"And everych cried 'What thing is that?'" : a reading of Chaucer's House of fame
Master Thesis
1992
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University of Cape Town
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The thesis attempts to show the complexity of the literary challenge which Chaucer undertook in the House of Fame. Firstly, I establish a sense of the tradition of criticism inspired by the poem, and then show the ramifications of the choice of medium. The poem is a "dream vision", a genre which took the contentious truth-claims and unsettled status of dreams, and used it as the foundation for a poetics which concentrated on the relation of the conscious subject to truth. This is investigated in an extended metaphor, where the experience of the unconscious subject in a purely linguistic world is tested, and from the experiment, conclusions may be drawn concerning the human condition with regard to all knowledge. I briefly examine the divergent positions of the Divine Comedy and the Romance of the Rose, situating Chaucer in the debt of both, but philosophically in the French camp. The House of Fame I see as a "deconstruction" of any position of certainty in rational or mystical epistemology, which marks out a secular sphere of influence for literature in the manner of Ovid. The second half of the thesis is largely a close reading of the poem itself, which attempts to trace the development of these "skeptical" ideas in literary form, showing how, by appealing to the whole European literary inheritance, the force of the argument is enhanced in subtlety, range and wit. Love, Nature, and Fame, the three topoi of the three books, are each in turn unsettled, as too are the three "ways of knowing" - perception, reason, and memory. The poem does not "end" in the traditional mode of closure largely because it has made such a notion an impossible ideal, beyond the reach of the unaided human mind.
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Bibliography: pages 74-83.
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Lamond, M. 1992. "And everych cried 'What thing is that?'" : a reading of Chaucer's House of fame. University of Cape Town.