Chaucer, Film, and the Desert of the Real; or, Why Geoffrey Chaucer Will Never Be Jane Austen.

Author / Editor
Scanlon, Larry.

Title
Chaucer, Film, and the Desert of the Real; or, Why Geoffrey Chaucer Will Never Be Jane Austen.

Published
Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Tison Pugh, eds. Chaucer on Screen: Absence, Presence, and Adapting the "Canterbury Tales" (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016), pp. 45-55.

Description
Suggests that modernity's insistence on a repressive break with the past helps to explain the paucity of screen adaptations of Chaucer's works, commenting on similarities between Chaucer's desert in HF and the "desert of the [R]eal" of Jean Baudrillard and Slavoj Žižek, and comparing Chaucer's narrative techniques (particularly in the Monk's description in GP, I.183–88) with Jean Austen's free indirect discourse and the cinematic technique of "shot/reverse shot."

Alternative Title
Chaucer on Screen.

Chaucer Subjects
Recordings and Films
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations