The intense struggle between experience and its representation through language that undergirds Chaucer's oeuvre has afforded him a monumental and inaugurating place in the history of English literature. Within his three dream visions, he marshals this conflict to play out at the point of the mediation of life through signifiers from two hopelessly entangled domains: that of Nature, and that of literature. From the animals of the forest in The Book of the Duchess, to the squabbling birds of The Parliament of Fowls, and ultimately, the golden eagle in The House of Fame, the dream vision poems are imbued with various facets of Nature mediated through components of the literary world of classical writers not only in an attempt to encapsulate fragments of humanity, but also to examine how personal experience bridge these dependent yet warring provinces. The site of reading in Chaucer's dream vision poems sets the process of arbitration in motion, as each of the narrators look to text in search of something absent from their own experiences. But when language fails in its delineation in the ever-shifting deferral of meanings, the force of textual authority generates an anxiety for the author, and a loss of intention through interpretation is at stake. In my thesis, I will examine the ways in which Chaucer illustrates the whole of experience as a culmination of the fluctuation of Nature and literary text and how the dream vision is the most appropriate vehicle for facilitating the developments and deferrals of what goes in the constitution of subjectivity.
"},{"label":"Degree","value":["Bachelor of Arts with Departmental Honors"]},{"label":"Administrative Note","value":"Drupal Node ID: 24063