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Chapter 18 - Alisoun after Alisoun
- Edited by Joshua Davies, King's College London, Caroline Bergvall, Queen Mary University of London
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- Book:
- Caroline Bergvall's Medievalist Poetics
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 20 February 2024
- Print publication:
- 30 November 2023, pp 155-162
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Summary
For the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no inven-tion in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him: when he has not attained to this state, he is powerless and is unable to utter his oracles.
Plato, IonJust as summer was ending, one or more of my characters—Celie, Shug, Albert, Sofia, or Harpo—would come for a visit. We would sit wherever I was sitting, and talk. They were very obliging, engaging, and jolly. They were, of course, at the end of their story but were telling it to me from the beginning. Things that made me sad, often made them laugh. Oh, we got through that; don’t pull such a long face, they’d say.
Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ GardensTHE TWO QUOTATIONS above are reflections on the creative process. Plato sug-gests that inspiration comes from somewhere outside the poet, that an external, divine force speaks through the singer so that he is “out of his senses” and “the mind is no longer in him.” Alice Walker writes from a perspective during the process of writing, implying that literary characters gain their own autonomy and function outside of the overt control of their authors. They leave the page and take on an existence that is sepa-rated from the conscious mind of the author: her characters can come to see her and talk to her; their perspectives are different from hers. Both Plato and Walker understand cre-ativity as something that seems to operate not only within, but also outside of the artist. In Alisoun Sings, Caroline Bergvall reconstructs her own creative process in a way that is reminiscent of both of these models. It focuses on the idea of an external inspiration for which the author must wait, and also foregrounds the concept that literary characters can escape from their texts and have lives of their own. In my meditation on Alisoun as a character, I want to explore what it means to think about creation and character in this way, focusing on how this particular character—Chaucer’s Alison of Bath—has worked on and with authors across time.
At the beginning of Alisoun Sings, Caroline Bergvall describes her creative process, as she calls a name, a name that calls up a “network of resonance” (vii).
Wal
- Edited by Stephanie L. Batkie, Matthew W. Irvin, Lynn Shutters
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- Book:
- A New Companion to Critical Thinking on Chaucer
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 21 October 2021
- Print publication:
- 30 June 2021, pp 187-200
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Manciple's Tale
Troilus and Criseyde
Book of the Duchess
House of Fame
Boece
What Is a Wall?
Walls figure in our imaginations and political consciousness as potent images of protection and division. From Hadrian's Wall separating Roman Britain from Scotland to the Great Wall of China; from the Berlin Wall to Trump's imagined wall between the United States and Mexico, walls function across time as markers of identity. Chaucer was far more familiar with defensive walls than most of us are today: for much of his life he inhabited a walled city (London) and indeed lived above the walls at Aldgate; he was part of a besieging army against a walled city (Reims) in 1359; he was in Navarre in 1366 when the king (Charles the Bad) was desperately fortifying cities against an invasion; he lived through the Rising of 1381 when the walls of London and of the Tower were breached. Yet in Chaucer's poetry, walls are often walls of wonder, canvases for frescoes, symbols of the mind, surfaces on which sound resounds and shadows play. Across his texts, he is consistently interested in the inability of walls to create effective divisions, and in the productive importance of moving through walls. In Chaucer's texts, the “wal” is often not what it seems.
In later medieval culture, it was perfectly possible to have a clear boundary without a wall: everyone knew where one London ward or parish ended and another began without the need for any physical marker. Equally, walls were not necessarily boundaries at all. Cooling Castle, built for John Cobham in the 1380s, was fronted by imposing walls that were merely a façade as they were open at the back. Walls constantly recur in Chaucer's writing, often in descriptions of walled cities that are being attacked. There are many references to defensive walls not working to keep the city safe, or to keep people out. For instance, Theseus “rente adoun bothe wall and sparre and rafter” (1.990) of Thebes, as a prelude to his total destruction of the city. Later on, Palamon sadly refers to the “waste [devastated] walles wyde” (1.1331) of Thebes.
1 - The Form of the Canterbury Tales
- Edited by Frank Grady, University of Missouri, St Louis
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to The Canterbury Tales
- Published online:
- 21 August 2020
- Print publication:
- 10 September 2020, pp 1-20
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This chapter explores the varying meanings and importance of form in the Canterbury Tales. Overall, the focus is on Chaucer’s understanding of form as integral to interpretation. The opening section contextualizes Chaucer’s approach to form within later medieval poetics, contrasting ideas of formal perfection and imperfection in the work of Dante and the Pearl-poet with Chaucer’s responsive and unpredictable forms. The Canterbury Tales is compared with tale-collections by Gower and Boccaccio, and with Chaucer’s other tale-collections – the ‘Monk’s Tale’ and the Legend of Good Women. The chapter explores the interplay and juxtaposition of forms both across the Tales, and within an individual tale (The Nun’s Priest’s Tale). Moving to a micro-level, it analyses one specific form – rhyme royal – by close-reading several stanzas from The Man of Law’s Tale. Finally it argues that Chaucer problematizes the conventional allegorical idea of seeing through form to reach meaning, suggesting instead that form and content cannot be divided. Meaning is inherent in Chaucer’s complex, kinetic, and, above all, multiple forms.
Chapter 16 - The English Context
- from Part II - Books, Discourse and Traditions
- Edited by Ian Johnson, University of St Andrews, Scotland
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- Book:
- Geoffrey Chaucer in Context
- Published online:
- 24 June 2019
- Print publication:
- 11 July 2019, pp 132-139
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This essay argues that Chaucer’s ‘English context’ cannot be divided from multiple other European and insular contexts. English as a language was the product of multiple waves of colonialism; England was a multilingual place; ‘English’ literature was heavily influenced by other literatures, especially literature written in Latin, French and Italian. It is traditional to assert that Chaucer mocked his English heritage through Sir Thopas, a pastiche of the popular ‘tail-rhyme’ genre. However, Chaucer was well aware of the variety and richness of English literary tradition. Manuscripts such as Auchinleck remind us of the many different things that English could do at this time, including estates satire, complaint and debate. Alliterative poems such as Pearl reveal contemporary poets’ ability to bring together diverse literary forms. Chaucer was exceptional not because he wrote in English but because of his unerring capacity to knit together multiple, interlinked, multilingual sources and traditions to create new things of wonder.
five - How does who we are shape the knowledge we produce? Doing collaborative research about personality disorders
- Edited by Patsy Staddon, University of Plymouth
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- Book:
- Mental Health Service Users in Research
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 03 February 2022
- Print publication:
- 12 June 2013, pp 53-68
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Introduction
A strong tradition of involving people with lived experiences of using mental health services as active members of research teams has emerged over the last two decades. This has focused on adding the voice of personal experience to the research process and on introducing the idea of ‘service user- or survivor-produced knowledge’ (Sweeney et al, 2009). However, the epistemological value of these new means of knowledge production continues to be evaluated alongside the ‘gold standard’ of university-produced clinical-academic research about mental health (Staley, 2009). Parallel developments in the philosophy of science have introduced the concept of ‘co-produced’ knowledge, where the inclusion of research partners from outside of the university questions the university's monopoly as the arbiter of ‘good science’ (Gibbons et al, 1994). All knowledge is held to be socially accountable, and all research voices – not just the new lay arrivals – are placed on the same critical plane (Nowotny et al, 2001).
Understanding the contribution of service user researchers to mental health research becomes not just a question of ‘What difference do they make?’ but an interrogation of how who we all are, as academics, clinicians and service users, shapes the knowledge we produce. Efforts have been made to measure the extent to which researchers with different backgrounds – service user researchers and ‘conventional’ university researchers – do mental health research differently, both in the collection and analysis of interview data (Gillard et al, 2010; Rose et al, 2011). In other research, we have attempted to capture the different sense we make of our data – the different analytical narratives we produce as service user, clinical and university researchers – and how we have endeavoured to co-produce a joint narrative through a collaborative research process (Gillard et al, 2011). In this chapter, we aim to illustrate and interrogate further this collaborative research process, focusing on the analysis of qualitative interview data, in order to explore at the level of research team practice how who we are shapes the knowledge we produce.
The research project
In this chapter, we will consider a research project entitled ‘Understanding personality disorders and recovery’, commissioned by a peer-led organisation that provides personality disorders services and is an active partner in the development of personality disorders policy in the UK.
2 - Greater London
- from LOCATIONS
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- By Marion Turner, King's College London
- Edited by Ardis Butterfield, University College London
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- Book:
- Chaucer and the City
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 05 February 2013
- Print publication:
- 18 May 2006, pp 25-40
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Late Fourteenth-Century London
Chaucer's imagination was steeped in London life and London language. His writings are infused with urban discourses such as curial prose and the legal complaint, and some of his earliest readers were Londoners (most famously Thomas Usk). Chaucer often refers to London geography in a throwaway manner and his poetry sometimes invokes the city in detail of breath-taking vibrancy. His life was, of course, profoundly bound up with London through his family background, his jobs, and his home above the walls. This essay is concerned with investigating what ‘London’ might mean and suggest – both geographically and culturally – in a late fourteenth-century textual environment. In particular, my interest is in the fractured and porous nature of London in the 1380s and 1390s. I suggest that in order to understand Chaucer's intimate involvement with the city we recognise the flexibility of the idea of London at this time. London, for Chaucer and his contemporaries, was not a contained, culturally unified city. Instead, it was a more complicated and expansive location, encompassing court and suburbs as well as the City itself, a place of fluctuating, unfixed boundaries. This geographical diversity was paralleled by cultural diversity. The London that is refracted through late fourteenth-century texts, including those by Chaucer, is a place of cultural conflict, jostling rivalries, and incompatible interests. The city, then, cannot be found in Chaucer's poetry if one seeks a coherent space; rather it emerges as a profoundly split and antagonistic location.