Beyond Canterbury: Chaucer, Humanism and Literature

Published: Church Stretton, Eng.:; Denver: Orny;; Society for New Language Study, 1977.

Description: One of the stumbling blocks to an unbiased reading of Chaucer is the prevalence of "humanistic" criticism, which is "intra-literary" and a kind of "anti-literature." The necessary corrective is "'meta'-humanistic" criticism, which strives "not to extend literature by means of the mirror-image admiration called criticism, but rather to terminate literary history." Fallacies of humanistic Chaucer criticism include: the tendency to "inflate" Chaucer to "cosmic proportions" (Dryden's "God's plenty"); the "noumenalization" of the work into "Literature," which glorifies the author and the work as prophet and eternal truth; unflagging "internalization" and "allegorizing" of language rather than accepting linguistic "indirection"; and "re-Christianizing" or "re-Medievalizing" Chaucer. In application, these methods of "meta-humanistic" criticism reveal that BD is an unorthodox elegy, which offers a "dramatization of emotional growth" paired with "deepening wisdom." The emphasis is upon the self, through "the first modern dialogue with death, not a traditional elegaic confrontation with the infinite." Similarly, KnT is not a regular romance. Through examining its language and archetypal character relationships, it can be seen that the tale is actually "the tragedy of the humanist condition, the tragedy of what it feels like to be a modern self caught in the fascinating yet fatal imperatives of this (now) unknowable process called life."

Chaucer Subjects: Background and General Criticism.; Book of the Duchess.; Knight and His Tale.