Reading Chaucer after Auschwitz: Sovereign Power and Bare Life.
- Author / Editor
- McClellan, William.
Reading Chaucer after Auschwitz: Sovereign Power and Bare Life.
- Published
- New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
- Physical Description
- ix, 123 pp.
- Description
- Applies a "New Paradigm for Reading" to MLT based on the "new ethics" of Giorgio Agamben's analysis of Levi Primo's testimony of Auschwitz, combined with Walter Benjamin's concept of "constellations" of images that fuse past and present. Focuses on relations between sovereign power and the subjectification and "desubjectification" of subjects, particularly how the multiple sovereigns of MLT impose power on Custance and abandon her, conveying "various permutations" of the "painful experience of exile" and the intrinsic culpability of the sovereign. Presents MLT as Chaucer's most negative view of sovereignty, and examines parallel concerns in PrT and ClT.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Man of Law and His Tale
Clerk and His Tale
Prioress and Her Tale,