Robert
Myles & David Williams, eds.
Chaucer and Language: Essays in
Honour
of Douglas Wurtele.
Montreal &
Kingston: McGill-Queen's
University
Press, 2001.
xxi,250pp.
Hardback ISBN
0773521828.
Publisher's
recommended price CA/US
$65.00, UK
£46.00
Geoffrey
Chaucer
is increasingly recognized as a writer whose work is particularly
congenial
to modern tastes. The essays in Chaucer and Language are at the
forefront of present-day interest in Chaucer as a highly self-conscious
manipulator of language and theorist of signification in the broadest
sense.
Every
poet arrives
at some sense of how language works. Chaucer's engagement, like that of
the greatest literary figures, goes beyond the brilliant, skilful use
of
language as a tool of expression, beyond what we usually call "talent."
He brings to the creative use of signification a sophisticated
philosophical
questioning of the very nature of language, of how we know and how we
signify.
Chaucer and Language argues that Chaucer's work points to answers to
these
questions, emphasizing that in various ways Chaucer made language
itself
the subject of his writing.
The
polyvalent
nature of signs and the ambiguity this makes possible are discussed as
one aspect of Chaucer's use of language as subject, as is irony.
Chaucer's
extension of the concept of language to include relics and the
Eucharist,
his exploitation of equivocation and the lie, and the semiotic
dimensions
of his poetic themes are also treated. These issues derive directly
from
the long tradition of mediaeval sign theory and anticipate the major
issues
of the modern theory of signs that is semantics.
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