STEP 1 A passage from the book 'Chaucer's Polyphony' by Jonathan Fruoco
Read the text and decide if the statements are true or false.
Chaucer's pilgrims share their stories on their journey to Canterbury Cathedral. This motif of the road allows the author to explore a wide range of social classes and perspectives. By bringing these different people together, Chaucer creates a rich tapestry of human experience.
[Chaucer] insists on inviting various social classes on his pilgrimage, which gives his company more variety than the group of aristocrats traveling in the Decameron. He also takes the time to present and describe each pilgrim, playing with the contrasts, nuances<span style="font-size:80%">1</span>, and similarities between them and makes sure that the tales are told on the road, not during the stops.
This characteristic is especially interesting since it gives the poet the opportunity to reinforce the structure of his creation, allowing his readers to pass from one motif to another through the unifying chronotope<span style="font-size:80%">2</span> of the road. Chaucer has indeed shown, in his previous works, his intent to describe a multifarious and moving world, freed from the verticality and rigidity of a more conventional form of literature. The chronotope of the road is, as a result, Chaucer's most suitable tool to give his poem a narrative stability that LGW [the Legend of Good Women<span style="font-size:80%">3</span>] did not necessarily possess while expanding the horizontality and polyphony<span style="font-size:80%">4</span> of his narration. For it is only on the road, at the same spatiotemporal juncture, that the paths of people belonging to different classes, situations, religions, nationalities, and ages can meet. As Bakhtin<span style="font-size:80%">5</span> points out, people usually separated by social hierarchy or distance can meet each other on the road and create all sorts of contrasts. It is there that a variety of fates can collide or mingle<span style="font-size:80%">6</span>.
<span style="font-size:90%;">(Jonathan Fruoco, Chaucer's Polyphony: The Modern in Medieval Poetry, Medieval Institute Publications, Michigan 2020.)</span>
1 Nuances. sfumature.
2 chronotope. Cronotopo (deriva dall'unione delle radici greche chrono (tempo) e topos (luogo) e descrive l'intreccio fra tempo e spazio all'interno di un'opera letteraria).
3 Legend of Good Women. Un'opera precedente di Chaucer.
4polyphony. Polifonia.
5 Bakhtin. Mikhail Bakhtin, filosofo e critico letterario russo.
6mingle. Mescolarsi.
A: The Canterbury Tales and the Decameron present characters that are mainly aristocratic.
B: Chaucer presents each pilgrim in detail to highlight the rich variety of characters in his work and society.
C: The tales in The Canterbury Tales are told during the stops on the pilgrimage.
D: The main advantage of the road as a narrative device in The Canterbury Tales is that it allows for a linear, straightforward narrative.
E: The chronotope of the road is a necessary unifying element in a work that is extremely variegated considering the diverse characters and the various tales each of them tells.
F: The role of Bakhtin's concept of the chronotope in understanding The Canterbury Tales is that it provides a framework for analysing the intersection of time, space, and social relations.