乔叟生平的空间批评

A Spatial Criticism of Chaucer’s Life

乔叟的生平不见史册,只能通过彼时社会空间中的蛛丝马迹来稽考。乔叟对英国诗歌形式的最大贡献,主要是从法国引入5步抑扬格的英雄双韵体(heroiccouplets)。但与但丁倡导的“光辉的俗语”不同,乔叟的“俗语”不避其俗,高雅与俚俗并举,它表述的是一个典型的世俗空间。乔叟出生中产阶级,毕生服务王室,其在社会等级中的这一微妙地位,对于他日后《坎特伯雷故事》中著名的“行业反讽”的风格形成具有深远影响。《坎特伯雷故事》中的31位香客,乔叟舍却最高等级王公贵胄,和最低等级流民乞丐,来写14世纪英国社会的各个阶级阶层的代表人物,这个取舍亦可对接他的中产阶级社会身份。

Chaucer writes his poem with East Midland dialect and plays a significant part in the formation of English literary language.In this perspective,Chaucer’s greatest contribution to the making of English poetic form shall be the iambic heroic couplets he introduced from France.However,unlike Dante who challenges the prestige of Latin with his"illuminated vernacular,"Chaucer’s"vernacular"never avoids its vulgar.Instead,against Dante’s divine comedy,he parallels the high-brow and the low-brow,presents a typical secular world in his time which in a large way,leads to his famous mild satiric style according one’s position in the social net.The fact that in Canterbury Tale,Chaucer depictes characters of all ranks in his time but the highest and lowest,well indicates Chaucer’s location in the 14 th century British social space.Chaucer’s courteous attitude towards the knight,a man in the lowest rank in his class,maps the social distance between a bourgeois poet occupied by public affairs and his royal patron.