'For myn entente nys but for to pleye': On the Playground with the Wife of Bath, the Clerk of Oxford, and Jacques Derrida
- Author / Editor
- Scheitzeneder, Franziska.
'For myn entente nys but for to pleye': On the Playground with the Wife of Bath, the Clerk of Oxford, and Jacques Derrida
- Published
- PhiN: Philologie im Netz 36 (2006): 44-59.
- Description
- Reads the opposition between the Clerk and the Wife of Bath in light of Derrida's opposition between the structuralist desire to decipher signs and the poststructuralist impulse to play with the "instability of signs." The Wife is an "anachronistic allegory of Derrida's play of structure, whose only truth is that there is not a single truth." In his Envoy, the Clerk transgresses his own efforts to specify meaning.
- Reprinted in Winfried Rudolf, Thomas Honegger, and Andrew James Johnston, eds. Clerks, Wives, and Historians: Essays on Medieval Language and Literature. Variations, no. 8 (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), pp. 47-68.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Wife of Bath and Her Tale.
- Clerk and His Tale.