Fictions of belief in the worldmaking of Geoffrey Chaucer, Sir Philip Sidney, and John Milton.

摘要

This dissertation enlarges Nelson Goodman's theories of worldmaking with the structures of informal reasoning and Kenneth Burke's theory of language and motivation. It shows how belief operates in the ethics and aesthetics of worldmaking in fictional worlds of the English late middle ages and Renaissance. The fictions, Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, Sidney's 1580 Arcadia and Milton's Paradise Lost, self-consciously ground their worldmaking in the beliefs imbued in three key terms, kynde, virtue and obedience, that demonstrate the ethically precarious basis of the fictional worlds and their making. These terms all describe the suitable conditions for connecting being to world. These fictional worlds hinge upon an appropriate relation between figures and the context or ground that surrounds them. While the size of the vision in each of these fictions is significant, each address a belief at its core about how that particular vision can be made. Each offers a challenge, if not a corrective, to a foundational belief that holds the elements of its world as a single entity. Kynde or nature is the making and undoing of both Criseyde and the fiction that contains her. The complicity of her readers, both inside and outside the poem, in her making jeopardizes their ultimate access to pagan or Christian heaven. For Sidney's 1580 Arcadia, the Countess of Pembroke's virtue is the grounding of the entire fictional enterprise, whose fictional figures ultimately offer a new version of feminine virtue that challenges previous categorization. That redefined virtue gives divine powers entrance to redeem local, occasional difficulties caused by human failing. Paradise Lost exposes worldmaking by any other than God to be based in self-interested appeal, including that of the poet and especially Satan. Obedience to that God, however, can be inspired by fallen, appeal-driven language. Milton's depiction of utterance for the sake of its pleasure and not for gain suggests a means for redemptive force within fallen rationality and perception.