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"Travis, Peter W"
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Disseminal Chaucer
Chaucer's The Nun's Priest's Tale is one of the most
popular of The Canterbury Tales . It is only 646 lines
long, yet it contains elements of a beast fable, an
exemplum , a satire, and other genres. There have been
countless attempts to articulate the \"real\" meaning of the tale,
but it has confounded the critics. Peter Travis contends that part
of the fun and part of the frustration of trying to interpret the
tale has to do with Chaucer's use of the tale to demonstrate the
resistance of all literature to traditional critical practices. But
the world of The Nun's Priest's Tale is so creative and so
quintessentially Chaucerian that critics persist in writing about
it.
No one has followed the critical fortunes of Chauntecleer and
his companions more closely over time than Peter Travis. One of the
most important contributions of this book is his assessment of the
tale's reception. Travis also provides an admirable discussion of
genre: his analysis of parody and Menippean satire clarify how to
approach works such as this tale that take pleasure in resisting
traditional generic classifications. Travis also demonstrates that
the tale deliberately invoked its readers' memories of specific
grammar school literary assignments, and the tale thus becomes a
miniaturized synopticon of western learning. Building on these
analyses and insights, Travis's final argument is that The
Nun's Priest's Tale is Chaucer's premier work of self-parody,
an ironic apologia pro sua arte . The most profound matters
foregrounded in the tale are not advertisements of the poet's
achievements. Rather, they are poetic problems that Chaucer
wrestled with from the beginning of his career and, at the end of
that career, wanted to address in a concentrated, experimental, and
parapoetic way.
eBook
Aesop's symposium of animal tongues
This essay is an attempt to ‘triangulate’ in a theoretical fashion three textual sites that address in quite different ways the ‘animal turn.’ The first site is comprised of the first literary texts studied in the medieval classroom, a collection of Aesopian fables. The second is a collection of modern and postmodern studies of animality – most notably by Marin, Agamben, Derrida, Wolfe and Oliver. The third is the
Vita Aesopi
, a rarely studied biography that served in the late Middle Ages as a prolegomenon and metafable for the fables themselves. What holds these three discursive sites together is their sustained interrogations of language, and most preeminently, of metaphor. Metaphor, as well as a number of closely related locutions such as ‘clinamen,’ ‘l’aperto’ and ‘l’animot,’ is essential in our attempts, both medieval and modern, at conceptualizing and redefining the foliated frontier between the so-called animal and the so-called human.
The vigilance with which the demarcations between human and animals, humans and things, and humans and children are watched over and safeguarded tells us much about the assailability of what they seek to preserve: an abstract notion of the human as unified, autonomous, and unmodified subject. Diana Fuss, ‘Introduction: Human, All Too Human’
Journal Article
Chaucer's Heliotropes and the Poetics of Metaphor
One possible way of dealing with the strange art of rhetoric is to claim one knows nothing about it. This is the tack taken by Chaucer's Franklin in his prologue to his Canterbury tale: I lerned nevere rethorik, certeyn; ………… Colours ne knowe I none, withouten drede, But swiche colours as growen in the mede, Or elles swiche as men dye or peynte. Colours of rethoryk been to me queynte. (V.719, 723–26) Here the Franklin pretends to be an ignoramus when it comes to understanding the figurae-the colors, or flowers, of poetry-taught in the rhetorical handbooks. The Franklin's antipoetic sentiments are of course problematic, for his fourline demurral concerning the proper understanding of “colours” contains a subtle illustration not only of the word “colour” being put to good metaphorical use but of metaphor's complex linguistic, ontological, and indeed epistemological nature. Here, in the Franklin's modesty trope, “colour” is a word that seems to have so many metaphorical meanings that it is difficult to descry its proper, or original, significance. Transported from what we might assume is its realm of original, literal meaning (the colors of pigment) into another linguistic realm as a name for poetic tropes (the “colours” of rhetoric), it is translated by the Franklin back to the domain of nature to serve as a synecdochic name for flowers (“swiche colours as growen in the mede”), even though “flowers” is a traditional medieval name for verbal tropes, the “flowers” of poetry.
Journal Article
Chaucer on Screen: Absence, Presence, and Adapting the Canterbury Tales
In a well-researched exploration of Hollywood archives, Lynn Arner in 'Chaucer and the Moving Image in Pre-World War II America' details four 'historical and cultural reasons' that Chaucer played second fiddle to Robin Hood and King Arthur: these four are 'American cinematic nationalism' (p. 75), his tales' failure 'to offer the promise of futurity' (p. 76), Chaucer's negative associations with the past, and his lack of 'cross-class appeal' (p. 79). [...]in 'The Naked Truth: Chaucerian Spectacle in Brian Helgeland's A Knight's Tale,' Siân Echard ingeniously argues Helgeland's film is 'improbably and surprisingly in tune' (p. 183) with the Chaucerian texts that inspired it. [...]Kathleen Davis emphasizes how the BBC's modernization of the 'Man of Law's Tale' underscores a host of present-day issues that were matters of equal urgency in Chaucer's Europe: religious extremism, colonialism, sexual desire, and the law.
Book Review
Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts, (The New Middle Ages)
Travis reviews Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts edited by Carolynn Van Dyke.
Book Review
The Wheel of Language: Representing Speech in Middle English Poetry, 1377-1422. (Medieval Studies)
Travis reviews The Wheel of Language: Representing Speech in Middle English Poetry, 1377-1422 by David K. Coley.
Book Review
