The road to Delphi: Chaucerian poetics and the legacy of Apollo (Geoffrey Chaucer).

摘要

This dissertation attempts a literary history of Apollo from Augustan Rome to the late Middle Ages. It draws on the fields of classical and medieval philology, poetics, and art history to characterize the "composite" Apollo, considering his many mythological involvements, the ambiguities that inhere in his nature, and his literary and cultural resonances in the Middle Ages, culminating in an assessment of Geoffrey Chaucer's appropriation and critique of Apollo. I read Apollo as a "mythical referent" of Chaucer's self-understanding as poet, and refer this phenomenon to the artistic, rhetorical, and cultural patterns enacted by Apollo as an agent or reflection of hermeneutic negotiations with classical antiquity. Apollo uniquely opens a rhetorical space for writers working in the classical tradition to define and negotiate artistic identity. Further, I revise established models of Chaucerian poetics by demonstrating Chaucer's engagement with the vatic ideal of inspired, prophetic truth associated with Apollo.; The first two chapters reassess Apollo by challenging Nietzsche's influential glorification of the god and highlighting instead his ambivalence, darkness, and human-like imperfections. Chapter One establishes the dimensions of the "vatic Apollo" in the cultural program of Augustan Rome and the artistic self-definition of Virgil and Ovid. Chapter Two charts the heretofore unexplored dimensions of the medieval Apollo in Latin commentaries, mythological compendia, iconography, and patristic discourse. Apollo's hermeneutic complexity and agency in authorial self-reflection reappear in different forms in the new cultural program that defines medieval exegesis.; The last three chapters analyze key moments in which appearances of Apollo and articulations of poetic theory coincide in Chaucer's works. Chapter Three studies Apollo's mythographic influence upon characterization in Troilus and Criseyde and his allusive interaction with the poem's classicized landscape. Chapter Four reads Apollo as a "rhetorical bridge" between the Squire's and Franklin's Tale and reapproaches, through Apolline rhetoric, the issue of literary influence as imagined by Chaucer and engaged anew by his fifteenth-century followers. Chapter Five confronts Chaucer's repudiation of both poetry and Apollo in the Manciple's Tale; reconsidering the tale's influences, I interpret it in light of the relation among the Apolline spheres of oracular prophecy, speech, and interpretation.