Robyn the Miller's Thrifty Work
- Author / Editor
- Knapp, Peggy A.
Robyn the Miller's Thrifty Work
- Published
- Julian N. Wasserman and Lois Roney, eds. Sign, Sentence, Discourse: Language in Medieval Thought and Literature (Syracuse, N. Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1989), pp. 294-303.
- Description
- Studies MilT for its "intersecting strands of linguistic coding" and contrasts Robertsonian character typing with Bakhtin's "dialogic imagination," semantic open-endedness. The stock character type of the Miller is "quited" by his tale. Bakhtin's view allows for Chaucerian immediacy and idiosyncrasy controlled by authoritative discourse. The new voices and meanings of CT are created out of the received languages of rhetoric, philosophy, and society.
- Knapp treats Robyn the Miller's "anti-aristocratic language" and his entrepreneurial and nominalist ideology, by which he forces the Knight and the Host, "who had offended him through their deference to the hierarchical world, to see disorder and sex graphically." MilT uses Freudian techniques of degradation and unmasking. Chaucer's fiction looks like the "real world" rather than the weaving together of languages.
- Alternative Title
- Sign, Sentence, Discourse: Language in Medieval Thought and Literature.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Miller and His Tale.