"BE PROCESSE OF TYME: " CHAUCER'S INVENTION OF POETRY IN THE "BOOK OF THE DUCHESS".
Item
-
Title
-
"BE PROCESSE OF TYME: " CHAUCER'S INVENTION OF POETRY IN THE "BOOK OF THE DUCHESS".
-
Identifier
-
AAI8401946
-
identifier
-
8401946
-
Creator
-
MARTIN, ELLEN ELIZABETH.
-
Contributor
-
Prof. Robert O. Payne
-
Date
-
1983
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
Literature, English
-
Abstract
-
I consider several aspects of the Book of the Duchess to describe its poetic texture in a new way. Many critics see in its discontinuities signs of an apprentice genius. One appreciates it better if one avoids trying to align its images with particular themes and reads it instead as a myth of the invention of poetry. Its discontinuities offer images and narrations in a form as yet unshaped by thematic or psychological considerations, in which we discern the play of imagination as it occurs before significance has been attached to its ideas. I call the poem an inventio poetriae--a rhetorical legend of the invention of poetry--because it captures moments of thought prior to significance, in which poesis and the process of signifying actually occur.;Chapter One surveys the development of temporized love narrative prior to Chaucer, and Chapter Two looks at the association of melancholia, elegy, and image-making. Chapter Three considers the poem's symbolic texture in the light of modern and medieval theories of symbolism and interpretation. Chapter Four describes the rhetoric of the conversation in which the protagonists find consolation. Chapter Five traces the poem's influence to show how this radically inventive work continues to recreate the possibility of poetry for later writers.
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
-
degree
-
Ph.D.
-
Program
-
English
