![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() There as here the term translation denotes a complex, dynamic, nonhierarchical reciprocal relation, in which the translated and the translation mutually "disarticulate" one another in a play of sameness and difference. Following this Ginsberg provides a "thumbnail sketch" (5) of the Benjaminian notion of translation that serves as the conceptual infrastructure of his analytical method, a notion that he earlier brought to bear on Chaucer's relations to his Italian intertexts ( Chaucer's Italian Tradition, 2002). thesis is that in each instance the parts fit together because they translate each other" (3-4). For the Clerk, the idea is transition, for the Merchant it is revision and reticence, for the Miller it is repetition, for the Franklin it is interruption and elision, for the Wife it is self-authorship, for the Pardoner it is misdirection and subversion. Less novelistic, more flexible, and more reciprocal than the dramatic approach, Ginsberg's account of the relation of teller and tale nonetheless affirms the tight artistic integration of the two, an integration performed most decisively by the work's linking passages, which hold center court in the monograph.Īs he states in his introduction, Ginsberg's "principal argument.is that the pilgrim portraits, the introductions and epilogues to their tales, and the tales themselves, all move in the same direction because each expresses in a different mode a coordinating idea or set of concerns. Ginsberg, in contrast, seeks not so much the approach's final demise as its recalibration-or, as he might say, translation-in order to take into account more rigorously such considerations as the nature of Chaucer's Latin and Italian literary models and the sheer uncertainties regarding the composition and structure of the Tales. Various alternative understandings of the relation between teller and tale, promoted by the dramatic approach's naysayers, have not generally succeeded at supplanting it (although Elizabeth Scala's very recent Desire in the Canterbury Tales adopts and extends Leicester's view), and this motivates Spearing's attempt to finish it off once and for all. betray their specific subjectivities/interiorities and historical positions, often by means of irony. Much criticism on the Tales remains haunted by the dramatic readings of the past, maintaining an underlying assumption that the work consists of psychologically realized characters who serve as the narrators of stories whose topics, structure, genre, style, narrational idiosyncrasies, etc. Spearing has recently shown ( Medieval Autographies, 2012), however, the issue was not so much killed off as entombed alive. Marshall Leicester and critical paradigm shifts that moved scholarly interest in the Tales on to other topics. David Benson, David Lawton, Derek Pearsall, and H. Lumiansky trenchant critiques of such readings by the likes of C. Robert this rewarding monograph Warren Ginsberg unearths an interpretive issue that was at the heart of much twentieth-century Canterbury Tales criticism-the relation between teller and tale-before becoming buried under the hyperboles of dramatic readings like those of R.
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