Chaucer and the Art of Storytelling

Author / Editor
Koff, Leonard Michael.

Title
Chaucer and the Art of Storytelling

Published
Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1988.

Physical Description
308 pp.

Description
Koff argues that "Chaucerian irony does not lead to Chaucer's own meaning. Instead, Chaucer's deflecting self-characterizations and the characterization of the storyteller who 'cannot tell stories' enable Chaucer to relinquish omniscience, thereby empowering all readers to recreate, as a mirror of themselves, the body social that reading any text creates."
Indeed, Koff suggests that Chaucer is best seen within a tradition of storytelling and textual interpretation (exemplified by the parables of Jesus and twelfth-century Victorine exegesis) that puts readers on the testing end of truth in fiction designed NOT as a code for something else.

Chaucer Subjects
Background and General Criticism.