Hello, all,
Nor can I match the Matchless Wit of that delightful post, but I keep
waiting for the Chaucerians to speak up---they who've been arguing for
years about authorial voice, persona construction, self-referentiality in
poetic texts, and how all that matters for narrative & lyric poetics.
"Geoffrey" in _House of Fame_, as well as the intrusive narrator of the
_Legend of Good Women_, come to mind as early examples of two different
sorts of authorial personation entering a poem. (Not to open the worm-can
that is _Canterbury Tales_.) But before this post becomes a grand blague,
uninformed since not from a Real Chaucerian, and then starts in on Sidney's
"I am not I: pity the tale of me," would any Chaucerians out there like to
describe the long evolution of such discussions, up to recent positions
like those of Marshall Leicester? (I am thinking in particular of his
notion of "impersonated selves" in _The Disenchanted Self_.) Or how about
A. C. Spearing's elegantly argued work on the development of poetic
subjectivity
, as related to persona construction, in poets like Machaut, Petrarch,
Hoccleve, Charles of Orleans, and Chaucer? ("Poetic Identity," _Subjects
on the World's Stage_, etc.)
This is important stuff throughout our period, in Engl, France, and Italy,
at least, and it seems to me (parmi d'autres choses) that by understanding
the way a poet handles this, one gets a clue to her/his fingerprint,
something essential about that poet. It's also theoretically impt
(development of lyric technique), & culturally impt (rise on national
vernacular literary self/consciousness or ack, buzz word, "subjectivity"),
but this post is already too long.
Medievalists, ho?
Anne Coldiron
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(PS--and let's not forget Catullus, Ovid, Sappho)
David Wilson-Okamura <[log in to unmask]>@JISCMAIL.AC.UK> on 01/05/2001
05:05:42 PM
Please respond to Edmund Spenser Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
Sent by: Edmund Spenser Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
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cc: (bcc: Anne Coldiron/acoldiron/LSU)
Subject: Re: persona versus voice
At 05:57 PM 1/5/01 -0500, Anne Prescott wrote:
>I don't think I have any exact parallel to Colin's chewing out Calidore,
>but I can't help remembering Rabelais entering Pantagruel as an anagram,
>"Alcofribas Nasier," or in this case just "Alcofribas." What did you eat,
>asks Pantagruel as the two chat afterward. Passing food, says
>Alcofribas. "And where didst thou shit?" "In your throat." Oh. Not the
>same, really, but a good precedent for entering one's fiction under an
>assumed name (at first *Pantagruel* was ascribed to Alcofribas Nasier,
>sort of like "Imerito"). Erasmus is at times named by his
>fictions--everyting is going to Hell, says one character in "The Gospel
>Bearer," as witness Erasmus writing dialogues. Ho, ho. Anne Prescott.
I can't match these two for wit, but the mention of Erasmus puts me in mind
of the character Morus in More's _Utopia_.
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David Wilson-Okamura http://geoffreychaucer.org [log in to unmask]
Macalester College Chaucer: An Annotated Guide to Online Resources
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