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At the risk of sounding dogmatic, I shall set forth a broad claim about Chaucer's poetic art as a whole, and, in the light of this claim, I shall venture some exploratory remarks about the House of Fame. First, I shall suggest that among the most persistent artistic purposes of Chaucer's entire poetic career was that of exploring, through rhetorical strategies either inherited or perfected by him, the ambiguous functions and limits of conventional verbal signs as mediators of human consciousness. Secondly, I shall suggest that the House of Fame may be read as a pragmatic study of a special kind of verbal fetishism that Chaucer saw as perverse, all the more so because it subsumed other kinds of fetishism that he saw as threatening to the social order: I have in mind the fetishism of money. Because it is so vast, the first generalization cannot be borne out in the space of a mere article. However, a few indicative remarks are still perhaps in order. To suggest that Chaucer's priorities as a poet were above
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