Inventing while dreaming :the performance of authorship in Chaucer’s dream trio -

Abstract

My thesis explores the way Chaucer, as a young poet, mobilizes different rhetorical strategies from the theories of translation, compilation, and bricolage, by taking fragments from various ancient and medieval sources (Virgil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Heroides and Metamorphoses, Macrobius’ Commentary on Scipio’s Dream, Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy, Alain de Lille’s The Complaint of Nature, and Guillaume de Lorris’ and arguably Jean de Meun’s The Romance of the Rose), and placing them in his dream sequence trio; The Book of the Duchess (1368), The Parliament of Fowls (1380-81), and The House of Fame (1381-82), for the purpose of literary invention. I examine the implications of translation theory and vernacular literary criticism, and I use the “primary” and “secondary” theories of translation discussed by Rita Copeland in her book Rhetoric Hermeneutics and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts, as well as the theories of compilation and bricolage in my close reading of Chaucer’s dream trio. By doing this, I investigate how Chaucer uses the generic form of the dream vision as a frame to appropriate literary fragments and assemblages from past authorial figures to repurpose familiar literary scenarios for the rhetorical purpose of invention, in order to enact a performance of author building within his dream sequence. We find throughout each dream poem in the progression of the dream sequence, instances depicted in greater frequency where the narrator poet, through misprision, tinkers with the texts he translates, and similarly more blatantly rejects and subverts the main conventions of the dream vision set by the exemplars of that form: the consolatory dream vision of The Consolation of Philosophy and the love vision of The Romance of the Rose; accordingly, the relationship the dream setting has with the plot of the dream vision shifts as does the role of the authoritative dream guide within the po