Chaucer's Haunted Aesthetics: Mimesis and Trauma in 'Troilus and Criseyde'

Author / Editor
Ingham, Patricia Clare.

Title
Chaucer's Haunted Aesthetics: Mimesis and Trauma in 'Troilus and Criseyde'

Published
College English 72.3 (2010): 226-47.

Description
Ingham uses Freud's meditations on Tasso's knight Tancred as a model for how literary texts mediate between the repetitive and the representational aspects of trauma. Chaucer's TC resonates with trauma in the work's historical context, in the abandonment of Criseyde by Calchas and the trafficking of women, and in its depiction of Pandarus's transfer of "wo" to Troilus. The allusions to Procne and Philomela in the poem problematize the voicing of trauma.

Chaucer Subjects
Troilus and Criseyde.