诗歌与不确定世界中的感知问题:乔叟《坎特伯雷故事》里管家被移动的摇篮  

Poetry and the Problem of Perception in an Uncertain World:The Reeve’s Shifted Cradle in Chaucer’s

作　　者：罗伯特·W.汉宁 Canterbury Tales

机构地区：[1]不详

出　　处：《中世纪与文艺复兴研究》2023年第2期3-18,共16页Medieval and Renaissance Studies

摘　　要：诗歌同时拥抱生活和语言。叙事诗最重要的是讲故事,它提供了关于追寻个人能动性的范例,不管这追寻能否实现。诗歌《坎特伯雷故事》揭示并评论了14世纪晚期西欧所面临的知识、感知、策略方面的不确定性危机。本文探讨《管家的故事》如何诗意地处理不确定世界里的感知问题。在故事的关键情节中,一位心怀不平、寻求报复的访客在深夜将婴儿摇篮从大人平时放置的位置移开,给婴儿的家长——屈鲁宾顿一位爱欺负人、常偷窃的磨坊主西姆金带来了多重灾难。摇篮表现出的不稳定性使它成了一个有力的诗意象征,象征着许多行为和人工系统类似的不稳定性。这些系统在故事一开始被西姆金用来表现他的家庭、经济及社会政治坚不可摧。由于两名愚蠢的剑桥学生稍显笨拙的努力,这些系统的暴虐谎言得以暴露无遗,其创造者的社会伪装因家庭背叛而被进一步撕裂。Poetry simultaneously embraces life and language.Narrative poetry is above all storytelling,and offers models of personal agency sought,and either gained or denied.The poetry of The Canterbury Tales reveals,and comments on,a crisis of uncertainty,concerning knowledge,perception,and strategy,that gripped late 14th-century western Europe.This paper examines how“The Reeve’s Tale”deals poetically with the problem of perception in an uncertain world.In the tale’s pivotal action,an aggrieved and vengeance-seeking visitor’s late-night shifting of a baby’s cradle from its usual position within a family’s sleeping arrangements results in multiple disasters for its paterfamilias,Symkyn,the bullying and thieving miller of Trumpington.By its demonstrated instability,the cradle becomes a powerful poetic symbol of the similar instability of the many behavioral and artifactual systems,catalogued earlier in the tale,that Symkyn has designed to signify his domestic,economic,and socio-political invulnerability:thanks to the somewhat bumbling efforts of two dim-bulb Cambridge students,the tyrannical mendacity of those systems stands revealed and the social pretentions of their creator further damaged by domestic betrayals.

关 键 词：乔叟 《坎特伯雷故事》 《管家的故事》 感知 不确定性 不稳定性 个人能动性 中世纪欧洲 

分 类 号：I561.072[文学—其他各国文学]