I’m delighted to kick off this blog’s Burning Questions series with Paul Strohm, formerly the JRR Tolkien Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford and a pioneer of historical methods in the study of medieval literature. Here we discuss his wonderful new memoir, Sportin’ Jack: One Hundred Hundred-Word Stories (available at Amazon.com and elsewhere), as well as the forthcoming A Day in the Life of Chaucer, which will appear from Viking/Penguin in a little over a year.
As those who know him will attest, this is vintage Strohm: witty, laconic, self-effacing, touching on everything from tumblr to the Alabama Shakes to the continuing importance of biographical criticism. At the 4:10 mark we get to hear him read “On the Run,” a great fragment on lying and the personal politics of haircuttery. His Chaucer book, which will focus on October 1, 1386 (a terrible day in the author’s life for reasons Paul discusses beginning around 5:35), pushes against what he calls the “zestful withdrawal” from historicist methods in recent years. Stay tuned for Burning Questions #2, a conversation with bestselling historical novelist Katherine Howe.
