Chaucerian Poetics
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"Nature as Destiny in Troilus and Criseyde"
Sue Hum
"Knowledge, Belief, and Lack of Agency: The Dreams
of Geoffrey, Troilus, Criseyde, and Chauntecleer"
William Kamowski
"Trading the ‘Knotte' for Loose Ends: The
Squire's Tale and the Poetics of Chaucerian Fragments"
Harold F. Mosher, Jr.
"Greimas, Bremond, and the Miller's Tale"
Daniel F. Pigg
"Authorial Insertion and Identity Poetics:
Figuring Subjectivity in Piers Plowman C and The Parson's Tale
and Retraction"
Carolynn Van Dyke
‘To Whome Shul We Compleyne?': The Poetics
of Agency in Chaucer's Complaints"
Scott Vaszily
"Fabliau Plotting against Romance in The Knight's
Tale"
Judith A. Weise
"Chaucer's Tell-Tale Lexicon: Romancing Seinte
Cecyle"
Chaucer's interest in natural philosophy is apparent throughout his writings. In Troilus and Criseyde it surfaces in the forms of motion ascribed to the principal characters, drawing on ideas from Aristotle's Physics about natural motion and natural place. This insight from ancient science helps explain the personalities of the characters and their choices, as well as the conclusion and epilogue.
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Sue Hum, "Knowledge, Belief, and Lack of Agency:
The Dreams of Geoffrey, Troilus, Criseyde, and Chauntecleer" / 500
Building on Mikhail Bakhtin's definition of authoritative discourse
and Michel Foucault's historical reconfigurations of knowledge and power,
one may identify dreams as a tangible, constraining mechanism that directs
the individual conduct of Geoffrey, Troilus, Criseyde, and Chauntecleer.
Through an analysis of dreams and medieval dream lore categories, one may
uncover the dominant paradigm of Chaucer's culture, exploring the nexus
among knowledge, belief, and agency. Because dreams are perceived as authoritative,
monologic, hegemonic texts that depict a fait accompli future, what may
seem to contemporary readers as the most natural course of action is to
Chaucer's characters inconceivable and absurd. The paradigm of authoritative
discourse not only encourages passivity but also reinforces the stability
and authority of the social structure.
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William Kamowski, "Trading the ‘Knotte' for
Loose Ends: The Squire's Tale and the Poetics of Chaucerian Fragments"
/ 391
As an unfinished frame narrative embedded in the Canterbury Tales,
the Squire's Tale encapsulates the poetics of Chaucerian fragments.
That poetics is represented by the Tale's internal incompleteness, its
"concluding" posture of an unapprehended whole, and its illusion of almost
infinite narrative possibilities. These features not only intensify the
dynamics of reader ideation but also sustain the experience of the text
beyond the act of reading itself. In addition the Squire's Tale
exploits a specifically medieval receptivity to fragmentary literature,
which is fostered by circumstances of manuscript dissemination, medieval
aesthetic theory, and the instability of textual boundaries in medieval
books. The "endings" of Chaucerian fragments suggest the poet's cognizance
of a contemporary audience for whom truncation was a familiar, viable alternative
to closure. Chaucer appears to recognize the efficacy of leaving both the
Squire's
Tale and the Canterbury Tales incomplete.
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Harold F. Mosher, Jr., "Greimas, Bremond,
and the Miller's Tale" / 480
Applied to Chaucer's Miller's Tale, A. J. Greimas's various
analytic systems—the structure of roles or acteurs, the plots of struggle
and exchange of objects, and the semiotic square—reveal Alison as an unchanging,
passive object who is passed from her husband John to her lover Nicholas
(and potentially to another lover, Absolon). But the application of Claude
Bremond's more dynamic functional model reveals not only the story's symmetrical
paradigms of seduction, retribution, and dissimulation but also the importance
of the last of these isotopies and, above all, the central activity of
Alison as seducer, dissimulator, and degrader.
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Daniel F. Pigg, "Authorial Insertion and
Identity Poetics: Figuring Subjectivity in Piers Plowman C and The
Parson's Tale and Retraction" / 428
For many years, scholars have speculated on the issue of whether or
not Geoffrey Chaucer knew William Langland's Piers Plowman in any
of its several versions. While it is impossible to be certain of this,
there are moments in The Canterbury Tales that seem to be inscribed
with a Langlandian voice: both writers are interested in the emerging concept
of the individual in the social body; both writers raise questions about
the nature of their writing enterprises; and both use pilgrimage as a way
of reforming the individual. For both writers, the medieval confessional
is tied to the emerging poetics of identity. Ultimately, both Piers
Plowman and The Parson's Tale and Retraction form an
homology to the confessional, and such activity of confession allows Chaucer
and Langland to create their own identities through the gesture of subjectivity.
While we cannot be absolutely sure that Chaucer knew Langland's work, we
can be sure that both recognized the power of the confessional in the developing
poetics of identity.
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Carolynn Van Dyke, "‘To Whome Shul We
Compleyne?': The Poetics of Agency in Chaucer's Complaints" / 370
Though not popular with modern readers, the complaint apparently interested
Chaucer throughout his career, perhaps because it offers unusual opportunities
for the exploration of agency. Seeking causes for his pain, the speaker
of a typical complaint represents himself as both active and helpless,
his beloved as both capricious creature and transcendent object, Fortune
as both omnipotent and illusory. Chaucer focuses and balances those equivocations.
In the conventional A Complaint to His Lady, he sorts the complaint's
inconsistent topoi into formal compartments. In the more self-conscious
A
Complaint unto Pity, he fashions a recursive loop from inconsistent
but interdependent conceptions of the title personification. Fortune
and A Complaint to His Purse also turn on ontological paradoxes,
though the latter suggests a pragmatic escape. In the highly sophisticated
Complaint
of Mars, his greatest short poem, Chaucer both exploits and reinvents
the complaint by multiplying, compounding, and subverting agency before
finally reconstituting it in the subjectivity of the reader. Chaucer's
complaints entail not personal grumbling but an occasionally playful, occasionally
profound questioning of subjectivity and causation.
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Scott Vaszily, "Fabliau Plotting against Romance
in The Knight's Tale" / 523
Roy J. Pearcy has defined the Old French fabliau genre in terms of
a few characteristic story-structures, all involving the misinterpretation
of ambiguous signs. This feature is even more prominent in Chaucer's fabliaux.
Since two key episodes of the Knight's Tale exhibit this feature,
as well as other common features of fabliaux, these episodes can be read
as fabliau interludes. These interludes evoke attitudes commonly associated
with fabliau and play them off against the more typical romance attitutdes
that predominate in the Knight's Tale, as the more widely recognized
allusions to courtly romance in Chaucer's fabliaux evoke romance attitudes.
The effect of the fabliau interludes is mainly to reinforce the questioning
of romance attitudes that critics like Charles Muscatine and Donald R.
Howard have already pointed out in the Knight's Tale.
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Judith A. Weise, "Chaucer's Tell-Tale Lexicon:
Romancing Seinte Cecyle" / 440
Drawing on modern statistical methods and insights from Chaucerian
poetics and other fields, lexical analyses help reveal the complex history
of the composition of The Second Nun's Prologue and Tale.
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