ABSTRACT

Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde puts perspective itself under the microscope: throughout, the individual experience of reading the world is brought into the foreground as sense-perception, and the immediate experience of time, are rendered with a striking psychological verisimilitude. This essay breaks with the critical orthodoxy around this poem, which sees the poem’s dynamics of temporal perspectives as a structural analogue with Boethius’ philosophy of time and free will—one which places the reader ‘in God’s shoes’ by providing advance knowledge of the poem’s end. Challenging this notion, this essay argues that the poem’s complex interplay of individual perspectives actually reveals the total contingency of the readerly vantage-point, exposing the ‘situatedness in time’ of reader and text. Rather than being a cipher for Boethian philosophy, I argue that Troilus and Criseyde advances a Chaucerian phenomenology of reading—one that is as metapoetic as it is metaphysical, concerning both semantic indeterminacy and the temporality of individual experience. This approach brings Chaucer into productive, and largely untapped, dialogues with modern philosophers and contemporary theoretical currents, including recent advances considering literature and contingency.

摘要

乔叟的特洛伊罗斯和克里西德将视角本身置于显微镜下：自始至终，阅读世界的个人体验作为感官知觉被带到前台，而时间的直接体验则以惊人的心理逼真度呈现。这篇文章打破了围绕这首诗的批判性正统观念，后者将这首诗的时间视角动态视为与波爱修斯的时间和自由意志哲学的结构类比——通过提供对这首诗的超前知识，将读者“置于上帝的位置”结尾。挑战这个概念，这篇文章认为，这首诗的个人观点的复杂相互作用实际上揭示了读者有利位置的总体偶然性，揭示了读者和文本的“时间定位”。与其成为波埃哲学的密码，我认为Troilus 和 Criseyde提出了一种乔叟式的阅读现象学——既是形而上学又是形而上学的，既涉及语义的不确定性，也涉及个人经验的时间性。这种方法使乔叟与现代哲学家和当代理论潮流（包括考虑文学和偶然性的最新进展）进行富有成效且基本上未开发的对话。