Chaucer's Poetry and Its Modern Commentators: The Necessity of History

Published: David Aers, ed. Medieval Literature (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986), pp. 123-47.

Description: Studies the hermeneutical "reflection of contemporary historical actuality" in Chaucer criticism. Although various critical schools--epistemologists, phenomenologists,Marxists and Russian Formalists (Medvedev, Bakhtin), etc.--recognize the historical approach as valid, "reflectionism" (the idea that literature reflects ideology and history) is superficial and unsatisfactory since history is slippery (Williams, Eagleton, Jameson).; "Vulgar Marxism" reduces literature to "class-based distortions of ideology." Uncertain of the world model, New Critics make the text a "verbal icon." Easy searches for irony and ambiguity have replaced "hard won linguistic and historical knowledge."; Reflecting his own distaste for the moral relativism of his time, Robertson adopted the policy that "nothing means what it says, and everything means the same thing" to reduce medieval literature into a sermon for moderns supporting traditional social and religious values. On Chaucer's Knight, Terry Jones reflects the current distaste for war. Pearsall reacts favorably to Aers and Delany. He advocates the British scholarly historical and philological traditions.