Penance, Irony, and Chaucer's Retraction
- Author / Editor
- Knapp, Robert S.
Penance, Irony, and Chaucer's Retraction
- Published
- Assays 2 (1983): 45-67.
- Description
- Ret, an "authorial form of self-elimination," is formally like irony; it is also a penance, which, also like irony, protects the author from adverse judgment. Thus CT irony can be neatly exchanged for Ret penance. Penance, however, a sacrament and thus a sign, "partakes of semiotics," and semiotic analysis reveals that, whereas irony is "metaphoric substitution," penance is "metonymic association."
- Chaucer Subjects
- Chaucer's Retraction.