Legible landscapes: Interpretive topography and the problematics of space in the poems of the "Pearl" manuscript.
Item
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Title
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Legible landscapes: Interpretive topography and the problematics of space in the poems of the "Pearl" manuscript.
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Identifier
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AAI9732922
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identifier
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9732922
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Creator
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Hammitt-McDonald, Margaret C.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Scott D. Westrem
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Date
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1997
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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 | Literature, Medieval
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Abstract
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This study analyzes the theme of interpretive topography (the hypothesis that places can be read like books) in the four poems of the fourteenth-century English Pearl-poet. It focuses on how the spaces in each poem are interpreted by protagonist according to his/her own limited human perspective. In each poem, the spaces are part of a larger system which attempts to educate the protagonist about divine purposes, but he/she consistently "reads" each place in a purely literal, physical way rather than considering the eternal truths which can be revealed by each space through reading more deeply. Furthermore, the narrow, confining spaces which each protagonist often prefers indicate his/her own restricted understanding.;In addition to this central issue, three related issues inform my study of interpretive topography in the Pearl-poet's corpus. First, I connect the poet's presentation of space as an interpretable realm, in which spatial features and relationships yield an understanding of some transcendent truth, with two commonplace metaphors in the medieval Christian world: the idea of the world itself as a text and the idea of pilgrimage as a way of interpreting this text. Second, I evaluate the poet's use of geographical boundaries to express marginalization, the position of the "Other" on the borders of both world and text. Just as a character's understanding of divine truths is presented through his/her perception of space, the metaphorical marginalization of these various "Others" in the society of the Pearl-poet is expressed through literal spatial exclusion in each of the poems.;Finally, I consider how the interpretable spatial structure of each poem is questioned and subverted. Each poem is fraught with misreadings on the part of each narrator--interpretations of space which express the human inability to comprehend fully the divine order of the universe. In the Pearl-poet's work, human misreadings of God's spatial "text" ultimately problematize interpretive space as the unchanging agent of meaning in the Pearl-poet's corpus. Additionally, the individual spaces of each poem themselves occasionally deconstruct the entire orderly design of the spatial text.
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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.
