Architectural Satire in the Tales of the Miller and Reeve

2015

Bu calisma Geoffrey Chaucer’in Canterbury Hikayeleri’ndeki karakterlerini toplumsal hareketlilik sonucu arada kalmis Ortacag melez kimlikleri olarak ele almaktadir. Bu dogrultuda, bu calisma Bhabha’nin somurgecilik sonrasi donem cercevesinde gelistirdigi melezlesme, arada kalmislik, ucuncu alan ve taklitcilik kavramlarindan yola cikarak, Chaucer’in Canterbury Hikayeleri’nde cok farkli Ortacag melez kimliklerini gozler onune serdigini savunmaktadir. Bu baglamda, Birinci Bolum Chaucer’in Şovalyesinin mensubu oldugu soylular sinifindaki buyuk degisim sebebiyle toplumsal konumunu kaybetmesinden dolayi eski ve yeni konumunun gerektirdigi farkli degerler arasinda melez bir kimlik gelistirdigini ele almaktadir. Ikinci Bolumde ise, Chaucer’in Kesis ve Basrahibesi, Şovalye’ninkine benzer bir sekilde fakat soylular sinifindan ruhban sinifina gecerek, toplumda alcalmalari sebebiyle soylu melez kimlikler olarak incelenmektedirler. Son olarak, Ucuncu Bolum’de toplumsal duzene karsi cikip soylu sini

Selim: Journal of the Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature, 2009

... Autores: María Beatriz Hernández Pérez; Localización: Selim: Journal of the Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature = Revista de la Sociedad Española de Lengua y Literatura Inglesa Medieval, ISSN 1132-631X, Nº 16, 2009 , págs. 103-120. ...

The long-standing and belaboured problem of the authorship of The Two Noble Kinsmen has often prompted readings of the play that have emphasized the uneven quality of various scenes or rifts indicative of the supposedly patchwork quality of the final product of Shakespeare’s and Fletcher’s cooperation. This article breaks with this critical tradition and instead stresses the play’s unity. The key issue analyzed is the relationship of The Two Noble Kinsmen to its source, understood, however, not so much as “The Knight’s Tale” itself, but as the figures of Chaucer and his characters. Suggesting that the play’s prologue is more than just a conventional opening, the argument outlines the contrast between Chaucer’s original characters and those added in the Jailer’s Daughter subplot. In its course, it posits the existence of a fundamental ontological gulf between the two groups and focuses on the only moment when it is bridged, offering a Bakhtinian reading of the carnivalesque masque and morris dance in the woods. In effect, the article provides a consistent reading of a both socio-historical and meta-literary nature which does justice to the play’s overall unity.

ELH, 1996

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Style 48.4 (2014): 479-495

"Chaucer’s three major dream visions all follow their respective narrator-dreamers as they move through various interior spaces, on one level reproducing the mise-en-abyme effect of the framed dream narrative. This paper examines the series of three interiors structuring the narrative of the House of Fame, and specifically how these spaces are constructed through a technique of accumulative description, in which the contents of a given room are catalogued at great length but rarely placed in precise spatial relation to one another. To employ the catalogue as the primary tool of spatial description may seem capable of leading only to a jumbled, a-perspectival representation of an interior, but the strategy aligns with the narrator’s difficult task of organizing into narrative description the luxuriant confusion of the spaces he perceives. In the House of Fame, the narrator turns to the catalogue because he finds the corridors of dreams filled with objects of high signifying power, including statues and other images that serve as windows out of one interior and into other narrative spaces. The accumulative catalogue becomes at once a way to narrate an otherwise un-narratable profusion of objects and associations, and a way to limit that profusion to the catalogue’s conclusion. We also find in the poem moments of more perspectival description linking these catalogues, as in the House of Fame itself, in which the narrator at first perceives only a formless crowd of heralds impossible to describe due to both their number and the semiotic complexity of their garments. After relegating their regalia to a short catalogue, the narrator can then move past the press and look up to observe a rising dais with the goddess Fame enthroned on it. Only after spatially locating arbitrary Fame as the principle governing the crowd in the room does the narrator notice and describe the pillar-lined corridor leading down to the hall’s wide doors. Since, upon closer examination, these pillars are seen to bear up the fame of ancient authors, they generate further descriptive catalogues. Throughout the poem we find this same sort of telescoping between the purposively cluttered catalogue and more perspectival articulations of space, presenting a challenge to spatial theories of narrative that would dismiss pre-modern narrative as crudely and/or flatly a-perspectival. Indeed, we will be unable to describe medieval literature as uninterested in perspective when we finally compare the navigation of space in House of Fame to the medieval and classical technique of the “memory palace,” in which memories are recalled based on their precise spatial relationships inside a mentally constructed building: Chaucer’s poem is at once such an edifice of memory and a challenge to the practice."

Semiotica, 1987

The application of contemporary sign theory or semiotics in the analysis of medieval literature in general, and of Chaucerian literature in particular, remains a fairly controversial issue. Such established medievalists as Morton W. Bloomfield and Florence Ridley have argued in print over the usefulness of this critical approach in recent essays which evaluate contemporary literary theories as applied to Chaucer's works. Calling semiotics 'peripheral' to the study of medieval texts (1981:26), and regretting the current lack of interest in more traditional tools of literary analysis, Bloomfield has strongly advocated a renewed emphasis on philology in such endeavors (1979: 411). Taking a more positive attitude to the newer approaches, Ridley anticipates that these new theoretical assays are signs 'that we are on the verge of new developments in Chaucer studies' (1981a: 51). Mediating between these two positions, Brian Stock suggests that 'semiotics is perhaps most skillfully deployed in concert with more traditional historical tools, not in isolation' (1979: 392). In their collection, Signs and Symbols in Chaucer's Poetry, John Hermann and John Burke warn, The scholar must discover not only what the word means now, but what it meant then; otherwise, it is quite easy to misinterpret even the plain grammatical sense. Just as the referents of words must be painstakingly tracked down so precise semantic limits can be grasped, so must the function of those referents themselves within the sign system of the culture be made clear, and their interrelationships mapped out, if we are to avoid misreading the text. (1981: 3) An example of the kind of misreading that Hermann and Burke describe is found in Eugene Vance's (1979) semiotic analysis of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. In this often fascinating and brilliant interpretation of Chaucer's poem, Vance not only assumes the narrator's description of Diomede as being Of tonge large' to be a sign that Diomede is a 'cunnilinguist', but he anachronistically reads the repetitions of the verb 'to die' as sexual puns (1979: 329, 319).

n Kristiansen, M. V. & Giles, K. (eds), Houses – Shaping Dwellings, Identities and Homes. European Housing Culture from Viking Age to the Renaissance. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2014

This paper is a study of the architectural design and exterior display in gentry houses in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England. The study seeks to identify and interpret the use of some of the architectural devices used to display status on the exterior of gentry houses. into consideration the social context of the owners, the study of these exteriors can be used to help us understand how buildings were designed as part of the language of display. It will be shown that the plan and elevation of these houses were designed using geometry, while showing an awareness of perspective and symmetry.