Chaucer and the Streams of Parnassus.
- Author/Editor
- Strohm, Paul.
- Title
- Chaucer and the Streams of Parnassus.
- Published
- Strohm, Paul. "Chaucer and the Streams of Parnassus." In Jonathan Fruoco, ed. Polyphony and the Modern. New York: Routledge, 2021. Pp. 192-205.
- Review
- Strohm challenges literary periodization in this essay, particularly the medieval/early modern divide, asking more generally whether a literary work can be modern not only by being "progressive" in its own time but by "reach[ing] beyond itself--to achieve modernity according to 'subsequent' standards" (194; original emphasis). Strohm's test case is Chaucer, who was recognized as up-to-date, Strohm argues, by Robert Greene in his "Greenes Vision" (1592/94), where fictionalized versions of Chaucer and Gower engage in a debate about literature and a tale-telling contest. Greene, Strohm tells us, "credits Chaucer's [Bahktinian] polyphonic style and mixed vocalities without condescension and as totally deserving of contemporary (that is, Early Modern) respect" (201)--an example, it seems, of achieving modernity according to a subsequent standard. Greene's Gower, Strohm points out, is associated instead with a strain of "stylistic and moralistic conservatism within Early Modern practice" but not one that matches standards of being progressive or polyphonic. The fact that Greene's persona prefers Gower's tale to Chaucer's is paradoxical, Strohm tells us, noting that Greene's praise of Chaucer is thereby "achieved under a sign of negation . . . the mechanism of negation identified by Freud, in which a difficult or problematic truth maybe uttered, on the condition of an accompanying nullification or disavowal" (203n2). [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1]
- Date
- 2021
- Gower Subjects
- Influence and Later Allusion