Between Voice and Name, or, Chaucer Theorizes Literary Person-Making

Abstract: Literary personhood takes shape between voice and name—that is, between first-person traces of locutionary agents in discourse and the third-person suturing of individuals into the textual record. This conceptual pair can help scholars organize the varied populace of literature, with its rabble of characters, personifications, dramatis personae , narrators, and so forth. But voice and name are also key terms in medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer's House of Fame , a speculative critique of poetic tradition (especially Dante) and literary person-making. Chaucer theorizes literary persons by disaggregating them into voice and name, thereby undermining poetry's ethical authority while showing its inescapable anthropomorphism.