![]() ![]() ![]() Any error is therefore seen as a manifestation of (spatial and sexual) deviance from the normative which provokes ‘ an injury to the father’ (Ahmed, 2006, 74). Sara Ahmed, for instance, describes heteronormative or familial relations spatially as ‘directional metaphors’ (Ahmed, 2006, 75) establishing a ‘line of descent’ (Ahmed, 2006, 73) originating from the father’s authority and identifying with him. The rhyming verbs ‘directe’ and ‘correcte’ articulate an apparent desire for a straight directionality this spatial configuration of writerly agency chimes with queer theories of identity as oriented or directed in space. ![]() As the rhyme suggests, late medieval authorship is underpinned by a preoccupation with the rectification of error. It is not only the moral potency of Gower or the philosophical integrity of Strode that Chaucer evokes, but also the redemptive intervention of Christ on the cross who possesses the power to ‘circumscrive’ (V.1865) or to contain the spectre of sinful error. To vouchen sauf, ther nede is, to correcte,Īnd to that sothfast Crist, that starf on rode (V.1856–60)Ī rhetoric of unidirectionality, control, and legitimization marks the passage, as Chaucer prepares to release anxiously his verses to the world. Paradoxically, a preoccupation with deviation and misprision becomes apparent in Chaucer’s famous dedication of Troilus and Criseyde to ‘moral Gower’ (V.1856), Footnote 1 whose authority is called upon to rectify or straighten the very possibility of error: Yet the function of this name-checking is far from straightforward. Chaucer and Gower both mention each other in some of their major works, Troilus and Criseyde and Confessio Amantis, respectively, and Chaucer also apparently alludes to Gower’s poetry in the Introduction to the Man of Law’s Tale in The Canterbury Tales. Indeed, a so-called quarrel between Geoffrey Chaucer and his contemporary and fellow poet, John Gower, has also been figured in terms of actual or at least metaphorical rivalry (Fisher, 1965 Dinshaw, 1991). While Bloom himself suggested that premodern writers did not feel the same need to assert the originality of their own work, it is in fact impossible to avoid applying this paradigm to late medieval literature, as Geoffrey Chaucer, famously identified as the ‘Father of English Poetry’ by John Dryden in the eighteenth century (Dryden, 1700, ), was cast as the patriarch of the English literary canon by one of his immediate successors, the poet-bureaucrat Thomas Hoccleve in his Regiment of Princes (Blyth, 1999). In aiming to disrupt conventional conceptualizations of the relationships between medieval manuscripts, this Special Issue sets out to offer what we think of as a new codicology, a queer philology, whose epistemology is founded on dissonance, instability, and misprision rather than on the teleological linearity of Bloom’s patriarchal paradigm. This Special Issue takes recognition of this possibility or even inevitability as its starting point, seeks to challenge it, and in so doing offers new ways of thinking about manuscripts and reading and interpreting texts. ![]() What is less widely acknowledged is the possibility that our understanding of the status of and relationships between medieval manuscripts, the very codices in which early literature was copied and circulated, has a comparable patriarchal underpinning. This much is well known, and it is exemplified, to give one famous example, in Harold Bloom’s study The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Bloom, 1973), in which, focusing primarily on post-medieval (and indeed initially on post-early modern) male poets, Bloom applied a Freudian model of Oedipal conflict to the relationships between different generations of writers. Intertwined ideas of authority and masculinity are foundational to traditional accounts of canon formation. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |