Speech Acts and the Art of the Exemplum in the Poetry of Chaucer and Gower
- Author / Editor
- Green, Eugene.
Speech Acts and the Art of the Exemplum in the Poetry of Chaucer and Gower
- Published
- Rosanne G. Potter, ed. Literary Computing and Literary Criticism: Theoretical and Practical Essays on Theme and Rhetoric (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), pp. 167-87.
- Description
- Examines the exemplum as a "speech act" in Gower's "Confessio Amantis" and in Chaucer's MLT, PhyT, WBT, and LGW. In WBT, "the motives of the hag in requesting marriage as recompense for her aid are central to matters of prudential action"; in LGW, "in the tale of Ariadne the promises of...Theseus illustrate the difficulties of deciding what is sincere."
- Green argues that "grammatical and contextual properties of utterances" in exempla of Gower and Chaucer can be analyzed by computers and concludes that "if Gower shapes his exempla as a public poet who implicitly urges self-reflection..., Chaucer reveals what the act of artistic creation as a committment means."
- Contributor
- Potter, Rosanne G.,ed.
- Alternative Title
- Literary Computing and Literary Criticism: Theoretical and Practic
- Chaucer Subjects
- Legend of Good Women.
- Wife of Bath and Her Tale.
- Physician and His Tale.
- Man of Law and His Tale.
- Background and General Criticism.