To (Re)tell Tales: the Knight's, the Miller's and the Reeve's Tales with/in THE CANTERBURY TALES

• Main Authors: Kao, Becky, 高家萱
• Other Authors: Patricia Haseltine
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 1996
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/86874549372610547693

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.