Narrative play: Medieval dream narrators and poetic process

This dissertation focuses on the performative actions of the narrators in four Middle English dream visions: The Assembly of Ladies, Chaucer’s House of Fame, Clanvowe’s Boke of Cupide, and William Langland’s The Vision of Piers Plowman. Performance theorists such as Herbert Blau, Sarah Beckwith and Kier Elam anchor the discussion of how tactical and systematic performances enable narrators to seize on binary rifts to create narrative opportunities. I draw on the scholarship of both allegory and theater in order to show how analogous work, whether signifying actors’ bodies or performed narrative gestures, engage social work. I extend the foundational work of other scholars on dream vision to show how the fluidity of the dreamscape authorizes the perspectives of the dream narrator-bricoleur -- the chief semiotician whose performed gestures drive meaning, while abrogating the responsibility of how acts of bricolage are presented in the narrative. This project explores the varying ways the narrator-bricoleur pieces together allegorical representations in the dreamscape to constitute individual and collective meaning. The larger significance of these actions is in how the narrator impacts his/her community while figuring himself/herself as a reformed signifier. I argue that this signification is occurring both within and outside of the frame of the poem. By including the narrators’ gestures that point beyond the physical poem, these dream visions with their incomplete or irresolvable endings, garner a stronger creative thrust, which takes into account narrative as process rather than end product.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Nicola Blak