Medieval Autographies: The "I" of the Text

Notes

269 n o t e s C hap te r 1. the textual First person 1. hansen, Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender, 37. Cf. Fludernik, Introduction to Narratology, 1–2: “narrative is associated above all with the act of narration and is to be found wherever someone tells us about something. . . . narrative is therefore closely bound up with the speech act of narrating and also with the figure of a narrator.” 2. adams, Pragmatics and Fiction, 10. 3. Chaucer is quoted from Benson, ed., Riverside Chaucer, with book/fragment and line numbers given in the text. 4. irvine and thomson, “Grammatica and literary theory,” 30–31. 5. Minnis, “influence of academic prologues,” 346. 6. Jajdelska, Silent Reading, 11. 7. i first did so in spearing, “Book of Margery Kempe,” 626. For an earlier application by John M. Bowers to hoccleve, see chapter 2, note 13. 8. Barbour, Bruce, Book 1, lines 1–5, 11–13. 9. Cannon, Grounds of English Literature, 29. 10. For discussion, see Fleischman, “on the representation of history ,” and green, Beginnings of Medieval Romance, especially chaps.1, 2, and 6. 11. Boffey and edwards, “literary texts,” 555–56. 12. genette, Narrative Discourse. 13. tamir, “personal narrative,” 415 (my italics). 14. Fludernik, “natural narratology and Cognitive parameters,” 252n6. 15. e.g.,Wallace, ed. Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature , and simpson, 1350–1547. lerer, “endurance of Formalism,” notes the marginalization in such histories of types of writing for which the tradition of study remains formalistic. a welcome exception is Cannon, Grounds of English Literature. 270 Notes to Pages 9–15 16. see Minkova, “Forms of verse,” 182. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is quoted from andrew and Waldron, eds., Poems of the Pearl Manuscript; here line 132. 17. For a sketch of some of these marks, see spearing, “Margery Kempe.” 18. Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, 224. 19. thanks to Chris Krentz for information about this. 20. ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, 91. 21. Fleischman, “discourse as space/discourse as time,” 299. roland Barthes had gone further, claiming, in connection with Flaubert, that “the very being of writing (the meaning of the labor that constitutes it) is to keep the question Who is speaking? from ever being answered” (S/Z, 140). 22. the topos goes back at least as far as the first line of the Tristia, dispatched by ovid from the shores of the Black sea to distant rome. 23. Fleischman, “discourse as space/discourse as time,” n.17. 24. searle, Speech Acts; see also svenbro, Phrasikleia, for an important critique of “the conviction that the first person necessarily implies an inner life and a voice” (42). i am grateful to vance smith for calling my attention to svenbro’s work. 25. heller-roazen, Fortune’s Faces, 33, citing Zink, Subjectivité litt éraire, 16–17, and Kay, Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry, 1. hellerroazen ’s point, in context, is that this is the medieval grammarians’ conception of all personal pronouns, including the third person. 26. Cf. nagel, View from Nowhere, especially chap. 4. 27. For “experientiality,” see the discussion on p. 20 and in note 46 below. 28. to take a single example, stephen B. davis, in an article of considerable sophistication and perceptiveness, refers to the Book of the Duchess’s “narrator” (a term used some twenty times) and “dreamer” (used some thirty times) as “a Machaut-like central character” (davis, “guillaume de Machaut, ” 392) and as the poem’s “primary character,” “a Machauldian poet becoming a Chaucerian one” (403). those formulations point to an important truth but at the same time distort it, because for much of the poem the “i” is no more than a transparent medium, lacking the specificity and thickness implied by “character” in the sense evidently intended. 29. newman, God and the Goddesses, 66. Notes to Pages 15–19 271 30. Jordan, Invention of Sodomy, 69. another scholarly account of the De planctu calls the textual first person the narrator, but without apparently distinguishing him from the author: Ziolkowski, Alan of Lille’s Grammar of Sex, 13, refers in successive sentences to the same figure as the “narrator,” the “dreamer-poet,” and “alan.” 31. Jordan, Invention of Sodomy, 72. 32. ibid., 87. 33. France, ed., New Oxford Companion to Literature in French, 476. 34. duncan, ed., Medieval English Lyrics, no. 94, lines 1–7. 35. see sandison, “Chanson d’aventure,” and Zeeman,“imaginative theory,” 227–40...