Chaucer's Sexual Poetics

Description: In chapters on Adam, TC, LGW, MLT, WBT, ClT, and PardT, Dinshaw argues that Chaucer's writing constructs and engages a sexual poetics. She contends that "whoever exerts control of signification, of language and the literary act, is associated with the masculine in patriarchal society."; The representation of the text as a veiled or clothed woman and the various literary acts--reading, translation, glossing, creating a literary tradition--as masculine acts performed on this feminine body recurs in various themes and structures in TC, LGW, and CT. It is in the Pardoner's "eunuch hermeneutics," Dinshaw argues that Chaucer points toward a poetics beyond gender and fallen language, redeemed in the incarnate word of Christ.

Chaucer Subjects: Background and General Criticism.; Troilus and Criseyde.; Adam Scriveyn.; Legend of Good Women.; Man of Law and His Tale.; Wife of Bath and Her Tale.; Pardoner and His Tale.; Clerk and His Tale.