DIALOGIC DISCOURSE IN "THE CLERK'S TALE" (CHAUCER, NARRATIVE THEORY, POETIC, BAKHTIN).
Item
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Title
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DIALOGIC DISCOURSE IN "THE CLERK'S TALE" (CHAUCER, NARRATIVE THEORY, POETIC, BAKHTIN).
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Identifier
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AAI8601671
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identifier
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8601671
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Creator
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MCCLELLAN, WILLIAM T.
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Contributor
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Robert O. Payne
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Date
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1985
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, English
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Abstract
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The dialogic principle of Mikhail Bakhtin's discourse theory provides a more comprehensive and flexible theoretical foundation for a reading model of The Canterbury Tales than does G. L. Kittredge's principle of dramatic persona. Because Kittredge employs only the mode of a fully developed character/narrator, many of the heterogeneous elements of Chaucer's complex and fragmented narrative escape his readings. Bakhtin not only enumerates a much wider range of discourse modes, but he develops a larger theoretical framework to describe the relations between them.;Bakhtin's fundamental concept of dialogism provides an account of the intentional structures of the various discourse modes focusing upon their transformational characteristics. His theoretic gives us a powerful analytic tool for examining the inner semantic structures of the tales. The different types of discourse in Bakhtin's typology range from the mode of an almost fully objectified narrator, as in The Pardoner's Tale, to a mode of multiple narrative voicings, as in The Clerk's Tale, where several voices collectively and oppositely narrate and comment upon the tale. Bakhtin's principle of dialogism makes it possible to construct a reading model which accounts for the radical heterogeneity of The Canterbury Tales.;Nowhere is Bakhtin's dialogic mode of analysis more useful than in reading The Clerk's Tale, a tale which has paradigmatic status because its double-voiced discourse is explicitly declared in its prologue. My analysis of the intranarrative commentary and framing material shows that there are three voices involved in the tale's narration: the Petrarchan voice of moral allegory, the Clerkly voice of humanistic pathos and the parodic voice of grotesque realism. Throughout the narrative proper, the Clerkly voice engages the Petrarchan voice in a hidden polemic while empathetically identifying with the tale's heroine, Griselda. In the second ending, the voice of grotesque realism parodically mocks the serious worldview of Petrarch and Clerk and subjects the idealized figure of Griselda to debasing ridicule. My analysis of The Clerk's Tale points towards a new general reading model for The Canterbury Tales by demonstrating how an approach based on Bakhtin's dialogic principle can more effectively integrate heterogeneous elements into the tale's major thematic.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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English
