Chaucer's "Clerk's Tale": The Poem Not the Myth.

Description: Challenges psychoanalytic approaches to ClT and rejects the approaches that read the poem either as a Christian parable of authoritarianism or a rejection of authority as a "disease of monarchy." Argues that Chaucer creates the Tale as an expression of the "conscious unlogic" of the Clerk, a "master rhetorician and disputant," who wittily engages the Wife of Bath and satisfies the expectations of his audience. Chaucer, typically, offers an "aesthetic resolution of the fundamentally irreconcilable conflicts of the sexual life."