent textual critics and applies them directly to Chaucer,’ reported Tim William Machan in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology. Modern Language Review contributor John Thompson commented: ‘The volume maintains a healthy respect for the historicity of texts and readers."

Lerer provides a revisionist study of the origins of courtly literature in Courtly Letters in the Age of Henry VIII: Literary Culture and the Arts of Deceit. Specifically, the author analyzes how the court received Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, which led to the character of Pandarus becoming the role model for the courtier of the times. ‘This is a valuable book,’ wrote W.A. Sessions in the Renaissance Quarterly. ‘If its thesis of ubiquitous Pandaric impersonation in the court of Henry VIII is too epic, certainly reductive, and finally impossible to prove, the means by which Lerer seeks to prove his case are consistently alive. In five densely argued chapters, Lerer leads the reader through landscapes of reading that are in themselves recapitulations of early Tudor readings."

Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language stems from the author's interest in Middle English dialects and how the English language evolved and came to be what it is today. As the author provides a history of the English language from the writing of Beowulf to modern-day rap, he explores such issues as the difference between English spelling and pronunciation and the development of rules of grammar. He also examines the origins of regional dialects, literary language, and everyday speech. Lerer provides analyses of a variety of texts, from the testimony of rape victims in the sixteenth century, to Mark Twain's use of dialect in his writings, to a Cab Calloway song. The book includes maps of dialects and linguistic variations, a glossary, and a bibliography. ‘Readers who never learned the phonetic alphabet (explained in an appendix) or those (like me) who find it difficult to imagine how the mouth shapes various sounds will occasionally feel a bit at sea,’ remarked Michael Dirda in the Washington Post Book World. ‘But persevere—there's much to enjoy.’ Referring to the book as ‘wonderful,’ New York Sun contributor Eric Ormsby went on to write: ‘As a writer he's erudite without ever becoming dull. He knows how to present the driest topics … in jargon-free prose enlivened by striking examples."

Lerer is also the editor of The Yale Companion to Chaucer. According to Tom Shippey in Books & Culture: ‘The plan of the volume carefully avoids the traditional division by works and genres. Instead there are four essays on ‘Contexts and Cultures,’ four on ‘Major Works, Major Issues,’ and two on ‘Critical Approaches and Afterlives.’’ Targeting primarily an American audience, the book features essays from ten scholars, including the author, with each essay including a bibliography and information for further reading and research. ‘This important work is an essential purchase for most academic and larger public libraries,’ concluded William D. Walsh in the Library Journal.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Anq, summer, 1995, Glending Olson, review of Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in Late-Medieval England, p. 45.

Booklist, March 15, 2007, Bryce Christensen, review of Inventing English: A Portable History of the English Language, p. 10.

Books & Culture, March 1, 2007, Tom Shippey, ‘The English Professor's Tale,’ review of The Yale Companion to Chaucer, p. 11.

Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, February, 1994, C.S. Cox, review of Chaucer and His Readers, p. 935; October 1996, review of Literary History and the Challenge of Philology: The Legacy of Erich Auerbach, p. 272; March, 1998, review of Courtly Letters in the Age of Henry VIII: Literary Culture and the Arts of Deceit, p. 1192; September, 2003, S.I. Bellman, review of Error and the Academic Self: The Scholarly Imagination, Medieval to Modern, p. 140; October, 2006, R.W. Haynes, review of The Yale Companion to Chaucer, p. 303.

College Literature, February, 1992, review of Literacy and Power in Anglo-Saxon Literature, p. 178; June, 1994, review of Chaucer and His Readers, p. 188.

Comparative Literature, spring, 1997, review of Literary History and the Challenge of Philology, p. 176; winter, 2006, David Greetham, review of Error and the Academic Self, p. 74.

English Language Notes, September, 1996, Donald C. Baker, review of Chaucer and His Readers, p. 94.

English Studies, January, 1995, N.F. Blake, review of Chaucer and His Readers, p. 96.

French Review, October, 1998, Hans R. Runte, review of Literary History and the Challenge of Philology, p. 120.

Journal of British Studies, April, 1994, Elaine Tuttle Hansen, review of Literacy and Power in Anglo-Saxon Literature, p. 204.

Journal of English and Germanic Philology, April, 1993, Calvin B. Kendall, review of Literacy and Power in Anglo-Saxon Literature, p. 215; July, 1995, Susan Schibanoff, review of Chaucer and His Readers, p. 402; July, 1998, Tim William Machan, review of Reading from the Margins: Textual Studies, Chaucer, and Medieval Literature, p. 418.

Library Journal, June 1, 2006, William D. Walsh, review of The Yale Companion to Chaucer, p. 117; March 1, 2007, Marianne Orme, review of Inventing English, p. 84.

Medium Aevum, fall, 1992, Jane Stevenson, review of Literacy and Power in Anglo-Saxon Literature, p. 310; fall, 1994, John M. Bowers, review of Chaucer and His Readers, p. 332; spring, 1999, James Simpson, review of Courtly Letters in the Age of Henry VIII, p. 135.

MLN, September, 1997, Willis G. Regier, review of Literary History and the Challenge of Philology, p. 702.

Modern Language Review, April, 1999, John Thompson, review of Reading from the Margins, p. 492.

Modern Philology, February, 1988, Russell Peck, review of Boethius and Dialogue: Literary Method in the Consolation of Philosophy, p. 311; February, 1996, Mary Carruthers, review of Chaucer and His Readers, p. 375.

New York Sun, June 6, 2007, Eric Ormsby, ‘Lingua Anglica,’ review of Inventing English.

Notes and Queries, June, 1999, Helen Cooper, review of Courtly Letters in the Age of Henry VIII, p. 270.

Poetics Today, spring, 1999, review of Literary History and the Challenge of Philology, p. 77.

Publishers Weekly, January 15, 2007, review of Inventing English, p. 40.

Reference & Research Book News, August, 2003, review of Error and the Academic Self, p. 209.

Renaissance Quarterly, spring, 1996, Andrew Welsh, review of Chaucer and His Readers, p. 154; summer, 1999, W.A. Sessions, review of Courtly Letters in the Age of Henry VIII, p. 547.

Review of English Studies, May, 1994, D.G. Scragg, review of Literacy and Power in Anglo-Saxon Literature, p. 238; May, 1996, C. David Benson, review of Chaucer and His Readers, p. 232.

Romance Philology, fall, 1998, Peter F. Dembowski, review of Literary History and the Challenge of Philology.

Southern Humanities Review, fall, 1995, R. James Goldstein, review of Chaucer and His Readers, p. 392.

Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies, April, 1988, John B. Friedman, review of Boethius and Dialogue, p. 428; July, 1993, John D. Niles, review of Literacy and Power in Anglo-Saxon Literature, p. 833; April, 1998, Jan M. Ziolkowski, review of Literary History and the Challenge of Philology, p. 557; July, 1998, review of Reading from the Margins, p. 930.

Times Higher Education Supplement, July 13, 2007, Raphael Salkie, ‘Vowels Shifted, Consonants Lost,’ review of Inventing English, p. 22.

Times Literary Supplement, March 20, 1992, J.A. Burrow, review of Literacy and Power in Anglo-Saxon Literature, p. 25.

Washington Post Book World, June 10, 2007, Michael Dirda, ‘The History of the English Language Is the History of Wild Invention,’ review of Inventing English, p. 14.

Weekly Standard, April 2, 2007, James Seaton, ‘Mother Tongue; There's a Lot of History in the History of English,’ review of Inventing English.

Yale Review, January, 1997, review of Literary History and the Challenge of Philology, p. 136.

ONLINE

Stanford University, Department of English Web site,http://english.stanford.edu/ (October 29, 2007), faculty profile of Seth Lerer.

Teaching Company,http://www.teach12.com/ (October 29, 2007), profile of Seth Lerer.