Chaucer and the Subject of History

Rating:
Summary: An essential book for students of Chaucer
Review: Patterson's book is a true tour de force. It combines provocative insight with impressive scholarship, and is already a model for literary studies.

His is not always a highly legible book since there is so much going on, and occasionally one gets the feeling that Patterson has too much to tell us (the sheer number and volume of the footnotes are indicative of his erudition).

This is not the forum to get into a scholarly discussion of the pros and cons of this title, and a short review could never do justice to Patterson's range and command of discourse. Allow me to point out one tiny thing: Patterson, in choosing mottos for his chapters from Don DeLillo's "Libra," manages to show how Chaucer studies are indeed still relevant, how the works of an author (Patterson doesn't limit himself to the "Canterbury Tales"--see his discussion of "Anelida and Arcite") dead for hundreds of years still is meaningful, if one reads him carefully, not just but also against the grain.

Rating:
Summary: Patterson's book a crucial text in Chaucer studies
Review: Patterson's book remains the classic new historicist study of the Chaucerian corpus. Construing his argument around the emergence of the self-aware subject in the late Middle Ages, Patterson opens his study with a an eloquent explanation of the interrelatedness of modernity and subjectivity. Chapters 1 & 2 set forth the parameters of his main thesis, noting how the subject is always constructed through history, rather than in opposition to it (despite the claims of these subjects to the contrary). While chapter 3's examination of the Knight's Tale is perhaps overdetermined by the theoretical models of the first two chapters, the rest of the book, particularly chapters 6 and 8, demonstrates Patterson's thinking and writing at its best, especially in his riveting analysis of the relationship between te Pardoner's nihilism and the construction of his subjectivity. All in all, the book provides an illuminating new assessment of Chaucer's place in the historical development of the modern subject. It is still a standard in Chaucer studies and I recommend it wholeheartedly.

Rating:
Summary: Patterson's book a crucial text in Chaucer studies
Review: Patterson's book remains the classic new historicist study of the Chaucerian corpus. Construing his argument around the emergence of the self-aware subject in the late Middle Ages, Patterson opens his study with a an eloquent explanation of the interrelatedness of modernity and subjectivity. Chapters 1 & 2 set forth the parameters of his main thesis, noting how the subject is always constructed through history, rather than in opposition to it (despite the claims of these subjects to the contrary). While chapter 3's examination of the Knight's Tale is perhaps overdetermined by the theoretical models of the first two chapters, the rest of the book, particularly chapters 6 and 8, demonstrates Patterson's thinking and writing at its best, especially in his riveting analysis of the relationship between te Pardoner's nihilism and the construction of his subjectivity. All in all, the book provides an illuminating new assessment of Chaucer's place in the historical development of the modern subject. It is still a standard in Chaucer studies and I recommend it wholeheartedly.