Abstract
This book introduces a political approach to reading Chaucer, contending that key tales present an examination of the destructive effects of sovereign power on the human subject. After a brief discussion of the Clerk’s Tale and the Prioress’s Tale, the point is made that scholars have overlooked Chaucer’s scrutiny of this fundamental political relation. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben and Primo Levi, it is asserted that the Holocaust has ushered in a new ethics that affects our reading of traditional literature. Adapting Walter Benjamin’s concept of constellation, this chapter offers a new paradigm that helps us read these tales in a more proximate way, one that, while taking account of Chaucer’s historical context, abridges the distance between him and us and makes possible “reading-history-as-ethical-meditation.”
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Notes
- 1.
Social Chaucer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989). (Strohm 1989)
- 2.
Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), see 7 and 41–74. (Patterson 1987)
- 3.
Negotiating the Past, 26–27. (Patterson 1987)
- 4.
“Criticism, Anti-Semitism, and the Prioress’s Tale,” Exemplaria 1 (1989): 69–115. (Fradenburg 1989)
- 5.
Ibid., 75. (Fradenburg 1989)
- 6.
Besides Strohm, I focus on Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1989) (Dinshaw 1989); Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1991) (Patterson 1991); Lynn Staley, “Chaucer and the Postures of Sanctity,” in The Powers of the Holy: Religion, Politics and Gender in Late Medieval English Culture, ed. David Aers and Lynn Staley (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 179–259 (Staley 1996); and Larry Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) (Scanlon 1994). My intention is not to provide an exhaustive survey of recent developments in Chaucer criticism but to evaluate a few scholars whose work in this transition period is exemplary in the adoption and use of the newer theoretical dispensations. But see for example, David Aers, Chaucer (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press International, 1986) (Aers 1986); David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997) (Wallace 1997). Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ed., The Postcolonial Middle Ages (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000) (Cohen 2000); R. Allen Shoaf, Chaucer’s Body: The Anxiety of Circulation in the “Canterbury Tales” (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001) (Shoaf 2001); Kathy Lavezzo, ed., Imagining a Medieval English Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004 (Lavezzo 2004); Stephen H. Rigby, Wisdom and Chivalry: Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale and Medieval Political Theory (Leiden: Brill, 2009). (Rigby 2009)
- 7.
Social Chaucer, 24–46. (Strohm 1989)
- 8.
Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, 15. (Dinshaw 1989)
- 9.
Chaucer and the Subject, esp. 254–262. (Patterson 1991)
- 10.
I chose these two scholars because they throw into sharp relief the relation of moral or cultural authority and the exercise of power which helps me focus on the issue of the legitimacy of the exercise of power that Chaucer is questioning in the two tales I analyze. I realize there are other scholars who examine Chaucer’s engagement with political issues in his poetry. David Wallace, for example, is one whose magisterial exploration of associational forms of late medieval polity falls just outside the time frame I am focusing on here. I don’t pretend to be offering a comprehensive history but offering some exemplary instances of critics whose engagement with modern theory provides a context and point of departure for my own analysis of Chaucer’s tales.
- 11.
Narrative, Authority, and Power, 142. (Scanlon 1994)
- 12.
“Chaucer and the Postures,” 180. (Staley 1996)
- 13.
Wisdom and Chivalry, 3. (Rigby 2009)
- 14.
See for example, Lawrence Besserman, “Ideology, Antisemitism and Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 36 (2001): 48–72 (Besserman 2001); Michael A. Calabrese, “Performing the Prioress: ‘Conscience’ and Responsibility in Studies of Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale,” Texas Studies in Language and Literature 44 (2002): 66–91. (Calabrese 2002)
- 15.
AntiJudaism: The Western Tradition (New York: Norton, 2013), 191 (Nirenberg 2013)
- 16.
Ibid., 191–202. (Nirenberg 2013)
- 17.
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., gen. ed. Larry Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987) (Chaucer 1987). All citations of Chaucer are from this edition.
- 18.
Denise L. Despres, “Cultic Anti-Judaism and Chaucer’s Litel Clergeon,” Modern Philology 91 (1994): 413–27, esp. 414 (Despres 1994); Sylvia Tomasch, “Postcolonial Chaucer and the Virtual Jew” in Chaucer and the Jews: Sources, Contexts, Meanings, ed. Sheila Delany (New York: Routledge, 2002), 69–85 (Tomasch 2002); Steven F. Kruger, The Spectral Jew: Conversion and Embodiment in Medieval Europe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). (Kruger 2006)
- 19.
AntiJudaism, 192. (Nirenberg 2013)
- 20.
Frank I. Schechter, “The Rightlessness of Mediaeval English Jewry,” The Jewish Quarterly Review, New Series 4 (1913): 121–151. (Schechter 1913)
- 21.
Sheila Delany, “Chaucer’s Prioress, the Jews and the Muslims,” in Chaucer and the Jews, 47–48. (Delany 2002)
- 22.
For Agamben see especially Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999) (Agamben 1999) and Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998 (Agamben 1998); for Levi, Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996) (Levi 1996) and The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Random House, Inc., 1989). (Levi 1989)
- 23.
The materials in this section and the following one, “New Reception Paradigm,” are a revision of two earlier short articles, “Primo Levi, Giorgio Agamben, and the New Ethics of Reading,” in The Legacy of Primo Levi, ed. Stanislao Pugliese (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 147–152 (McClellan 2005b); “Primo Levi and the History of Reception,” in Answering Auschwitz: Primo Levi’s Science and Humanism After the Fall, ed. Stanislao Pugliese (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), 169–176. (McClellan 2011)
- 24.
Survival, 90. (Levi 1996)
- 25.
Remnants, 81–82. (Agamben 1999)
- 26.
Ibid., 63. (Agamben 1999)
- 27.
Ibid., 69. (Agamben 1999)
- 28.
Drowned, 83. (Levi 1989)
- 29.
Remnants, 54. (Agamben 1999)
- 30.
Ibid., 69. (Agamben 1999)
- 31.
Drowned, 21. (Levi 1989)
- 32.
Homo Sacer, 32. (Agamben 1998)
- 33.
Remnants, 69. (Agamben 1999)
- 34.
Holocaust Representation: Art Within the Limits of History and Ethics (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 35–50, esp., 43. (Lang 2000)
- 35.
The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 462. (Benjamin 2002)
- 36.
See Erich Auerbach’s classic explication of the medieval theory, “Figura” in Scenes From the Drama of European Literature, trans. Ralph Manheim (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 53 (Auerbach 1984) that Agamben refers to in his discussion of Benjamin’s theory of constellation, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 74, 141–143. (Agamben 2005)
- 37.
Time That Remains, 142. (Agamben 2005)
- 38.
The Arcades Project, 463. (Benjamin 2002)
- 39.
Ibid., 463. (Benjamin 2002)
- 40.
Ibid., 462. (Benjamin 2002)
- 41.
Time That Remains, 145. (Agamben 2005)
- 42.
“Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 255. (Benjamin 1969)
- 43.
Survival, 111–115. (Levi 1996)
- 44.
Ibid., 113. (Levi 1996)
- 45.
Ibid., (Levi 1996)
- 46.
Ibid., 115. (Levi 1996)
- 47.
Ibid., 115. (Levi 1996)
- 48.
The Origins of Nazi Violence, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: The New Press, 2003). (Traverso 2003)
- 49.
“‘Full Pale Face’: Agamben’s Biopolitical Theory and the Sovereign Subject in Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale,” Exemplaria 17 (2005): 103–134. (McClellan 2005a)
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Wallace, David. 1997. Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
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McClellan, W. (2016). Political Chaucer. In: Reading Chaucer After Auschwitz. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54879-5_1
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