Table of contents Introduction

The purpose of our study is to consider the narrative art of Geoffrey Chaucer (on the material of The Canterbury Tales): Describe narrative art, its concept and features Consider the creative path of Geoffrey Chaucer to the Canterbury Tales 3.
Analyze the composition of the "Canterbury Tales" by Geoffrey Chaucer, comparing Chaucer and Boccaccio. Determine the features of Chaucer's skill in creating images of characters.
Characterize the pre-Renaissance in Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" The object of study is the poems and stories of Geoffrey Chaucer. The subject of the research is the narrative art of Geoffrey Chaucer based on the material of The Canterbury Tales.
Research methods : cultural-historical, comparative, hermeneutical, involving analysis, synthesis, modeling. research — our research consists of an introduction, two chapters, a conclusion, a list of references.


Chapter 1. The Creative Individuality of Geoffrey Chaucer

1. 
   Narrative art: concept, features
   

Need help writing your thesis? We are an exchange of professional authors (teachers and associate professors of universities). Handing over chapter by chapter. Uniqueness over 70%. We make edits for free . Diploma price Consider the issues and features of narrative art. The concept of "narrative" comes from the English word narrative, which means a presentation of certain interconnected events that are presented to readers or listeners as a sequence of words or images. Part of the meanings of the concept of "narrative" coincides with such concepts, terms, commonly used words as "story", "narrative". Narratology is the study of narrative, of the nature of narration [72]. Narrative is also called a linguistic act, a certain verbal presentation, which is a concept in the philosophy of postmodernism, fixing the procedural nature of self-fulfillment as a way of narrative being or, in the words of Roland Barthes, a “reporting” text [9].
The term itself was borrowed from historiography, where it was formed during the development of the concept of “narrative history”, which considers historical events as appearing not as a result of historical regular processes, but in the context of stories about these events and as inextricably linked with their interpretation (for example, the study of A. Toynbee 1976 "Humanity and the Cradle-Earth. A Narrative History of the World") [35].
In general, within the framework of narrative history, the event is not traced back to a certain initial root cause, and for texts, as postmodernists believe, the presence of an initial meaning in them is not important. This axiom has found its manifestations, for example, in the idea of ​​J. Derrida regarding the destruction of "onto-theo-teleo-phallo-phono-logo-centrism" in the text, as well as Yu. Kristeva, who is critical of the need to remove the "ban on associativity ”, which was caused by “logocentrism in the Indo-European sentence” [35].
As the fundamental idea of ​​narrativism, the idea of ​​the subjective introduction of meaning is singled out through the task of the final. Accordingly, understanding the text from classical positions is not important. Researcher F. Jamison notes that narrative procedures “create reality”, affirm both relative reality (that is, without pretense of adequacy) and their own “independence” from the meaning received. Bart considers the text as an “echo chamber” that returns to the subject only the meaning he has introduced, while the narration itself takes place “for the sake of the story itself, and not for the sake of a direct impact on reality, that is, ultimately, outside of any function other than symbolic activity as such” [9]. When comparing a classical work — a “work” and a postmodern “text”, Barthes notes: “a work is closed, reduced to a certain signified… In the Text, on the contrary, the signified is infinitely postponed to the future” [9].
In accordance with the ideas of M. Poster, the meaning of the story is understood in the processes of narration, that is, “it is thought of as devoid of any kind of ontological support and arising in an act of purely subjective effort” [72]. J. Brockmeier and Rom Harre noted that the narrative is not a description of this or that reality, but an “instruction” for defining and understanding this reality, citing the rules of the game of tennis as an example, which only create an illusion of describing the processes of the game, in fact actually acting only as a means of "calling the players into existence" [32]. Need help writing your thesis? We are an exchange of professional authors (teachers and associate professors of universities). Handing over chapter by chapter. Uniqueness over 70%. We make edits for free . More According to the expression of I. Calvino, this is the lightness that "narrative imagination can breathe into pezantezza - heavy reality" [32].
The main part in the story and the moment the plot appears in it is its completion. As for the narrator, that is, the narrator, it is he who is, first of all, the bearer of knowledge about the finale, and it is in accordance with this quality that he has fundamental differences from other subjects of the narrative story - his "heroes", who, being in the center events, they do not have this knowledge. Such ideas were also typical for authors who only anticipate postmodern philosophy. For example, R. Ingarden considered the "end of the story" as a factor that gives the idea of ​​a trivial chronological sequence of events. He singled out the most important meaning in the “last” (“culminating”) phrase in the text: “The specificity of what is expressed by this phrase ... permeates everything that was presented before ... It leaves an imprint of integrity on it”.
The main idea for the concept of history adopted by postmodernism is the idea of ​​the final meaning in the constitution of the narrative as such. Researcher F. Kermud noted that only the existence in the text of a certain “completion”, which is initially known to the narrator, is able to create a certain gravity field that pulls all plot vectors into a common focus. J. Derrida proposed the idea of ​​“delay”, according to which the implementation of the formation (shift) of meaning is carried out with the help of “a method of leaving (in the writing itself and in the ordering of concepts) certain gaps or spaces of free movement, dictated by the still only forthcoming theoretical articulation”. Derrida considers the “movement of meaning” as an important factor in which all the “elements”, called “existing” and standing “on the stage of the present”, are correlated with something else, while they keep in themselves “an echo generated by the sound of the past element” , and in this case they begin to collapse "by the vibration of one's own attitude to the element of the future" [35].
Thus, being in the present, it can be attributed both to the "so-called past" and to the "so-called future", which acts as one of the forces of the present. For a postmodern text, the presence of an objective meaning is not important, and therefore the understanding of such a text is not assumed in the hermeneutical sense. The “narrative strategy” of postmodernism is a radical rejection of realism in any of its manifestations [32]:
critical realism - literary and artistic, because to criticize means to reckon with something as something objective (moreover, even symbolism was criticized by postmodernists from the standpoint that signs and symbols act as traces of a certain reality); traditional realism is philosophical, because, as D. Reichman believed, postmodernism treats the text in a fundamentally nominalistic way; surrealism, because the postmodern does not need "zones of freedom" [72] in the sphere of personal-subjective emotional-affective. Surrealism reveals such freedom in dreams and childhood phenomena, while postmodernism works with the procedures of signification and deconstruction, which presuppose arbitrariness in its semantization and centering. Researcher Hans Gadamer notes, In this context, one of the aspects of the attitude common to postmodernism, which is sometimes called the “death of the subject” (and often the death of the author), is also considered. In the literature of postmodernism, in the process of reading, the “author” narrative is replaced by the “reader” narrative, which understands and defines the text in its own way. If the reader retells the text, the reader becomes for another reader, in turn, the author, and so on. Thus, the narrative can be thought of as a story that can always be told in a different way. In general, narrative is a concept of postmodern philosophy, which fixes the procedural nature of self-fulfillment as a way of being of a narrative text. As the most important attributive characteristic of the narrative, one can single out its self-worth and self-sufficiency, when the procedural nature of the narrative, according to R. Barth, unfolds for the sake of the story itself, and not from the standpoint of having a direct impact on reality.
The narrative as a whole is outside of these or those functions, except as such symbolic activity [9]. Need help writing your thesis? We are an exchange of professional authors (teachers and associate professors of universities). Handing over chapter by chapter. Uniqueness over 70%. We make edits for free . Diploma price The classical sphere of manifestation of postmodernism is history as a theoretical discipline, where the meaning of events is interpreted not from the position of its conditionality by historical processes, but as appearing in the context of a story about an event, in direct connection with interpretation [72].
The concepts of narratology help in solving the most complex hermeneutic problems associated with the "game" of a literary text. In our country, the concept of "narrative" was formed much earlier than the term itself appeared. Approaches to its definition were outlined in the works of M.M. Bakhtin, B.O. Korman, D.S. Likhachev, Yu.M. Lotman, V. Propp, B.A. Uspensky, V.B. Shklovsky and other domestic literary critics. However, despite such a thorough approach to the problem of narrative, which is determined by the significance of the heritage of the given names of researchers, in Russia narratology (as a “narrative theory”) is currently only beginning to receive active distribution in the analysis of texts [35].
The narratological concept in foreign literary criticism arose in the 60s of the XX century. It became widespread after the publication of the structuralist works of R. Barth, K. Bremon, T.D. Todorova, K. Friedemann, F. Stanzel, P. Ricker. At the present stage, narratology or storytelling theory is becoming more and more widespread; it is already being used as an analytical method that can be applied in various fields of scientific knowledge. Narratology today is a science that allowed the formation of new concepts in relation to the narrative, which began to be perceived not as a genre, but as a type of discourse generated by culture. The most important concepts and categories of narratology are time, space, chronotope, focalization, plot, etc., which are important when applied to the analysis of medieval texts. The narrative text reveals new forms of the author's presence in the text and allows considering the structure of the work at various levels of narrative constructions [35].
The narrator is understood as a subject endowed with a more or less definite point of view, which affects at least the selection of certain elements from the "events" for the narrated "story". In the individual image of the narrator, all the methods of constructing a narrative are involved [32]:
1. Selection of elements (characters, situations, actions, including speeches, thoughts and perceptions of characters) from "events" as narrative material to create a narrated story. Need help writing your thesis? We are an exchange of professional authors (teachers and associate professors of universities). Handing over chapter by chapter. Uniqueness over 70%. We make edits for free . More 3.Composition of the narrative text, i.e. compilation and arrangement of selected elements in a certain order. Language (lexical and syntactic) presentation of the selected elements. Evaluation of the selected elements (it may be contained implicitly in the above methods, or it may be given explicitly). Reflections, comments and generalizations of the narrator. Thus, the narrator is the bearer of diverse properties and functions. It is characteristic that the narrator takes a fairly definite position during the narration, i.e. it is not abstract, but quite definite. The whole narrative is in the power of the narrator - the strength of his skill as a narrator depends on how unique the plot will turn out. The narrative work is also characterized by cases when the author can fully accept the point of view of one or another of his characters. The author's position can be more or less clearly fixed in a literary work, and then, first of all, the question is important: where was the author during the events described; this is a kind of question about the degree of trust of the reader to the author [35].
The question of the chronology of the events taking place is closely connected with the point of view in the work. It always turns out that the narrator is faced with the choice of whether to reproduce the events presented sequentially or to present them in a reorganized form. V. Schmid speaks about the narrativity of this or that text from the point of view of the concept of “eventfulness”, borrowed by him from Yu.M. Lotman [83]. As a result, the German narratologist identifies five features that make it possible to attribute the work to the narrative type [82]:
1. The relevance of the change. Event changes must be significant, at least on the scale of this fictitious world. Trivial changes do not form events. Unpredictability. The eventfulness of change increases as it is unexpected. Consistency. Eventfulness depends on what consequences it entails in the thinking or actions of the subject and how this event is reflected in the life of the hero. Irreversibility. The event that has occurred must be irreversible. Uniqueness. The change must be one time. Repeating event changes do not produce. Yu.M. Lotman, on the other hand, contrasts narrative texts with “plotless” and “mythological” texts that do not tell about news in a changing world, but depict cyclical repetitions [45]. At the same time, linguistically oriented narratologists define a narrative as any sequence of sentences that contains at least one temporal connection (two sentences connected, for example, with the help of "then" will already constitute a narrative). The narrative theory of events is important; "intrigue" analytics, which makes connections between events; methodology for the analytical division of narrative texts; detecting the position of the narrator in the communicative space of storytelling, etc. The term "narratology" was first introduced into scientific use by Tsvetan Todorov in 1969. It was widely used in foreign literary criticism in the studies of F.K. Stanzel, V. Schmid, S. Chatman, S. Rimmon (-Kenan), P. Ricoeur, R. Bart, J. Genette [35]. Need help writing your thesis? We are an exchange of professional authors (teachers and associate professors of universities). Handing over chapter by chapter. Uniqueness over 70%. We make edits for free . Order a diploma The event acts as a unit for operating all the definitions of the narrative. An event is any disruption in the normal course of life (Yu.M. Lotman defines an event as “crossing a semantic boundary”) [45]. For an oral story, it is characteristic not to distinguish between the events of life and the events of the text, since the text has arrogated to itself the right to call an event an event.