| The long and sharp debate over Geoffrey Chaucer's moral aims for the Canterbury Tales has been shelved in recent years, not resolved. The question of his moral aims is unavoidable by design, but it is also irresolvable by design. At least that is my claim: I show that Chaucer's fictional narrative devises a corrective process based on grammatical emendation that was tied, by a long-standing analogy, to moral reform. Through his narrative, Chaucer pushes his reader to retrace the corrective structure in the Tales, yet the sort of corrective process he recreates is so closely akin to moral practice as to make any distinction between the two difficult. The resulting form is a defining characteristic of the Tales and answers why his moral aims have been irresolvable: in this literary form, the literary and moral are inseparable; they become versions of each other.;Medieval grammatical and textual practice inherited this analogy of correction from traditions of classical grammar. Grammatical theory, pedagogy, and practice all developed around the correction of error in several related areas -- grammar, pronunciation, style, and (eventually) scribal reproduction. Grammarians and scribes understood correction as a task requiring chronic vigilance and recursive reform, and they treated these various arenas of fault and correction as analogous to each other. But they further used language that suggested an analogy with moral reform, so that evocations of textual emendation could allude to moral correction; in turn, moral error could as easily allude to textual and scribal error. Medieval grammarians and thinkers recognized that errors persist not only despite emendation, but even as a result of emendation. Roger Bacon insisted that correction perpetuated error, and handbooks like the correctoria, which listed textual variants to help correct copies of the Bible, themselves fostered errors; they perpetuated what they were designed to eliminate. And just as grammarians and scribes recognized error as inevitable, they understood emendation as recursive: since authors and scribes need chronically to re-correct their work, they could never consider emendation complete. The dissertation's first chapter traces this history of correction: its theory in antique and medieval grammatical arts, its practice in scribal emendation, and the development of the analogy between these unending processes of verbal correction and the process, also unending, of moral correction.;The remaining three chapters treat the Canterbury Tales. Chaucer, more than his predecessors, explicitly notes the recursive logic of error, as famous passages in the Troilus and his "Adam Scriveyn" show. At the same time, he bases his narrative poetics on this recursive logic, developing from it a structure and theme for his Tales. (Abstract shortened by UMI.). |
