Miller's Tale Research Articles

“This carpenter wende he were in despeir”: Misinterpretation and the Nightmare in Chaucer's Miller's Tale

“This carpenter wende he were in despeir”: Misinterpretation and the Nightmare in Chaucer's Miller's Tale

The Canterbury Tales Handbook by Elizabeth Scala (review)

Reviewed by: The Canterbury Tales Handbook by Elizabeth Scala Peter Fields Elizabeth Scala. The Canterbury Tales Handbook. Norton, 2020. 297 p. Elizabeth Scala knows that she does not have the luxury of scale. A handbook becomes a problem if it competes with its subject for the student's reading time. Her technique is to anticipate a disconnect between Chaucer and the modern reader and then to leap into the breach with a provisional explanation that moves the reader forward. The only slow place is dwelling momentarily on the General Prologue, taking advantage of the first 18 lines to introduce a model for explication. Especially well-done is how Scala seems to take on too much, making a point, for instance, of explaining the demande d'amour in "The Knight'sTale." What first seems like a needless excursus emerges as a great opportunity to acknowledge the difficulty the modern young person might have entering into the motives and emotions of courtly love as in the case of Arcite's bittersweet dilemma of regretful freedom. Suddenly released upon the wide world, Arcite frets the loss of that prison window he once shared with his fellow knight Palamon because it afforded an unencumbered view of Emelye, the idol of their hearts. [End Page 250] The Knight's own language presumes that the skeptical reader must be won over if only by flattery: "But almost as though he knows that his audience is made up of potentially resisting readers, the Knight preemptively turns it into a group of lovers—courtly, aristocratic, gentle lovers—subtly persuading us to play the demande's game" (47). Such is Scala's modus operandi of first highlighting a pitfall for modern students, then hinting that the astute and playful Chaucer is simpatico with modern sensibility. Interestingly, she does not feel the need to apologize for Chaucer's bawdy fabliaux like "The Miller's Tale," "The Reeve's Tale," "The Friar's Tale," and "The Summoner's Tale." Here the teacher can sit back and give Scala the wheel as she acquaints students with double-entendre like "quainte." Scala builds momentum right up to "The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale," where she makes a perfect compromise between examining the far-ranging implications of Chaucer's most important speaker and keeping the reader moving along. The concision of Scalas also does well with the motif of marriage-as-torture-of-women in "The Clerk's Tale" and "The Merchant's Tale." She makes an exceptionally compelling case for "The Man-of-Law's Tale" as genre-bending "secular hagiography," all the while staying breezy with her prose. Scala reconnoiters as of "The Squire's Tale," shifting from modern resistance to a more esoteric consideration of whether language can express the speaker's meaning. The Squire for instance seems conscious of the limitations of language to express the inexpressible. By surrendering to limitation, he enters another level of sensibility and wonder. The hinge of the book is the chapter on "The Franklin's Tale," a story that depends on the tension between marriage and courtly love and comes to a rather hip conclusion to the marriage debate: "The answer that the Franklin offers is that no one should have mastery (which we might define as control over another person or being), and everyone should have sovereignty (or control over themselves)" (179). However, "The Physician's Tale," whose story of a father who wins his daughter's permission to cut off her head (to avoid her marriage to a corrupt judge), would logically seem to present Scala a high hurdle for casting Chaucer as a hero of personal freedom. But Scala stands up for the story and reveals her previous strategy for reconciling the resistant modern reader: "But rather than suggest that the story is some kind of intentional failure (on Chaucer's part or the Physician's), we might see [End Page 251] the tale as provocatively experimental" (182). Another great explanation is her take on the Pardoner's subterfuge, which strategically blurs "[…] the distinction between forgiveness a poena (from the pain of punishment) and forgiveness a culpa (from guilt of one's actions or intent)" (189). Her larger purpose...

Bottom-Kissing and the Fragility of Status in Chaucer's Miller's Tale

Abstract The Miller's Tale attacks authority and permanence of status among a highly class-conscious, small bourgeoisie, using the humiliation through bottom-kissing found in the Old French fabliaux Berengier au Lonc Cul and La Gageure. Chaucer's recollection of these fabliaux may have influenced the postures of Alisoun and Nicholas in the Miller's Tale's window scenes, scenes that ultimately result in a loss of status, certainty, and authority for all of the major characters but Alisoun. Moreover, the ancient motif of apotropaic sexual exhibitionism, where the display of female genitalia, the buttocks, and farting averted demons, is comically used to imagine Absolon as such a demon when he comes wooing at Alisoun's window on the night of her tryst with Nicholas.

The Affix Changes from Middle English to Modern English Found In The Miller's Tale Written by Geoffrey Chaucer and Its Modern English Version

The history of English language has three periods of time; Old English, Middle English, and Modern English. The linguistic forms in English development are different each period. This research aims to find out one of the changes, that is, the affix changes from Middle English to Modern English form that found in both of The Miller’s Tale Story Middle English and Modern English versions. This research also aims to find out the spelling changes in affixes. This research used descriptive qualitative method. The data, which are the collection of words that have affixes found in The Miller’s Tale, were identified based on the base of the words and its affixes and its were classified based on the type of its functions. Based on data analysis, there are seven affixes in Middle English which have been changed in Modern English form. These changes occur in the deletion of vowel, change of vowel, substitution of the affix, and elimination of the affix. The spelling change also influenced the change in suffixes. Some of the vocabularies change into the new words and some of the words change only in its vowel.

Chaucer's Biblical Turn

In the Miller's Tale Chaucer turns away from classical sources and a classical authorial persona towards biblical source material in order to craft a providential mode of self-asserting and self-effacing authorship, a turn fraught with generative possibilities for the Canterbury Tales. The Miller and Nicholas theorize God's authorial production as ‘Goddes pryvetee’, concealed meaning they ignore when adapting the Bible but whose concealment they can imitate when claiming its authority. Chaucer writes the Miller's Tale, then, as God would have: its clear design revealing decisive authorial agency, its meaning hidden in the inscrutable transcendence of that agency.

Chaucer's Decameron and the Origin of the Canterbury Tales by Frederick M. Biggs

Reviewed by: Chaucer's Decameron and the Origin of the Canterbury Tales by Frederick M. Biggs Greg Waite Biggs, Frederick M., Chaucer's Decameron and the Origin of the Canterbury Tales (Chaucer Studies, 44), Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 2017; cloth; pp. xii, 275; R.R.P. £60.00; ISBN 9781843844754. The vexed question of Chaucer's knowledge and use of Boccaccio's Decameron is revisited in this study. Frederick M. Biggs argues that three novelle from the eighth day of the Decameron—8.1, 8.2, and 8.10—formed Chaucer's source for the Shipman's Tale, originally intended for the Wife of Bath, and that Chaucer's reading of these novelle crucially reshaped the way he conceived of how to create tales from diverse sources. Furthermore, Chaucer's idea of the Canterbury Tales, thematically and structurally, owes much to the influence of Boccaccio's account of Licisca's outburst in the Introduction to the sixth day of the Decameron, where she reveals her contempt for the attitudes of men regarding women, marriage, power, and class inequality. From this passage and its effects on stories told in the days following, Chaucer learned how to construct frames for his narratives that would create dramatic roles in the debates that they developed. Biggs's analysis hinges on these passages from the Decameron, and is further developed by the working out of a chronology for the early Tales as Chaucer developed and revised his ideas. Biggs focuses upon the apparent quarrel between Chaucer and Gower, involving Gower's retelling, in his Tale of Florent, of the Wife of Bath's Tale, given to her to replace the tale she was originally intended to deliver, but which Chaucer transferred to the Shipman. This Tale was intended originally to have been set against the already written Melibee, originally assigned to the Man of Law. Biggs claims that the Miller's Tale was the third to be written as Chaucer's radical new approach was developing. Within a wide-ranging examination of the tale and its narrative elements, he advances Dom Felice's speech in Decameron 3.4 as one of Chaucer's sources. Biggs may not convince all Chaucerians with his elaborate theory, but this book deserves to be read and recognized for its deep learning and astute critical analysis of Chaucer's tales, the historical and cultural contextualization of them, and beyond that, the nature of source study itself. [End Page 235] Greg Waite University of Otago Copyright © 2019 Parergon

Curious Labor in the Miller's Tale

Curious Labor in the Miller's Tale

Virgin Whore by Emma Maggie Solberg

Reviewed by: Virgin Whore by Emma Maggie Solberg Daisy Black Emma Maggie Solberg. Virgin Whore. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018. Pp. 294. $39.95. Asking when the qualities of virginity—fragile, difficult to detect, and easily defiled—were transferred to the Virgin Mary, Virgin Whore confronts a medieval figuring of an earthy Mary who played the trickster, embarrassed her son, and seduced God with her sexual charisma. While recent decades have produced a body of influential work on the Virgin, [End Page 415] this book's sustained analysis of Mary's role in the East Anglian N-Town manuscript pageants is a welcome addition. Drawing on diverse theological, artistic, historical, and literary sources, its focus on Mary in performance permits an important examination of the ways Mary became both the target of ridicule and vicious accusation and herself played the role of divine comedienne. The centering of early theater, so often on the margins of Marian studies, offers an exciting rethinking of how the Virgin's legendary lives were reimagined by lay communities. The pageants dealing with Joseph's doubts about Mary are among the more scrutinized in early-drama criticism; however, Solberg's first chapter helpfully draws together a history of apocrypha, artwork, and theological texts in its focus on this episode in the N-Town manuscript. Solberg finds Joseph's question about Jesus' paternity amplified to farcical effect as the list of candidates grows. The history of Joseph's role as a legitimizing presence fortifying Mary's virginity and as threat to the virgin narrative is charted, covering the second-century Gospel of James, early Christian theologians, the physical diminishing of Joseph, and farce and fabliau tropes. Intriguingly, Solberg also briefly considers the racial stereotyping of Joseph's decrepitude and impotence as Jewish, set in opposition to Mary, "the young, beautiful, blossoming flower of Christianity" (27). While this is a small part of this chapter's argument rather than forming the book's core, it shows interesting intersections with the debates of Kathleen Biddick and Anthony Bale about gender in anti-Semitic art and literature. Solberg examines how sexual doubt is developed, including the pageant's exploitation of theological debates about how God impregnated Mary, and why, given the narrative's classical and Hebrew contexts, Joseph was justified in fearing that the angel Gabriel or God "jape[d]" with his wife. This introduces the monograph's recurring argument: that the more theologians, artwork, and plays attempted to fortify Mary's virginity, the more open it was to doubt, challenge, and testing. Chapter 2 examines why the Gospels might have provoked this desire to produce supplemental "proofs" of Mary's virginity. This chapter includes a welcome discussion of early accusations against the Virgin, including the Hebrew New Testament parody Toledot Yeshu, as well as the history of the chastity trial from apocrypha to the N-Town's Trial of Mary and Joseph and the midwife's testing of Mary's virginity in the Nativity. Solberg identifies a long line of Marian skeptics and notes that, where historical chastity trials destroyed the subject being tested, Mary [End Page 416] passes each trial, ready to be tested anew. Here, Solberg makes her original argument that the N-Town Mary takes these repetitive trials in a spirit of humor and play that "turns the trial by ordeal into a harmless game, violence into play, tragedy into comedy" (58). This reading of the trials as a "game" is secured firmly within the N-Town manuscript's East Anglian context, with its ecclesiastical trials, ritual humiliation of icons, and public suspicion of "white" marriages. The chapter ends by drawing an intriguing link between the cuckolded carpenter and his wife and Chaucer's Miller's Tale. The third chapter complicates the Ave/Eva model, which constructs Mary as the typological opposite of Eve. It focuses on the cherry-tree episode in the N-Town pageant of the Nativity, arguing that Mary does not so much reverse Eve as demonstrate a surprising ability to mimic the pattern of Eve's actions yet get away with it: "God seems to reward Mary for re-enacting the scene of Eve's transgression" (84). This contrasts...

An East–West Conversation: Gürpınar's A Marriage under the Comet and Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales

AbstractThe Turkish writer Hüseyin Rahmi Gürpınar's 1922 novel A Marriage under the Comet shows similarities with “The Miller's Tale” and “The Wife of Bath's Tale” from Chaucer's fourteenth‐century The Canterbury Tales in terms of its subject and its characters. In the first part of the novel, Irfan, like Nicholas, makes fun of the uneducated people, frightening them with his astrological explanations and predictions. The second part of the novel, like “The Wife of Bath's Tale,” ends with a speech on an ideal marriage. Here too, it is advised that when choosing his/her spouse, one must value inner beauty more than appearance and that if they want a happy marriage, husbands should submit their will to their wives. The enormous interest shown the Turkish version of The Canterbury Tales, since it was translated in 1994 for the first time, might be attributed to these similarities. In the tales above, Chaucer satirizes the religious, sexual, and class culture of the English society of his age unsparingly. It is possible that Gürpınar's well‐loved novel, which adapts similar stories from a different culture and time to the local context, might have played a role in preparing the relatively more conservative Turkish readers for Chaucer's work, which they would meet eighty years later.

Chaucer's Gnof

Gnof, used to introduce a major theme—our need to question even our most basic assumptions—in The Miller's Tale, is, remarkably, both a neologism and a borrowing. Because this essay sets out to prove that Chaucer created this word, the linguistic evidence is considered in detail. In Middle English, gnof appears only in the opening description of John the carpenter, it lacks a convincing etymology, and it was changed by several scribes as they copied their exemplars. In Early Modern English, it was revived by a limited number of authors, many of whom were associated with antiquarian interests in Chaucer's works, during the time of the inkhorn debate. Moreover, because I also argue that Chaucer took the sound of gnof but not its meaning from the Tuscan interjection gnaffé, which he found in Decameron, III.4, I consider the larger thematic links between these two narratives. If correct, this combined evidence leads to more than an interpretation of The Miller's Tale or new evidence for the reception of the Canterbury Tales. Chaucer did not just borrow lexemes from languages such as French and Latin and echo, on occasion, specific dialects of Middle English, but created new words. And, as an unusual verbal borrowing, gnof proves his use of the Decameron.

The Endless Knot: Essays on Old and Middle English in Honor of Marie Borroff ed. by M. Teresa Tavormina and R. F. Yeager

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER M. TERESA TAVORMINA and R. F. YEAGER, eds. The Endless Knot: Essays on Old and Middle English in Honor ofMarie Borroff Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1995. Pp. ix, 252. $81.00. This anthology of fifteen elegant essays by Marie Borroff's students and friends is an appropriate tribute upon the retirement of one of the fine medievalists of our time.Several of the essays acknowledge their ori­ gin in Professor Borroff's own scholarship or in remarks in her lectures or papers prepared for her seminars. The names of the participants be­ speak the distinction of Professor Borroff's affinity. Would that we could all call upon the influence of a Yale to enhance our efforts with our students. The essays that impress me most are Sherry Reames, "Artistry, Decorum, and Purpose in Three Middle English Retellings of the Cecelia Legend," and R. F. Yeager, "Ben Jonson's English Grammar and John Gower's Reception in theSeventeenth Century." Reames's essay, which grows out of her continuing study of theSt. Cecelia legend cited in her footnotes, is the most impressive scholarly contribution in the volume in its familiarity with manuscripts, texts, and previous criti­ cism. Her discussion of the significance for date and method of compo­ sition and possible political implications of the discovery of two sources for Chaucer's Second Nun's Tale is genuinely important. Yeager's essay is interesting to me for the light it throws on the con­ tinuing standardization of English in the seventeenth century. I do not think that grammars and dictionaries had much effect on the process of standardization until the advent of general education for upward mo­ bility in the eighteenth century, but Jonson's Grammar shows a pre­ science for cultivating English as a medium independent of Latin, and his more than 150 illustrative quotations from Gower, Chaucer, Lydgate, Cheke, Fox, Jewell, Norton, More, Lambert, Ascham, Lord Berners, and the King James Bible (p. 229) established the precedence of the bureaucratic/literary establishment that has controlled the stan­ dardization of the language since the fifteenth century. EricStanley's introductory essay on the survival of dual pronouns in Old English is very interesting, although I wish that he had used the term "direct address" instead of "direct speech" for the locutions in which the dual forms survive. Melissa Furrow's comparison of the def­ erential uses of Latin tags by Gower and Langland with the derisive uses 322 REVIEWS by Chaucer illustrates another reason for Chaucer's superior popularity. Teresa Tavormina has found fascinating associations between the names of John and Aleyn in Chaucer's Miller's Tale and John Aleyn, a clerk in Edward Ill's Chapel Royal. Solar Hall in Cambridge was King's Hall, a branch of the Chapel Royal to which choristers of the Chapel might be sent for further education. John Aleyn was a clerk of the Chapel Royal, a musician of some consequence, and, like Chaucer, employed in vari­ ous errands for the King and Queen. In a motet possibly byJohn Aleyn there is a "Flos Oxonie miracur Nicholaus, qui vocatur Vade Famelico." This Nicholaus became Prior of St. Frideswide's Priory in Oxford, and Tavormina recounts several interesting events that occurred during his administration. She wishes that there were more certainty and signifi­ cance about the names and associations, but the essay reveals again the extent to which Chaucer's poems were addressed to a familiar audience now lost to us. Mary Carruthers has an interesting essay on the purpose of sense im­ agery in Prudentius and the Pearl. She has informative things to say about education in the era of memory. Elizabeth Kirk has a sensitive reading of healing mourning in Pearl. Warren Ginsberg discusses the arrangement of details in Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale as conventionally "relational" rather than postmodernly "associational." John Burrow cites Chaucer's allusions to his "elvishness" as evidence of his reticence and abstraction. Traugott Lawler gives a very close read­ ing of Conscience's dinner in Piers Plowman B.13. Fred Robinson prints eight letters by the Anglo-Saxonist Elizabeth Elstob that point up the plight ofan educated woman...

Literary Nominalism and the Theory of Rereading Late Medieval Texts: A New Research Paradigm ed. by Richard J. Utz

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER want their books read, and their university libraries to continue to ac­ quire books, then they must resist the cachet ofa label in favor ofmore colleague-friendly presses. LEE PATTERSON Yale University RICHARD J. UTZ, ed. Literary Nominalism and the Theory ofRereading Late Medieval Texts: A New Research Paradigm. Medieval Studies, vol. 5. Lewiston, N.Y., and Queenston, Ontario: Edwin Mellen Press, 1995. Pp. 256. $90.00. This volume is a collection of essays dealing with what the editor, Richard J. Utz, derivatively calls "a paradigm shift," after the phrase made famous, if not bromidic, by the contemporary philosopher Thomas S. Kuhn. As recent scholarship of the late medieval period has moved nominalism from the margins to the center ofphilosophical and theological attention, so literary criticism-in quasi-vassalage-has come to reexamine the literature ofthe period according to the dictates of the new paradigm. Although Chaucer has been the focus of most of these nominalist reconsiderations--even in this volume seven ofthe ten essays focus on Chaucerian themes-Professor Utz has editorially ex­ tended the paradigm to include three extra-Chaucerian essays: Jay Ruud's on Julian of Norwich's Revelations ofDivine Love, which argues for a correspondence of concerns therein between mysticism and nomi­ nalism; Michael Randall's onJean Molinet's Chappellet des Dames, which places the poem in a shifting fifteenth-century "episteme" from the realist/analogical to the nominalist/anti-analogical; and J. Stephen Russell's on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, of which more anon. In his own lead-offessay, Utz is extremely helpful to readers who are still trying to "negotiate" the shift, not only by bibliographically sur­ veying its movers and shakers but also by cueing the uninitiated into understanding some of its presuppositions: that, for example, Augustinianism and Thomism had by Chaucer's time given way to nominalism as the philosophical or theological underpinning of liter­ ary texts. Despite the paucity ofreferences to specific nominalists in the literature of the time, Utz argues that since fourteenth-century 328 REVIEWS thinkers-like the Dominican Robert Holcot-"attempted to spread nominalist thought in a more popular mode among 'lewed' non­ specialists" (p. 14), they could not but have influenced the literati as well. Even Chaucer's friend Ralph Strode, who since Israel Gollancz's well-known 1898 DNB article had been considered a Thomist, finds himselfconscripted into the nominalist camp here and therefore serves as a convenientpoint d'appui for nominalist readings ofChaucer's works. Utz's arguments for Strode's nominalism are, by his own admission, not incontrovertible, but compelling nonetheless. Compelling too is his reading of the narrator's leap to faith in the Epilogue of Troilus and Criseyde, not merely as another illustration of the contemptus mundi tra­ dition but as a narrative strategy that "resembles the academic fideism of {Chaucer's} coeval nominalist counterparts" (p. 19). Notwithstanding his own preference for nominalist readings, Utz has sought to recruit a few recalcitrant voices in his symposium. Edgar Laird, for example, takes issue with those who would write off The Knight's Tale as a kind of Boethianism manque by placing it in the tra­ dition ofuniversals signified by the "scientific ontology" ofAlbumasar, Grosseteste, and Wyclif. He thus supports Peggy Knapp's idea that The Canterbury Tales moves from the intelligible world of The Knight's Tale to the world ofsensibles in The Miller's Tale. AndJohn Micheal Crafton argues that by being drawn to both sides of the nominalist controversy, Chaucer consumes both his Augustinian and nominalist precursors. Having confronted realist themes in The Book of the Duchess, he aban­ dons allegory for nominalism in the other dream visions, but is finally disillusioned by it. Troilus and Criseyde continues the dialectic and The Canterbury Tales perfects it. Grover Furr enters the lists by considering the problem offuture con­ tingents-considered by many the dominant nominalist theme of Ricardian literature-in his article on The Nun's Priest's Tale. Although the Nun's Priest seems to be agreeing with Chauntecleer that what "God forwoot moost needes bee," Furr contends that the subsequent al­ lusion to the great philosophical dispute over simple or conditional ne...

Chaucer and Array: Patterns of Costume and Fabric Rhetoric in The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, and Other Works by Laura F. Hodges (review)

LAURA F. HODGES, Chaucer and Array: Patterns of Costume and Fabric Rhetoric in The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, and Other Works. Chaucer Studies Vol. 42. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2014. Pp. xi, 232. isbn: 978-1-8438-4368-9. $99.Laura Hodges has spent much of her scholarly career studying medieval clothing, particularly what she calls costume rhetoric (the sociological and economic implications of medieval dress). Two of her previous books have explored this topic in a more limited way by covering the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, where Hodges cataloged the variety of Chaucer's techniques in depicting clothing but could not determine an overarching pattern in Chaucer's artistic choices. However, in Chaucer and Array, Hodges knits together her earlier work and expands upon it by analyzing Chaucer's descriptions of clothing in the entirety of his writings. In particular, Hodges argues that when we examine Chaucer's writings collectively, he reveals several tendencies in his depictions of wardrobe going beyond mere characterization; these range from meeting genre expectations, to subverting or reversing those same expectations, to creating comic incongruity. The genre of the particular work influences which strategy Chaucer will employ.Hodges is meticulous and thorough. Her book's copious footnotes sometimes threaten to eclipse the entire page, but her writing style is uncluttered by jargon and her arguments are always cogent and careful in their claims. Although Hodges occasionally nods to Michael Camille, Carolyn Dinshaw, and Lorraine Stock in her footnotes, her explications focus less on gender politics and medieval sexuality than one might expect, given the content of the tales. Instead, her readings will be of special benefit to scholars interested in the semiotics of clothing, materialist criticism, and medieval expectations of genre. For the most part, as she explores these topics, her mission is one of augmentation rather than revolution; she usually provides new information that supports older understandings of the text rather than radically seeking to revise how we read a given work. A notable exception to that tendency is her rebuttal of some of the more dated annotations in the standard scholarly text of Chaucer's works, The Riverside Chaucer published in 1987, where Hodges is quick to point out unhelpful, incomplete, or potentially misleading understandings of clothing terminology.In Chaucer and Array, the most thorough explorations are of Chaucer's Knight's Tale, Troilus and Criseyde, The Clerk's Tale, The Miller's Tale, and Sir Thopas, each of which has its own chapter of discussion. …

The lives of the Miller's tale: the roots, composition and retellings of Chaucer's bawdy story

The lives of the Miller's tale: the roots, composition and retellings of Chaucer's bawdy story

The Meaning of Middle English <em>Gent and Smal</em>

Abstract Gent and smal, a phrase that occurs frequently in Middle English literature, is typically interpreted as “slender,” perhaps most famously in translations and interpretations of Alisoun's descriptio in the Miller's Tale. This article argues that the word-pair must be understood as a hendiadys that carries the connotations of both a noble character and a good build. Due to the phrase's connotations of nobility, its appearance in descriptio complicates the traditional distinction between appearance (effictio) and character (notatio).

Introduction

Introduction

Something from Nothing:

The relentless negations in these lines—denials of action, thought, being, and feeling—emphasize the narrator’s lack of productive intellectual or social influence and his emotional void. Yet “nothing” takes on an allegorical force as it “cometh or gooth” and as the narrator describes his “felyng in nothyng.” This allegory illogically suggests that the Dreamer finds something—a feeling—in nothing, a paradoxical notion that anticipates a deep

Notes and Documents: A Miller's Tale of Captivity, Ransom, and Remembrance, 1758–1811

Notes and Documents: A Miller's Tale of Captivity, Ransom, and Remembrance, 1758–1811

Chaucerian Obscenity in the Court of Public Opinion

Chaucerian Obscenity in the Court of Public Opinion

The Nothing That Is

The Nothing That Is Scott Nadelson (bio) My sophomore year of college I signed up for a comparative literature survey class that sampled the great works of the Western world from Goethe to Garcia Marquez. I was fairly new to literature— I'd hardly read at all in high school—but over the past year I'd decided it was the most important thing in the world to me, something to which I'd swiftly and happily pinned my identity. This decision arose partly out of genuine passion; Dylan Thomas's poetry had moved me the first time I'd read it, and Chaucer's Miller's Tale had made me laugh out loud. But I also liked the idea of myself as someone who was passionate about literature, and even more, the idea of other people recognizing me for such passion, which struck me as unique and distinguished, a mark of my sophisticated and mysterious nature. All this was part of a larger transformation I'd undergone over the past year, moving to North Carolina, quickly abandoning the New Jersey accent I previously hadn't even been aware of, taking my first tentative steps toward independence. It had never occurred to me before that an identity was something I could construct for myself. It didn't occur to me now, either, at least not consciously, though as soon as I was gone from my parents' house I was aware that no one around me knew who I was, or who I'd been, and that, given a little effort, I could be whoever I claimed to be. The comp lit course description caught my attention, and I carried it around in my pocket over winter break, as if to remind myself of the person I'd become. On it were big books I wanted to tell people I'd read—Faust, Crime and Punishment, Madame Bovary —along with others I'd never heard of but whose titles intrigued me: Dead Souls, Death in Venice. Yes, death caught my attention. What better subject for a nineteen-year-old obsessed with transformation? Above all, though, I was excited about Kafka, who was then to me nothing more than a name. I knew he'd written a story about a [End Page 152] man who turned into a bug, but I hadn't read that story or any others. Still, the name meant something to me. I associated it with mystery and weirdness and cryptic knowledge, and if anyone had asked I would have claimed to be a fan. That I hadn't yet read him was simply a matter of patience. I was waiting for the right moment. I didn't want to rush it, when I had so much to read for classes, though I did find plenty of time to read other writers, spending long hours in the stacks of the library, poring over The Waste Land and The Cantos, neither of which I understood and both of which I pretended to love. Around the same time that I signed up for the class, a friend introduced me to LSD. This, too, was something about which I'd feigned knowledge, though when I finally experienced it, I was surprised to discover how little my imagination held up to this new distorted reality. The acrobatics and contortions through which the drug exercised my mind alternately fascinated and terrified me. I spent hours staring at the wiggling lines of my fingerprints, or at a textured ceiling crawling with neon death's-heads, and felt confirmed in my belief—copped from watching David Lynch films—that the world was stranger than I knew, that the reality I took for granted was shaky and porous, a mask for other realities lurking just out of sight. I was primed for further transformation, though a part of me resisted it, fearing that I might not be able to transform myself back. Delaying reading Kafka may have been part of my strategy for keeping at least one foot in the world I knew. On the first day of class, though, I was disappointed to find that Kafka wasn't on the schedule until early April. It...