강지수, 기억의 판에 새겨진 아이네아스와 디도 이야기: 초서의 [명성의 전당]과 독자
Jisoo Kang, "The Story of Aeneas and Dido on the Tablet of Memory: The
House of Fame and the Reader"
According to various scholarship on the
ancient and medieval understanding of memory, its representational function in
restructuring the past for present cognition and, for that matter, what one has
read for later recollection and composition has important ramifications for
understanding the process involved in reading and the closely related activity
of writing. In Book 1 of the House of Fame, Chaucer effectively demonstrates how
in and through the memory of its reader a text was understood to have a life of
its own once the author ceased to speak. What is written on a brass tablet as
though it would never be erased or revised―what an author like Virgil supposedly
does with his authority―is superimposed by the reader's mental images that are
in his intertextual memory, which in turn question the received significance of
the texts that have been awarded fame by the collective memory. The rhetoric
treatises’s recognition of a text’s ending as the point of transition―that is,
the transition of authority from the author to the reader―is figured prominently
by the House of Fame as the poem legitimizes the reader's assessment of what is
true or false.
Key Words
Chaucer, The House of Fame, memory,
reader, authority, medieval rhetoric, composition, textuality