There are a few things in our culture that almost no one dislikes. Dolly Parton, fried rice... I can think of something else, too. For this item the constituency is smaller-you probably have to go to college to want to vote on it-but really, it, or she, should be included: the Wife of Bath, from Geoffrey Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales." With "The Canterbury Tales," which Chaucer wrote during the last decade or so of his life he died in 1400, leaving it unfinished he went a long way toward inventing the novel. Actually, scholars don't agree on what the first novel was, but, more than any other work preceding it, "The Canterbury Tales" has a trait, in abundance, that people look for in a novel and miss if it's not there: the noise and bustle of real human life, the market-square color and variety that you find in "Tom Jones" and "Middlemarch" and "War and Peace" indeed, in most of the works that we reflexively think of as great novels. One might even say that "The Canterbury Tales" has too much human life, too many characters: some thirty late-medieval people who are going on a pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral and who decide to pass the time by taking turns telling stories.
Among them is the Wife of Bath, Alison by name, a clothmaker-well off, well travelled, well dressed, riding a nice horse. Alison is a sort of distillation of the work's chief novelistic qualities, its realism and its immediacy. As she speaks, you can almost feel her breath on your neck. And it's not just medieval life she's talking about. Her story is also a summary of much of the important literature available to people of the Middle Ages, the stories that taught them who they were. Alison is a whole syllabus of human wishes and grudges, blessings and curses a Divine Comedy, a Metamorphoses, a Decameron, even. (She alludes to all of these sources.)
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der February 13 - 20, 2023 (Double Issue)-Ausgabe von The New Yorker.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der February 13 - 20, 2023 (Double Issue)-Ausgabe von The New Yorker.
Starten Sie Ihre 7-tägige kostenlose Testversion von Magzter GOLD, um auf Tausende kuratierte Premium-Storys sowie über 8.000 Zeitschriften und Zeitungen zuzugreifen.
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President for Sale - A survey of today's political ads.
On a mid-October Sunday not long ago sun high, wind cool-I was in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for a book festival, and I took a stroll. There were few people on the streets-like the population of a lot of capital cities, Harrisburg's swells on weekdays with lawyers and lobbyists and legislative staffers, and dwindles on the weekends. But, on the façades of small businesses and in the doorways of private homes, I could see evidence of political activity. Across from the sparkling Susquehanna River, there was a row of Democratic lawn signs: Malcolm Kenyatta for auditor general, Bob Casey for U.S. Senate, and, most important, in white letters atop a periwinkle not unlike that of the sky, Kamala Harris for President.
LIFE ADVICE WITH ANIMAL ANALOGIES
Go with the flow like a dead fish.
CONNOISSEUR OF CHAOS
The masterly musical as mblages of Charles Ives
BEAUTIFUL DREAMERS
How the Brothers Grimm sought to awaken a nation.
THE ARTIFICIAL STATE
A different kind of machine politics.
THE HONEST ISLAND GREG JACKSON
Craint did not know when he had come to the island or why he had come.
THE SHIPWRECK DETECTIVE
Nigel Pickford has spent a lifetime searching for sunken treasure-without leaving dry land.
THE HOME FRONT
Some Americans are preparing for a second civil war.
SYRIA'S EMPIRE OF SPEED
Bashar al-Assad's regime is now a narco-state reliant on sales of amphetamines.
TUCKER EVERLASTING
Trump's favorite pundit takes his show on the road.