| Summary: | 碩士 === 靜宜大學 === 外國語文研究所 === 84 === Re-read in every age, retold perennially, Geoffrey Chaucer the author of
The Canterbury Tales has been providing not only alistener's pilgrimage by his
fictional characters acting in aparticular storytelling order, but also
sharing a teller'spilgrimage over this fictional structure. In The Canterbury
Tales, Chaucer combines various genres of medieval literature and givesthis
combination a degree of unity. This device is called a "framework narrative":
a story which allows other stories to be told within it. The mixed styles
turn the parallel tales into a listening-and reading dialogue. Within the comic
contrast of romance and fabliau, Chaucer demonstrates the divergent roles of
reporter, teller and reteller. Thus, within his texts, there are several
authorial messages in the foreshowing of an outcome of plot, in amoraling voice
and in a comic humanity.
In this thesis, my first purpose is to illustrate Chaucer's narrativity
in the first three tales by examining them as three separate novels. I connect
Bakhtin's dialogism with the relationship between the genres of romance and
fabliau in order to examine the textual meanings of the Knight's, the Miller's
and the Reeve's tales. In the second place, I "tell" (distinguish) the distance
between Chaucer's authorial world and his pilgrim tellers' world. Finally and
most importantly, I link those points of comic realism with the "pilgrimage"
idea. By transferring the tales into a reading pilgrimage, I explicate the
three kinds of laughter with Henri Bergson's theory so as to know Chaucer's
humorous power. From here, we retell and relaugh with Chaucer's medieval
pilgrims and the society they lived in.
|
|---|
