Intention and the Idea of the Literary in Chaucer

Far more than any other Middle English author, Chaucer makes frequent and explicitclaims about the intention - or "entente" - with which his works are composed. What Chaucermeans by proclaiming his intention, however, is not transparent. Voiced by parodic ordiscursively compromised authorial personae, Chaucer at once asserts the hermeneutic salienceof his "entente," while pressing the term to serve in ways counter to the intentio auctoris ofscholastic commentaries, whereby the author's intention is circularly defined as identical to awork's moral use. As the first account of intentional hermeneutics across Chaucer's career, thisdissertation shows Chaucer supplanting a rhetorical and linguistic conception of the author'sintention with one both psychologistic and legal in nature, whereby his works are viewed asintentional acts judged in terms of the author's motives in composing them, rather than as writtenartifacts whose "menynge," defined as their moral usefulness, is legible through the compiler'sarrangement (ordo) of exemplary narratives. Chaucer thus establishes the author's intention notas his purpose legible in the arrangement of a text, but rather as a hermeneutic for explaining and justifying his works viewed as individual acts. My dissertation thus re-frames a longstandingcritical debate about the categories of medieval poetry conceived in terms of its fitness as vehiclefor ethical edification. I set out to define what Chaucer means by his "entente" by considering hisdeployment of the term across his fictions, and thus to show how intention defines a category ofwriting -- at once more ethical and more aesthetically autonomous -- that we know as hisliterature