PrT and SNT mirror each other but "with a telling difference." The two stand in relation to each other as Old Testament figura to New Testament fulfillment (the shadow and substance of the title). Ironically, in this figural scheme, PrT takes the…
Examines food imagery in MilT, RvT, CkT, and GP. These portions of CT threaten, but do not quite achieve, the collapse of Lévi-Strauss's "culinary triangle."
In the fifteenth century, Chaucer was admired chiefly as the founder of English eloquence, betraying English anxiety about French influences. The patronage networks that promoted Chaucer as a literary icon also promoted translations of the works of…
Medieval allegory "prefigures cinematic consciousness." In Wegener's film "Der Golem," "Judaeo-Christian figural allegory, coupled with the narratology and the phenomenology of film," shifts "the deep past into the present in centrifugal, shocking,…
Scholars such as Sheila Delany, Derek Pearsall, and Thomas Frederick Tout have used bureaucratic records of Chaucer - and records of Chaucer as bureaucrat - to construct subjective portraits of the poet. Mead explores the processes of "reading"…
Chaucer studies are often considered neutral and unpoliticized, whether they are subjective, personalized readings, or objective and "professionalized." The construction of the Middle Ages as unalterably "Other," combined with the lack of a…
Vance's concept of "power semantics" articulates how Chaucer uses transgressive exempla--"meta-examples which confound expectations"--to pit the discourse of medieval history against itself in PardT, predicating a literal critique of medieval culture…
Chaucer's PrT allows competing psychoanalytic readings from both feminine and masculine points of view, a conflict that mirrors the competition for predominance between male and female figures embedded within the text. These readings may be…
Fradenburg, Louise O.
Exemplaria 2 (1990): 169-202.
Chaucer's poetry of loss and reparation, exemplified by Anel and BD, reveals anxieties about isolation, change, and death through the defensive strategies generated by the poems both to remember and commemorate loss and to point toward a regenerative…
Ferster's and Fradenburg's essays problematize the critical act of reading medieval texts: Ferster's examination of "who speaks" in PrT extends to the critic's own voice; Fradenburg's articulation of medievalists' anxieties concerning the status of…
Although Chaucer criticism divides into prefeminist, feminist, and postfeminist eras, postfeminist criticism often lapses into prefeminist exclusion of female readers and critics by assuming transhistorical categories of the masculine and feminine…
Leicester, H. Marshall,Jr.
Exemplaria 2 (1990): 241-61.
Chaucer's GP actively encourages the adoption of a "disenchanted perspective" on society, on the pilgrims, and on discourse itself by constructing traditional estates-satire classifications. The narrator successively adopts and then discards first a…
Despite pressures of late-twentieth-century scholarship to make Chaucer's poetry as difficult and allusive as possible,scholars need to distinguish between Chaucer's use of sources that would have been obscure or unobtainable for his…
Both Spearing and Leicester focus on the question of authorial intention as an interpretive norm. By acknowledging that Chaucer may intend private allusions, Spearing opens the possibility that one audience's "use" is another audience's "allusion,"…
Chaucer explores the "citation and corruption of media" in MLT by having the lawyer tell a tale of "pseudo-circulation" in which Custance remains constant despite her apparent circulation and use. The tale enacts the Man of Law's anxieties about…
Wetherbee examines the literary history of KnT in classical epic, Statius, Dante, and Boccaccio to demonstrate (1) how, in a "deliberate, political" move, the Knight attempts to suppress psychological and historical reality to produce an "optimistic…
Fifteenth-century readers of Chaucer shaped the Chaucerian canon and cult of authorship by appropriating both the language and the rhetorical strategy of ClT, wherein the Clerk simultaneously recognizes the authority of Petrarch and appropriates to…
Fyler's assertion that Chaucer's ambiguous use of generic and gendered "man" is both self-conscious and consciously feminist assumes a false stability of meaning for the generic masculine and ignores the critical construction of authorial…
Reading CT through the lens of the postmodern text suggests certain Derridean and Bakhtinian parallels, illuminating the polysemic and polyphonic characteristics of Chaucer's text. Like the postmodernists, Chaucer tends to question authority; to…
An intertextual study of Margery Kempe and May in MerT reveals how language, sex, and money, considered as "media of exchange," affect medieval discourse concerning women and merchants, and especially merchants' wives. All three media are recognized…
Consolation can be effected in BD only by the creation of a radically "privatized" apocalyptic "moment" situated not only "outside the text itself" but also outside the historical world, a moment capable of giving mourners "imaginative space" to…
Chaucer represents popular discourse as analogous to social, historical, and even apocalyptic disruption. He thus variously attempts to contain and to release its power: In TC, disruption can be temporarily contained by heroic action; in KnT, it…
The feminist film criticism theory of the "male gaze" articulates the "triangulated" male-female relationship of KnT and MilT as they arise in response to Boccaccio's elucidation of the gaze in his "Teseida" and in relation to two classical…
