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In William Langland's Piers Plowman and Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales BETWEEN “ERNEST” AND “GAME”: THE AESTHETICS OF KNOWING AND POETICS OF “WITTE” IN WILLIAM LANGLAND'S PIERS PLOWMAN AND GEOFFREY CHAUCER’S CANTERBURY TALES by SHARITY D. NELSON A DISSERTATION Presented to the Department of English and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy September 2013 DISSERTATION APPROVAL PAGE Student: Sharity D. Nelson Title: Between “Ernest” and “Game”: The Aesthetics of Knowing and Poetics of “Witte” in William Langland's Piers Plowman and Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales This dissertation has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in the Department of English by: Warren Ginsberg Chair Anne Laskaya Core Member Louise M. Bishop Core Member Kenneth Calhoon Institutional Representative and Kimberly Andrews Espy Vice President for Research and Innovation; Dean of the Graduate School Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Graduate School. Degree awarded in September 2013 ii © 2013 Sharity D. Nelson iii DISSERTATION ABSTRACT Sharity D. Nelson Doctor of Philosophy Department of English September 2013 Title: Between “Ernest” and “Game”: The Aesthetics of Knowing and Poetics of “Witte” in William Langland's Piers Plowman and Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales A common assumption in theories of the aesthetic is that it is a concept and experience that belongs to modernity. However, as Umberto Eco has shown, the aesthetic was a topic of great consideration by medieval thinkers. As this project demonstrates in the study of the poetry of William Langland and Geoffrey Chaucer, the aesthetic was, in fact, a dynamic and complex concept in the Middle Ages that could affirm institutional ideologies even as it challenged them and suggested alternative perspectives for comprehending truth. This project focuses on the ways in which the poets’ respective vernacular literary masterpieces, Piers Plowman and The Canterbury Tales, individually craft theories of the aesthetic and defend its role as a privileged discursive epistemology. I argue that, for Langland and Chaucer, the aesthetic is a discursive mode through which the reader comes to possess a complex knowledge that matches his or her nature, material and immaterial, sensitive and intellective; the reader arrives at this knowledge by engaging his or her wits in a translation of the poetics of Piers Plowman and The Canterbury Tales. For Langland, this translative exercise is evoked by the complex interplay of allegory and irony, and the result of the aesthetic experience is an embodied knowledge of God’s truth that he refers to as “kind knowing.” For Chaucer, the aesthetic iv is configured through the experience of irony, a figure that engages the process of translation as it confirms the complexity of truth as we can comprehend it. The aesthetic is also, for Chaucer, represented by the privileged mode of parody, which allows the reader to hear, as it were, what is missing and, in reading, supply the missing voice and create a dialogue—between text and reader and/or tale and tale—that in effect remasters whatever is monoaural by translating it into stereo. Ultimately, for both Langland and Chaucer, the aesthetic engenders instruction and pleasure, and both together are essential to our embodied comprehension of truth. v CURRICULUM VITAE NAME OF AUTHOR: Sharity D. Nelson GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED: University of Oregon, Eugene Indiana University, Bloomington Truman State University, Kirksville, Missouri DEGREES AWARDED: Doctor of Philosophy, English, 2013, University of Oregon Master of Library Science, 2007, Indiana University Bachelor of Arts, English, 2005, Truman State University AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST: Medieval Literature PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE: Assistant Director, Center for Teaching Writing, University of Oregon, Eugene, 2011-2012 Graduate Teaching Fellow, Department of English, University of Oregon, Eugene, 2008 to present GRANTS, AWARDS, AND HONORS: Graduate Teaching Fellowship, English, 2008 to present Stanley Maveety Fellowship, 2007 Summa cum Laude, Truman State University, 2005 vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION: THE AESTHETICS OF KNOWING AND POETICS OF WITTE OF LANGLAND AND CHAUCER ..................................................... 1 The Problem of Language: Authorized Aesthetics and Counter Epistemologies ....................................................................................................... 9 Translational Potential: The Growth of Vernacular Aesthetics ............................. 29 Langland and Chaucer: Aesthetics of Knowing and Poetics of Witte ................... 41 II. LANGLAND’S POETICS OF WITTE: ALLEGORICAL AESTHETICS IN PIERS PLOWMAN ............................................................................................ 49 Telling versus Showing: Holy Church and Allegorical Instruction ....................... 57 Wit’s Allegory and the Kind Knowing of Dowel, Dobet, and Dobest .................. 68 Langland’s Ironic Apology .................................................................................... 80 Christ’s Aesthetic and the Poetics of the Harrowing of Hell ................................. 89 III. CHAUCER’S POETICS OF WITTE: IRONIC AESTHETICS IN THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE ...................................................................................................... 98 Chauntecleer’s Mistranslation and Ironic Instruction ............................................ 108 Chaucer’s Ironic Apology ...................................................................................... 124 Mistranslation Translated: The Moralitates of Rooster, Fox, and Narrator .......... 131 IV. PARODIC AESTHETICS IN FRAGMENT VII OF THE CANTERBURY TALES ..................................................................................................................... 139 Parody and The Shipman’s Tale: Poetics of Exchange .......................................... 144 Parody and the Prioress: Poetics of Permeability .................................................. 157 Parody and the Poetics of Incompleteness in Sir Thopas and The Tale of Melibee ................................................................................................................... 165 Failure and Success: Parody and The Monk’s Tale and The Nun’s Priest’s Tale ........................................................................................................................ 178 APPENDIX: ADDITIONAL SOURCES .................................................................... 185 REFERENCES CITED ................................................................................................ 192 vii CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION: THE AESTHETICS OF KNOWING AND POETICS OF WITTE OF LANGLAND AND CHAUCER With the Wife of Bath’s opening declaration, “Experience, though noon auctoritee / Were in this world, is right ynogh for me / To speke of wo that is in mariage” (1-3)1, Geoffrey Chaucer revisits intersecting problems of philosophy, theology, and art that had troubled thinkers from Augustine to Aquinas. Through the dubious character of the Wife and her history of husbands, Chaucer gives dramatic shape to questions regarding who bestows and bears authority2, who decides the meaning and value of experience, and who determines the processes, products, and validity of interpretation—questions the Wife inflects in her Prologue by re-articulating the spiritual and material obligations of gender. Not only does Chaucer transport these concerns of the churchmen into poetry, he renders them in the Middle English vernacular. The consequences of this translation are significant: where the medieval Church subordinated experience to authority, art to ethics, knowledge to truth, vernacular to Latin and woman to man, Chaucer seems to 1 For all line citations of The Canterbury Tales and Piers Plowman, I am dispensing with the standard parenthetical line indicator, ll. 2 Albert Russell Ascoli, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, explains that authority in the Middle Ages “is that quality which renders an author ‘worthy of faith and obedience’ (CV 4.65), is to give an individual access to transpersonal and transhistorical ‘truth’—making his words worthy of faith—and to legitimated, and officially delimited, power—making his words worth of obedience” (5). Certainly, the Wife as Chaucer has created her seeks obedience to her will through the creation of an alternate truth that invests her with an authority derived from her experience. 1 dismantle these hierarchies and place their concepts in tension as rhetorical equals. He shakes the cultural preconceptions of the Middle Ages “to the roote.” It is a subversive move, which Chaucer complicates throughout the Prologue as the Wife, in her sermon, reflects the growing influence and danger of vernacular literary authority in the fourteenth century3. By dismissing “auctoritee” in her initial sally, the Wife denies institutional claims to sovereignty over the representation and interpretation of universal truth. In their place she substitutes her own system of values; she privileges experience, claiming it provides the knowledge necessary for recognizing and proclaiming truth in all matters. Like imaginative literature, poetic figures, and the vernacular, the Wife offers a reinterpretation of the world in apparent conflict with that provided by the authoritative
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