Prof. Tim Miller Published in New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy & Profession

Congratulations to Professor Timothy Miller on publication of an article, "Choice of Chaucers: Teaching Kate Heartfield’s Interactive Novel The Road to Canterbury," in New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy & Profession.

This piece reflects on Prof. Miller's experiences teaching this 2018 interactive or branching-path novel in conjunction with Chaucer in ENL 4210: Medieval Literature. As the article puts it, "As games and other interactive works continue to gain market share in the media landscape and the wider attention economy, an interactive Canterbury Tales adaptation presents a perfect opportunity for juxtaposing medieval and digital textuality in the contemporary classroom and encouraging students to draw perhaps unexpected connections between the two."

The abstract for "Choice of Chaucers: Teaching Kate Heartfield’s Interactive Novel The Road to Canterbury," in New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy & Profession:

Kate Heartfield’s 2018 interactive novel, The Road to Canterbury invites a contemporary audience to join Chaucer and his fellow pilgrims on their way to Canterbury. This text-based game—or game-like text—enables the reader to make choices about the direction of the narrative in the fashion of earlier hypertext literature and the old Choose Your Own Adventure novels for young readers and other so-called ‘gamebooks.’ Based primarily on my experiences teaching The Road to Canterbury in an upper-level English course at a large public university, this essay reflects on how one might teach Heartfield’s interactive fiction alongside Chaucer in mutually illuminating ways and in a variety of course settings [ . . . ]