Chaucer, Gower, and the Affect of Invention by Steele Nowlin (review)

Steele Nowlin's discussion of invention through a reconceptualization of affect is a groundbreaking study that marks a shift in our understanding of and approach to two of the most important authors in Middle English: Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower. Nowlin examines how Chaucer and Gower "present invention as an affective force, a process characterized by emergence and potentiality" (1). Nowlin's affect is not one of emotion. It is "an intensity … typically described in a critical vocabulary of movement, emergence, and becoming" (1). He also broadens the definition of invention to one "that includes the dynamism and sense of potential that characterize inventional activity" (2). He clearly illustrates this relationship between affect and invention with an analysis of two cases of "paralyzed dreaming narrators": in Chaucer's The Parliament of Fowls and Gower's Vox clamantis (2). In both cases, the narrators' emotions manifest themselves in actions that lead to the creation of poetry: what Nowlin calls "the affect of invention" (12). In the remainder of the introduction, Nowlin provides an excellent overview of the scholarship on both invention and affect in medieval studies. His discussion of affect theory (13–17) explains his own contribution to this discourse within medieval studies as well as how he brings this contribution to bear on the idea of invention (17–18). In so doing, Nowlin deftly addresses a number of primary and secondary texts on invention in medieval studies (18–28). He concludes the introduction by coming back to Chaucer and Gower, again reiterating that "examining the ways in which aesthetic productions emerge through processes of invention… creates ways in which poetry can intervene in the discursive constructions of reality that exist outside of poetic worlds" (28). Whether or not intentional, Nowlin's chapters each follow this emergent process, which he argues is vital to the works of Chaucer and Gower, with each chapter stemming from the affect of the prior.

In Chapter 1, Nowlin explores the conceit of invention as movement in Chaucer's House of Fame. Nowlin emphasizes the abundance of movement in the proem to Book I, noting that it is "the primary conceptual framework" within the poem that sets the stage for its "examination of invention as movement" (40). He directs our attention to how the proem presents "dreams as affective forces" (40) and adds that the movement produced from these forces essentially displaces feeling. He marks the poem's emphasis on "engynes and gynnynges" as thought before likening "tydynges" as depicted in Book III's House of Rumor to images in the imagination (42–43). Referring to Chaucer's "motional quality of imagination" (43), Nowlin then demonstrates that tydynges are actually "inventional gynnynges" (50). The meticulousness with which Nowlin presents this argument, marrying the theoretical so well with the textual apparatus that Chaucer employs, is admirable. The analysis he provides of Book III to demonstrate invention as "a process of moving and becoming" is delightful (55), particularly his discussion of the eagle's speech (56–58), which adds an impressive and ultimately more productive interpretation of this moment in the poem to the existing readings. Towards the end of the chapter, Nowlin discusses the poem's treatment of Dido as a potential inventor, which results in Geffrey appropriating her invention as his own, participating in the "misogynistic trope of masculinist invention" (68).

Chapter 2 emerges from this unresolved question of gender and invention left at the end of Chapter 1. "The Legend of Good Women," contends Nowlin, "… actively work[s] to trigger in readers a sudden awareness of the pervasiveness of cultural constructions of gender and power" (69). He calls Legend "Chaucer's fullest narrative treatise on the affect of invention" and asserts it is an effort "to destabilize the antifeminist literary and cultural traditions its narratives would seem to represent" (73). Nowlin points out the impossibility for any poem to represent the affect of invention directly in a...