RT info:eu-repo/semantics/article
T1 Slow practice as ethical aesthetics: the ecocritical strategy of patience in Geoffrey Chaucer’s "The Clerk’s Tale"
A1 Morrison, Susan Signe
K1 Slow
K1 Slow walking
K1 Slow cinema
K1 Ecocritical strategy
K1 Pilgrimage
K1 Middle Ages
K1 Ethical practice
K1 Chaucer
K1 Patient Griselda
K1 The Clerk’s Tale
K1 Lentitud
K1 Caminar lento
K1 Cinematografía lenta
K1 Estrategia ecocrítica
K1 Peregrinaje
K1 Edad Media
K1 Práctica ética
K1 Literatura
K1 Literature
K1 Medio ambiente
K1 Environmental science
AB How can cultural works from the distant past—such as the Middle Ages—teach us ethical modes of behavior for today? One form of ecopoetics emerges through slow practice, making the reader collaborate in the measured process of co-creating the emotional impact of an imaginative text. Drawing on rich debates about slow cinema, this essay suggests how Chaucer’s “The Clerk’s Tale”—from his grand fourteenth-century poem, “The Canterbury Tales”—evokes a slow eco-aesthetics with ethical impact. The relative slowness of walking shapes how individuals respond to their environment. In turn, a deceleration of perception affects how travel comes to be written about, as seen in the tale of Patient Griselda. Introduced by Giovanni Boccaccio and adapted by such writers as Francesco Petrarch, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Christine de Pizan, she acts dynamically through her apparent silence and notorious patience. The environmental humanities offer paradigms for us to consider the strategies of slowness and patience. This essay shows how medieval pilgrimage literature evokes a slow aesthetic which is at the same time an ecocritical strategy. Slowness results in an enduring impact and heightened sensitivity to the ecological damage for which we all are culpable. Sloweness somatically inculcates key aspects of environmental awareness. Pilgrimage texts from the Middle Ages teach us slow ethical aesthetics, suggesting that the medieval moment—finally and a long time coming— is now.
PB Universidad de Alcalá
SN 2171-9594
YR 2020
FD 2020
LK http://hdl.handle.net/10017/45730
UL http://hdl.handle.net/10017/45730
LA eng
DS MINDS@UW
RD 20-abr-2024