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FDU PRESS
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| Chaucer’s Agents: Cause and Representation in Chaucerian Narrative |
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Author - Carolynn Van Dyke
Publication Date - January 2006
Number of Pages - 371
ISBN #0838640834
Contents
Price $63.50 - Price subject to change
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| Description |
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The ever-proliferating views of Chaucers texts amount in part to disagreements about who or what determines his narratives: lifelike characters, doctrinal principles, the cycles of history, material conditions, the prototypical subject, the reader, even the text itself. In Chaucers Agents, Carolynn Van Dyke shifts our focus from any particular kind of cause to the representation of cause itself that is, to agency.
"Agency" is widely used but seldom defined. Indeed, academic writers use it in contrary ways. To linguists, philosophers, and most social scientists, it means the pwer to initiate actions, but economists and legal scholars define it as delegated power. Defining "agency" broadly as the capacity to cause action, Van Dyke argues that the words opposing uses reveal a fundamental ambiguity: agency is always double, autonomous and subordinate.
That doubleness was particularly evident in late-medieval England. Political and ecclesiastical rulers aggrandized power with instruments that weakened it. Philosophers denied reality of universal ideas but acknowledged their force as mental representations. Textual scholars and poets simultaneously downplayed and emphasized human authorship.
Chaucer responded to those fluctuations by modeling them. His works deploy an exceptional range of agents, from lifelike peasants to transcendent personifications, and the kind of agency continually changes both within and among individual texts.
Chaucers Agents draws on medieval and modern theories of agency to provide fresh readings of the major Chaucerian texts. Collectively, those readings aim to illuminate Chaucers responses to two great problems of agency: the degree to which human beings and forces qualify as agents, and the equal reference of "agent" to initiators and instruments. Each chapter surveys medieval conceptions of the agency in question allegorical Realities, intelligent animals, pagan gods, women, and the author and then follows that kind of agent through representative Chaucerian texts. Readers have long recognized Chaucers interest in questions of causation; Van Dyke shows that his answers to those questions shape, even constitute, his narratives.
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| Author/Editor Biographies |
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| Carolynn Van Dyke received her BA from Grinnell College and her PhD in English from Yale University. She has taught at Drake University, Grinnell College, Case Western Reserve University, and Lafayette College, where she is currently Franics A. March Professor of English. Having begun her Lafayette College career in 1980 in the English department, she became a member of the Computer Science department in 1984 and returned to English in 1990. She has published essays on Middle English literautre, computer literacy and languages in relation to natural language, and Chaucer; she is also the author of The Fiction of Truth: Structures of Meaning in Narrative and Dramatic Allegory (1985). |
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| Scholarly Reviews | |
Dianne Watt - Medium Aevum LXXVII (2008)
Elizabeth Roberston, University of Colorado at Boulder - Journal of English and Germanic Philology, January 2009
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