FHS Paper 2 Criticism

Arthur Bahr - illustrative density

Pearl-manuscript is unique for its illustrative density; 12 illustrations, nearlly all full-page, 4 dedicated just to Pearl

Arthur Bahr - interpretative work of the illustrations

both reinforce the poems’ internal emphasis on the visual AND make the visual character of the page a site of reading

Arthur Bahr - illustrations’ double reading

illustrations constitute interpretations (readings) of the poems and independently invite their own interpretation

Best and Marcus - Surface Reading of material texts

linguistic signs must be treated as inseparable from their material supports

Sarah Stanbury - Pearl, visual and structure

‘Pearl is singular in its use of visual perception to structure the narrative’

Sarah Stanbury - visual epistemology in Pearl

‘the poet establishes vision as an act of interpretation’

Sarah Stanbury - description in Gawain

description not just ornamental but also has a narrative role in constructing ‘the text’s perceptual framework’

Sarah Beckwith - transubstantiation

the eating of Christ’s body was ‘where the integrity of an entire culture was most celebrated and consequently protested

Sarah Beckwith - Christ’s body

‘Christ was imagined as haing a life, and this involved having a body’

Vincent Gillespie - Julian working-through

Revelations is a ‘complex and subtle, working-through of the ontology and teleology of human suffering and death.’

Barry Windeatt - Julian’s sensual soul

‘this term acknowledges how the spiritual and psychic self are aprt of our whole life as lived through the sensory being within the terms of the body and of this world’

Mishtooni Bose - radical Nun’s Priest Tale

‘radical premodernity’ in its refusal ‘to maintain a single point of view, unity of action, imitation of life, decorum [or] consistency of characterisation’

Mishtooni Bose - narrator of the Nun’s Priest’s tale

‘a self-interrupting, free-associating narrator with wandering attention’

Mishtooni Bose - Chaucer’s focus in the Nun’s Priest’s tale

Chaucer’s attention is focused not on narrative content but on ‘the readers’ interpretative responsibilities’

Piero Boitani - dreams and books

dream poems show how for Chaucer ‘the book (literature) both causes the dream and exists within it’

Piero Boitani - proto-humanism in dream visions

old books being digested into new things - proto-humanist

H. Marshall Leicester - if author is the sole meaning-maker

‘puts us in the difficult position of trying to decide which parts of a single narrative are to be assigned to the pilgrim teller and which to the “author”

H. Marshall Leicester - privileging the text

I want rather to begin with the fact of their textuality, to insist that there is nobody there, that there is only the text.’

H. Marshall Leicester - textuality of the Cantebury Tales

‘the tales must be treated not as the performances of preexisting selves but as texts’