Talking Some Sense into Chaucer: Bodies in “The Miller’s Prologue” and “The Miller’s Tale”

<p>If there is one question that underpins the evaluation of any great literary work, it is the following: How does the text make us feel? Through affect and textural studies, the answer becomes more complicated than any old adage might readily convey, for “feeling” here becomes a matter of simultaneous tactility and sentiment. Under this lens, perhaps no historical period becomes more desirable to feel than the Middle Ages; it is here, after all, that readers’ responsibilities with texts are pluralized: readers move from listeners born from oral traditions to participants of all kinds. Feeling, then, may be found in that nexus of sounds and sensation, and Chaucer’s fabliaux, through their appropriation of old language sounds into a new Middle English sensibility, become important examples of linguistic friction during the late medieval period. In other words, the sounds Chaucer produces direct attention toward the way that the body is present all times and the problem that arises when bodies inadvertently cross one another. Chaucer’s sounds in “The Miller’s Prologue” and “The Miller’s Tale” become especially apt in this investigation, because the Miller’s enigmatic disposition cultivates inquiry into how much tales can be separated from their authors and how relevant or irrelevant ownership becomes under a linguistic approach, where language creates, rather than abides by, any rules or limitations. If nothing else, <em>The Canterbury Tales</em> fashions itself as a love letter to language and literature in the ways that its ambition counters all assessments of what reading and writing can do. But therein is the deepest motivation of “The Miller’s Tale”: to do something to its audience, and to do so through language.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

MA English

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Year dc:date.available

2016

Author dc:creator

• Joewono, Jacqueline

Contributors dc:contributor

• Angela Weisl, Ph.D
• Donovan Sherman, Ph.D

• chaucer
• medieval
• canterbury tales
• English Language and Literature
• Literature in English, British Isles

Repository record dc:identifier

https://scholarship.shu.edu/dissertations/2186

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:scholarship.shu.edu:dissertations-3240