英国文学British Literature.ppt

Reading “The Lagoon” and Chaucer’s “The Knight’s Tale” through Edward Said’s The World, the Text, and the Critic Author: Reilly Terry University of Alaska Fairbanks Source: Conradiana; Summer 2006, Vol. 38 Issue 2, p175-182 Type: Article Abstract: In this article, the author proposes that the short story The Knights Tale, by Geoffrey Chaucer influenced Joseph Conrads writing of the narrative The Lagoon”. The author uses the book The World, the Text, and the Critic, by Edward Said as a critical foundation. He begins by calling attention to some circumstantial evidence and then focuses on the narratives more specifically. He develops a broader comparativistic approach to the two works, one which illuminates similarities in the authors narrative methodologies. Edward Said (November 1935 – 25 September 2003)----a Palestinian American literary theorist and advocate for Palestinian rights. Geoffrey Chaucer (1343 – 25 October 1400)----known as the Father of English literature, is widely considered the greatest English poet of the Middle Ages and was the first poet to have been buried in Poets Corner of Westminster Abbey . The Knights Tale“----the first tale from Geoffrey Chaucers work The Canterbury Tales . The story introduces many typical aspects of knighthood such as courtly love and ethical dilemmas. What Edward Said calls “the extraordinary presentational mode of Conrad’s narratives” can be broadened to include Chaucer’s narrative strategies in The Canterbury Tales generally and The Knight’s Tale specifically. Also, like Chaucer’s tales, Conrad’s narratives, Said notes, “are really made out of secondary, reported speech, and the interplay between appeals to the eye and the ear in his work is highly organized and subtle. What is interesting is that in every letter he sent to Edward Garnett (an English writer and critic) in which he mentions “The Lagoon,” Conrad also mentions The Rescuer. Since the two works seem so obviously interconne