Home ENGL 200 Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Tuesday, September 11, 2012 CC-BY-NC
Chaucer and friends

Maintainer: admin

Was 10 mins late to class

Is tolkien popular culture or high culture?
He's not taken taht seriously as an eminent author in the literary sense, but he is not a popular culture author either. He is in an ambiguous position

Characteristic figures of speech of old english poem

  • Kenning = a compound of two words to form a new one, two words seperated by a hyphen
  • Synecdoche = the part is to signify the whole or vice versa. the edge = sword, the coil = dragon. advertisers use this a lot to capture your attention
  • Metonymy = a thing is called by something which is associated with it. Not intrical, but adjacent things: The crown = king. In Beowulf, King = ring-giver

No more Beowulf, onto Chaucer

chaucer is a pretty funny guy, besides being influential in literature.

Middle english is pretty weird shit. It sound pretty silly too. Knight is pronounced ke-nee-te, what the shit.

Prologue of canterbury tales

  • introduces the various speakers of the tales: the main characters, who happen to meet at the Tabard Inn as pilgrims on their way to Canterbury
  • The innkeeper, "the host" devises the tale telling scheme as entertainment for the journey
  • The best story0teller is to win a dinner at the inn after the journey
  • each pilgrim is to tell 2 tales going to Canterbury, 2 coming back, totalling about 120 stories
  • only 22 are complete, with 2 more in fragments
  • the criteria of judging the tales, "tales of best sentence and solas" - best meaning and joy, became a central criteria in literary criticism.

How many stand ins(Narrative voices) are there for chaucer in the general prologue/the work as a whole?
Each pilgrim is a narrative voice, the main ones are the chaucerian narrator and the host himself. The most central ones.

The host, pretty nice guy, pretty entertaining, offers the pilgrims a place to stay and stuff.

What's the character of the narrative? Naive, innocent, he's not up to much, but it seems like he is up to much more than that. Ironic naivety, on the sidelines watching. Socratic pose. Socrates was the kind of the dick that says he knows nothing, then it turns out he knows way more than you do, making you look like a dumbass.
The narrative uses the phrase 'a worthy man' sometimes real, sometimes ironic.