| Geoffrey Chaucer's early work, The House of Fame, is by recent critical consensus a secular poem with secular concerns, a quirky dream vision that charts the narrator's fantastic, eagle-borne ascent to the "hous" of the goddess Fame (she who governs and embodies the dual meaning of "fame"---both singular "fame" and plural "tidings"), mediating with both skepticism and exuberance on such topics as the poet's responsibilities, the poet's access to truth, and the creation and "multiplicacioun" of texts and stories through the process of reading books by famous men and listening and participating in everyday talk (gossip or "tidings"). Although scholars have always noted the poem's playful allusions to Dante's Divine Comedy, critics of the poem have, for the most part, concluded that these allusions, occurring within a purportedly lighthearted secular poem, suggest only a purely humorous and ironic relationship to Dante's lofty Christian poem. A notable exception is B.G. Koonce whose 1966 study used the moralistic "patristic exegesis" of D.W. Robertson, Jr. to argue that The House of Fame is a Christian poem closely modeled after Dante's The Divine Comedy. Like Koonce's study, this dissertation will offer an intensely Christian reading of Chaucer's poem; however, in stark contrast to Koonce's ideologically conservative Christian vision and his corresponding patriarchal hermeneutics, my dissertation, inspired by the Lacanian theorist Slavoj Zizek's radical reading of Pauline Christianity, will present a psychoanalytically informed, thoroughly "post-Robertsonian" Christian interpretation of Chaucer's poem, and, beyond that, Chaucer's Christian vision. Like Zizek, I conceive of the Christian subject in terms of a "breakout" from the patriarchal symbolic order and Christian charity in terms of "feminine" subjectivity and "feminine" jouissance. Reflecting The House of Fame's brilliant and uncannily profound intertextuality, my book-by-book thematic close reading of the poem will tangle out the relationship of Chaucer's radical, goddess-and-tidings-blessed Christianity to foundational texts such as Augustine's Confessions, Virgil's Aeneid, Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, the Bible, and, above all, Dante's Divine Comedy, with special emphasis on Dante and Chaucer's Christian rewriting of the pagan classical cosmos via their respectively sublime and "divinely comical" incarnational astronomical poetics. |
