Author : Samuel McMillan
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (959 download)
Book Synopsis Medieval Authorship at Reason's End by : Samuel McMillan
Download or read book Medieval Authorship at Reason's End written by Samuel McMillan and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation examines the authorial consequences of reasons banishment. It addresses how medieval poets imagine their occupation when the faculty of mean, mediation, and measure is rendered suspect in relation to literary composition and reception. I argue that Guillaume de Lorriss and Jean de Meuns Roman de la Rose initiates a literary tradition that understands reason to be in tension with and even antithetical to imaginative writing. The abandonment of rationality proffers the terms and concepts around which authors understand, structure, and represent their occupation. This largely unrecognized tradition of authorial misrule goes on to serve as a speculative domain for later Middle English authors. Poets such as Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, John Lydgate, and Thomas Hoccleve imitate, correct, and reimagine the narrative conditions and implications of Raisons repudiation. These authors gain from the Roses irrationality a hermeneutica method of perception that goes on to shape representationa topica collection of material and terms from which to draw both for literary theory and for literary practiceand a condition for writingan anti-intellectual source that initiates invention. A writerly art based in misrule, rather than emerging as a broken creative system, ultimately enables medieval writers to recognize, accept, document, and value the morally questionable, the ephemeral, the earthly. Redefined as poetic virtueas imaginatively productive and artistically challengingmisrule produces authors who see their work as a consequence and simulation of the transient, often rapturous pleasures of a mundane irrationality.
