(DOWNLOAD) "Visions of Alterity: The Gothic Encounter in Chaucer's House of Fame (Report)" by Fu Jen Studies: literature & linguistics # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Visions of Alterity: The Gothic Encounter in Chaucer's House of Fame (Report)
- Author : Fu Jen Studies: literature & linguistics
- Release Date : January 01, 2009
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 102 KB
Description
The idea of the Gothic has been an important critical concern in Chaucer studies. Chaucerians have used the analogy of the Gothic cathedral to explain what they suppose to be an important feature in Chaucer's works: a poised balance or a structurally harmonized synthesis of disparate parts. (1) Charles Muscatine introduces the Gothic analogy into Chaucer criticism to describe the coordinateness and expansiveness that subsume the tension between opposed values and ideas in the Canterbury Tales (167-69). In A Preface to Chaucer D. W. Robertson extends the argument to emphasize that the desire for order, symmetry and systematic organization, namely what supposedly characterizes the Gothic style, "made itself felt in almost every aspect of life" in the later Middle Ages (175). Robert Jordan continues the analogy of the Gothic cathedral to accommodate antithetical elements in The Canterbury Tales. Like the cathedral, the poem is the product of "an endlessly inventive process of dividing a preconceived totality into constituent parts" (xi). Moreover, the Gothic aesthetic incorporates the disruptive elements into an "inorganic unity" (130). Derek Brewer also endorses the Gothic analogy in his article on "Gothic Chaucer." Although "the range of inconsistencies and internal incompatibilities within The Canterbury Tales is formidable" (112-13), he writes, there is a "balance between a multiplicity of forces ... that was able to contain unusual diversity" (135). Beyond this common adoption of the formal analogy of the Gothic cathedral, several scholars (e.g., Bennett, Braswell, Kendrick) have demonstrated the influence of contemporary Gothic architecture on many descriptive details in The House of Fame. Mary Flowers Braswell, for example, comments that "a systematic comparison of the architecture in Chaucer's poem with the contemporary art forms with which the poet would have been familiar seems to reveal Chaucer's stubborn adherence to material reality" (101). She further suggests that Chaucer was involved in various architectural projects, including the Palace of Westminster, the Tower of London and the no-longer-extant Chapel of St. George at Windsor, and proposes that the temple of glass was inspired by Sainte-Chapelle (101-09), the renowned Gothic chapel in Paris.