Orality and Literacy in Chaucer
- Author / Editor
- Brewer, Derek.
Orality and Literacy in Chaucer
- Published
- Willi Erzgraber and Sabine Volk, eds. Mundlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit im englischen Mittelalter. ScriptOralia, no. 5 (Tubingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1988), pp. 85-119.
- Description
- Chaucer's style in his poetry, though not in his prose, is a special mixture of orality and literacy. Brewer analyzes characteristics of orality (with examples): formulas and set phrases, sententiousness, repetition with variation, metonymy, wordplay, oaths, hyperbole, kinetic not mimetic imagery, and a mind-set that is ahistorical, essentialist, and holistic.
- These are underpinned, however, by a remarkable literacy with lexical fullness of high and low style, rhetoric, realism, and irony. To neglect the combined elements of orality and literacy leads to anachronistic and mistaken readings that become pale imitations of what are often typically nineteenth-century effects of characteriazation, or such New Critical concepts (purely literate) as the Narrator.
- Contributor
- Erzgraber, Willi.
- Volk, Sabine.
- Alternative Title
- Mundlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit im englischen Mittelalter.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Style and Versification.