Guilt Historicism: Walter Benjamin’s "Capitalism as Religion," Aura, and the Case of Chaucer's Pardoner.
- Author / Editor
- Edmondson, George.
Guilt Historicism: Walter Benjamin’s "Capitalism as Religion," Aura, and the Case of Chaucer's Pardoner.
- Published
- Exemplaria 34 (2022): 103-29.
- Description
- Considers the Pardoner in PardT as an "exemplary figure" of what Walter Benjamin argues is a defining trait of modernity: the eclipse of religion's sacralizing capacities by capitalism, which, like the Pardoner’s sales pitch, intensifies guilt rather than offering atonement. In this, the Pardoner is not only a prophet of modernity but its neighbor.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Pardoner and His Tale