FRINK Linked Data Fragments server

Matches in SemOpenAlex for { <https://semopenalex.org/work/W2782124685> ?p ?o ?g. }

• W2782124685 endingPage "140" @default.
• W2782124685 startingPage "135" @default.
• W2782124685 abstract "Reviews JUDSONBOYCE ALLEN and THERESA ANNE MORITZ, A Distinction ofStories: The Medieval Unity ofChaucer's Fair Chain ofNarrativesfor Canter­ bury. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1981. Pp. xii, 258. $20.00. The ambitions of this important book are wholly laudable, and the propositions with which it begins are sound. The authors recognize and share the desire of all readers of The Canterbury Tales to find some underlying unity in the work, but they show clearly how previous attempts to establish this unity have been based upon irrelevant or unhelpful assumptions. The 'geographical' method, for instance, has to invoke a type of narrative realism which Chaucer shows himself little interested in, and furthermore has to concentrate almost exclusively on the frame at the expense of the stories. Analysis which concentrates on the completed beginning and ending ofthe Tales likewise has to abandon the greater part of the work as a muddle. The evidence of the manu­ scripts themselves, even the best of them, is not helpful. As for the 'dramatic' principle in The Canterbury Tales, the authors give it short shrift: For us Chaucer's stories are not, except trivially, speeches or dramatic monologues (p. x). They mount an attack on the dramatic reading ofthe Tales-Because it is so insidious, it needs especially to be put down (p. 11)---which is wholly convincing, and makes at least one reader wish to break into spontaneous applause. They have little time, either, for the sophisticated types of modern deconstructionism, which find in every poem by Chaucer a desperately subtle statement about how impossible it is to write poetry, or the similarly fashionable retreat into multiple irony-whereby the unity of the work is said to lie in its demonstration ofuniversal disunity, and its affirmations in the denial of the possibility of affirmation. As the authors put it, with welcome trenchancy: Irony, for the Middle Ages, is simply one of the forms of allegory, that is, not a denial of meaning but an affirmation of it (p. 11). 135 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER What the authors propose, instead, is to try to arrive at an under­ standing ofthe unity ofThe Canterbury Tales by taking medieval theories of tale-aggregation, as those theories may be seen in operation in commentaries on Ovid's Metamorphoses, and applying those to the Tales. The detailed study of these commentaries is promised in a forthcoming volume, but meanwhile the authors take the fourfold division oftypes of metamorphosis made by the commentators-natural, magical, moral, and spiritual-and use it to reconstruct Chaucer's poem as a normative array ofexempla in four groups, which exploit the literal and analogical significance ofthe structure ofmarriage in order to arrive at a definition of social order. Within the tales themselves, therefore, the reading is acknowledged to be exemplary rather than mimetic or dramatic, exem­ plary, that is, of moral and other kinds of truth, though the authors claim that they are interested in the forms of narrative that allow these truths expression rather than in the truths themselves. This claim is disingenuous, and turns out to be not true. To these original and ingenious propositions the authors bring the support of an impressive array of arguments. They point out that 'artificial' ordering of the kind they adduce is established practice in medieval writing: since narrative has no important correspondence in itself with reality, it must be manipulated into one. Characters, like­ wise, are not significant in themselves, dramatically and psychological­ ly, but as exempla of general truths, and the authors demonstrate this point with some remarks on the Marriage Group. Read literally, or 'dramatically,' as they point out, it is trivial, curious,merely psycholog­ ical; read properly, it evokes a whole series of associations with other relationships analogous to marriage-Christ and the church, the higher and lower reason, the mind and the body, the ruler and his subjects. In this way, the particular always stands to reveal the universal, the general truth. Even the prologues and links, which some have thought to be inherently dramatic, are really part of a continuing commentary on the nature and function of narrative, a discourse on the relation between telling a story and..." @default.
• W2782124685 created "2018-01-12" @default.
• W2782124685 creator A5031846204 @default.
• W2782124685 date "1982-01-01" @default.
• W2782124685 modified "2023-10-17" @default.
• W2782124685 title "A Distinction of Stories: The Medieval Unity of Chaucer’s Fair Chain of Narratives for Canterbury by Judson Boyce Allen, Theresa Anne Moritz" @default.
• W2782124685 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/sac.1982.0005" @default.
• W2782124685 hasPublicationYear "1982" @default.
• W2782124685 type Work @default.
• W2782124685 sameAs 2782124685 @default.
• W2782124685 citedByCount "0" @default.
• W2782124685 crossrefType "journal-article" @default.
• W2782124685 hasAuthorship W2782124685A5031846204 @default.
• W2782124685 hasConcept C124952713 @default.
• W2782124685 hasConcept C138885662 @default.
• W2782124685 hasConcept C142362112 @default.
• W2782124685 hasConcept C164913051 @default.
• W2782124685 hasConcept C199033989 @default.
• W2782124685 hasConcept C2781298115 @default.
• W2782124685 hasConcept C41895202 @default.
• W2782124685 hasConcept C543847140 @default.
• W2782124685 hasConcept C554936623 @default.
• W2782124685 hasConcept C95457728 @default.
• W2782124685 hasConceptScore W2782124685C124952713 @default.
• W2782124685 hasConceptScore W2782124685C138885662 @default.
• W2782124685 hasConceptScore W2782124685C142362112 @default.
• W2782124685 hasConceptScore W2782124685C164913051 @default.
• W2782124685 hasConceptScore W2782124685C199033989 @default.
• W2782124685 hasConceptScore W2782124685C2781298115 @default.
• W2782124685 hasConceptScore W2782124685C41895202 @default.
• W2782124685 hasConceptScore W2782124685C543847140 @default.
• W2782124685 hasConceptScore W2782124685C554936623 @default.
• W2782124685 hasConceptScore W2782124685C95457728 @default.
• W2782124685 hasIssue "1" @default.
• W2782124685 hasLocation W27821246851 @default.
• W2782124685 hasOpenAccess W2782124685 @default.
• W2782124685 hasPrimaryLocation W27821246851 @default.
• W2782124685 hasRelatedWork W2061721244 @default.
• W2782124685 hasRelatedWork W2350000257 @default.
• W2782124685 hasRelatedWork W2363496435 @default.
• W2782124685 hasRelatedWork W2364594581 @default.
• W2782124685 hasRelatedWork W2365648407 @default.
• W2782124685 hasRelatedWork W2379933635 @default.
• W2782124685 hasRelatedWork W2383599784 @default.
• W2782124685 hasRelatedWork W2392951461 @default.
• W2782124685 hasRelatedWork W2748952813 @default.
• W2782124685 hasRelatedWork W2899084033 @default.
• W2782124685 hasVolume "4" @default.
• W2782124685 isParatext "false" @default.
• W2782124685 isRetracted "false" @default.
• W2782124685 magId "2782124685" @default.
• W2782124685 workType "article" @default.