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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary theory
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Medieval Nonsense - Signifying Nothing in Fourteenth-Century England (Paperback)
Loot Price: R723
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Medieval Nonsense - Signifying Nothing in Fourteenth-Century England (Paperback)
Series: Fordham Series in Medieval Studies
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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Five hundred years before "Jabberwocky" and Tender Buttons, writers
were already preoccupied with the question of nonsense. But even as
the prevalence in medieval texts of gibberish, babble, birdsong,
and allusions to bare voice has come into view in recent years, an
impression persists that these phenomena are exceptions that prove
the rule of the period's theologically motivated commitment to the
kernel of meaning over and against the shell of the mere letter.
This book shows that, to the contrary, the foundational object of
study of medieval linguistic thought was vox non-significativa, the
utterance insofar as it means nothing whatsoever, and that this
fact was not lost on medieval writers of various kinds. In a series
of close and unorthodox readings of works by Priscian, Boethius,
Augustine, Walter Burley, Geoffrey Chaucer, and the anonymous
authors of the Cloud of Unknowing and St. Erkenwald, it inquires
into the way that a number of fourteenth-century writers recognized
possibilities inherent in the accounts of language transmitted to
them from antiquity and transformed those accounts into new ideas,
forms, and practices of non-signification. Retrieving a premodern
hermeneutics of obscurity in order to provide materials for an
archeology of the category of the literary, Medieval Nonsense shows
how these medieval linguistic textbooks, mystical treatises, and
poems were engineered in such a way as to arrest the faculty of
interpretation and force it to focus on the extinguishing of sense
that occurs in the encounter with language itself.
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