Texts
Two well-known works in which the animals carry on intellectual debates are The Owl and the Nightingale (13th century), involving a dispute between two birds quarreling over who is more useful to man, and Geoffrey Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls (1382?). In the former the argument is loud and vindictive, with the nightingale condescendingly insulting the owl for having a toneless and depressing singing voice; the owl defends her voice as warning and correcting men, and in turns threatens the nightingale. In Chaucer's shorter and more sentimental poem, a formel (a female eagle) has three suitors who submit their cases to an assembly of birds; the birds all have different agendas and cannot reach a decision, and 'Nature' must finally intervene by giving the formel the right to choose her own spouse. In the end the formel opts to delay being married to anyone for a year.
A similar and probably later poem is The Cuckoo and the Nightingale, by Sir John Clanvowe (1341–1391), a follower of Chaucer. This poem also continues the theme of moral dispute by featuring a cuckoo, symbol of female infidelity, debating the nightingale over love. The nightingale advocates love as an ethically uplifting emotion, while the cuckoo claims that love's arbitrariness damages people's lives. The poem ends with the human observer throwing a rock at the cuckoo and the nightingale rewarding him with happiness in marriage.
A poem in which two human, though allegorical, figures engage in a debate is the anonymous Wynnere and Wastoure (c.1352), written in alliterative verse.
Read more about this topic: Medieval Debate Poetry
Famous quotes containing the word texts:
“The bases for historical knowledge are not empirical facts but written texts, even if these texts masquerade in the guise of wars or revolutions.”
—Paul Deman (1919–1983)
“I know that I will always be expected to have extra insight into black texts—especially texts by black women. A working-class Jewish woman from Brooklyn could become an expert on Shakespeare or Baudelaire, my students seemed to believe, if she mastered the language, the texts, and the critical literature. But they would not grant that a middle-class white man could ever be a trusted authority on Toni Morrison.”
—Claire Oberon Garcia, African American scholar and educator. Chronicle of Higher Education, p. B2 (July 27, 1994)
“A book is not an autonomous entity: it is a relation, an axis of innumerable relations. One literature differs from another, be it earlier or later, not because of the texts but because of the way they are read: if I could read any page from the present time—this one, for instance—as it will be read in the year 2000, I would know what the literature of the year 2000 would be like.”
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)