Mervelous Signals: Poetics, Sign Theory, and Politics in Chaucer's Troilus

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to New Literary History. in forme of speche is chaunge ... Troilus and CriseydeURING THE LAST TWO DECADES, there has been an astonishing increase of speculation within the humanities and social sciences about the nature and function of language as a system of signs, a system perhaps primal to all others constituting human culture. The study of literature has become especially receptive to the post-Saussurean debate on the nature of verbal signs, and for good reason: if literature can be said to exist at all, it exists only as signs-or rather, in the written letters signifying those signs.Paradoxically, as modern semiology and its cousin disciplines reveal, with time, their aporias, hence, the limits of their utility, we are simultaneously discovering to what extent a radical anxiety about the sign and its functions has always marked the consciousness of the West. More and more we are discovering that if there is any future for semiology, it lies to a large extent in a reflection upon its own rich past.l One consequence of this new archaeological interest in the notion of sign is the growing awareness that during more than a thousand years, the most resourceful minds of what we call the Middle Ages speculated unceasingly, often passionately, about the nature and function of language as a privileged system of signs. Indeed, one could perhaps claim without exaggeration that sign theory, as it developed within and across the three branches of the trivium, or the three "arts of language" (artes sermocinales), is the most singular feature of the intellectual coherence of the Middle Ages, seen as a phase of Western culture. In any case, between the fourth and fourteenth centuries, the debate about signs repeated and renewed itself many times over, until the humanists, who invented the concept of the Middle Ages in the first place, altered the nature and purpose of that debate in a profound way, as Cesare Vasali, Nancy S. Struever, and others have shown.2 My purpose in this article is, first, to set forth a few commonplace medieval notions about the relationship between the order of verbal PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions NEW LITERARY HISTORY signs and social order; and second, to show how a poet-in this case, Chaucer-could incorporate this metalinguistic consciousness into his strategies of composition. I shall refer principally to the Troilus andCriseyde, though one could examine with much profit other works of Chaucer (the Book of the Duchess, the House of Fame, and the Canterbury Tales, for instance) and also many of the sources of Chaucer's poetry, and find there a ...

Translatio studii et imperii: Sir Gawain as literary critic

“…2. Translatio studü et imperil has been studied from various perspectives; e.g., historical (Curtius 1973: 27-30), linguistic (Vance 1979), and literary (Freeman 1979). 3.…”

Semiotica Mediaevalia: Introduction

“…As such, it takes its place in a growing body of research that has revealed, recently, how well Chaucer's literary texts illustrate the awareness of sign theory in medieval culture both within and apart from the scholastic tradition (e.g., Vance 1979;Irvine 1985). Stock shows how, ranging from self-conscious usage of the term 'signe' to the nonverbal physical gestures of the tale's characters, Chaucer's attention to semiotic phenomena is further developed in this text through artistic usage of verbs of facture or creation -Brought to you by | University of Queensland -UQ Libr Authenticated Download Date | 6/23/15 11:08 AM such terms as, in Middle English, maken, schapen, and impressen -which function subtextually to reinforce the characters' reenactment of the Fall.…”