Rhetoric and Poetics in the 'Canterbury Tales': The Knight, the Squire, and the Franklin

Description: The ways these three pilgrims use four rhetorical devices--"occupatio," "brevitas," "digressio," and "descriptio"--reveals their personalities. The Knight's self-conscious narrative stance shows his pretensions: his insensitivity in his use of rhetorical techniques reveals that he is not nearly as wise and high-minded a person as his GP portrait suggests.; The Squire's rhetorical errors are generally an intensification of his father's and show him to be a trivial, rather silly person. FranT is rhetorically superior to KnT and SqT. The Franklin's utilitarian use of rhetorical techniques provides an indirect critique of the Squire's, and to some degree the Knight's, social and rhetorical pretensions.

Chaucer Subjects: Style and Versification.; Knight and His Tale.; Squire and His Tale.; Franklin and His Tale.