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"All Is Alike Good" : = Melancholia and Desire in Medieval Literature.

Record Type:	Language materials, manuscript : Monograph/item
Title/Author:	"All Is Alike Good" :/
Reminder of title:	Melancholia and Desire in Medieval Literature.
Author:	Dragu, Jacqueline.
Description:	1 online resource (140 pages)
Notes:	Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 84-12, Section: A.
Contained By:	Dissertations Abstracts International84-12A.
Subject:	Medieval literature. -
Online resource:	click for full text (PQDT)
ISBN:	9798379704964

"All Is Alike Good" : = Melancholia and Desire in Medieval Literature.
Dragu, Jacqueline.

"All Is Alike Good" :Melancholia and Desire in Medieval Literature. - 1 online resource (140 pages)

Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 84-12, Section: A.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--The University of Chicago, 2023.

Includes bibliographical references

This dissertation draws a distinction between medieval and psychoanalytic representations of melancholia as something repressed on the level of narrative structure and as a subjective mode of enjoyment. In each chapter I explore a problematic that psychoanalysis has traditionally conceived in melancholic terms: gender, the object, and the symptom. I argue that melancholia offers a useful reference point for understanding not only how medieval literary texts articulate accounts of gender, ideology and the family, but also some of the uses late medieval English writers made of melancholic affect for their novel interpretations of genres such as the dream vision and the complaint. If melancholia is symptomatic, repressive and pathological, I argue that there may also be a sense in which this symptomaticity itself might be seen as constitutive of a subjective position through which otherwise repressed forms of self-knowledge and enjoyment might begin to be articulated.The medieval texts I engage begin from positions of lessened or foreclosed agency, in which a kind of subject position is occasioned by its own lack of information or authority with respect to its own form or destiny. In Heldris of Cornwall's Roman de Silence, the titular character's transgender embodiment is posited in order to advance a cissexist and homophobic claim about "natural" sex. Silence's normative commitments emerge from a melancholic theory of gender emplotted by the sense of a departure from "Nature." In the process, however, its reparative ending demands the abandoning of the titular character's transgender embodiment. I then turn to Chaucer's Prioress's Tale, arguing that its treatment of the "little clergeon" is such that the child becomes sacrificed in order to be the instrument of the mother's racist jouissance. Though the Prioress's Tale centers the loss of a loved object, the tale is just as resistant to the melancholic as it is to the proper mourning of the child, as it paranoiacally attributes its repressed aggression towards him onto the Jews rather than ever identifying that aggression as an aspect of its own desire.In Chaucer's Book of the Duchess, I argue for reading Chaucer's poetic "I" in terms of his treatment of the melancholic symptom as a literary device. The logic of identification which brings together the nested narratives in the Book, I argue, can be understood in a distinctly non-Oedipal sense, indicating a kind of aesthetic subjectivity by which we melancholia might be seen as more open-ended than a pathology constantly teetering on the edge of sinfulness. In the last chapter, I turn to the poetry of Thomas Hoccleve, arguing that there is within his writing a novel take on the genre of complaint, which I read in terms of the Lacan's later revision of his account of the symptom. Complaint for Hoccleve is a benignly narcissistic genre: the "I" of Hoccleve's texts is Hoccleve, and the emergence of these texts out of and beyond the depressive isn't in the service of paranoid projection or the fetishization of some loved object. Rather, the complainer simply seeks to continue complaining.

Electronic reproduction.
Ann Arbor, Mich. :
ProQuest,
2024

Mode of access: World Wide Web

ISBN: 9798379704964Subjects--Topical Terms:

1148457
Medieval literature.
Subjects--Index Terms:

PsychoanalysisIndex Terms--Genre/Form:

554714
Electronic books.

"All Is Alike Good" : = Melancholia and Desire in Medieval Literature.
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500 $a Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 84-12, Section: A.
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502 $a Thesis (Ph.D.)--The University of Chicago, 2023.
504 $a Includes bibliographical references
520 $a This dissertation draws a distinction between medieval and psychoanalytic representations of melancholia as something repressed on the level of narrative structure and as a subjective mode of enjoyment. In each chapter I explore a problematic that psychoanalysis has traditionally conceived in melancholic terms: gender, the object, and the symptom. I argue that melancholia offers a useful reference point for understanding not only how medieval literary texts articulate accounts of gender, ideology and the family, but also some of the uses late medieval English writers made of melancholic affect for their novel interpretations of genres such as the dream vision and the complaint. If melancholia is symptomatic, repressive and pathological, I argue that there may also be a sense in which this symptomaticity itself might be seen as constitutive of a subjective position through which otherwise repressed forms of self-knowledge and enjoyment might begin to be articulated.The medieval texts I engage begin from positions of lessened or foreclosed agency, in which a kind of subject position is occasioned by its own lack of information or authority with respect to its own form or destiny. In Heldris of Cornwall's Roman de Silence, the titular character's transgender embodiment is posited in order to advance a cissexist and homophobic claim about "natural" sex. Silence's normative commitments emerge from a melancholic theory of gender emplotted by the sense of a departure from "Nature." In the process, however, its reparative ending demands the abandoning of the titular character's transgender embodiment. I then turn to Chaucer's Prioress's Tale, arguing that its treatment of the "little clergeon" is such that the child becomes sacrificed in order to be the instrument of the mother's racist jouissance. Though the Prioress's Tale centers the loss of a loved object, the tale is just as resistant to the melancholic as it is to the proper mourning of the child, as it paranoiacally attributes its repressed aggression towards him onto the Jews rather than ever identifying that aggression as an aspect of its own desire.In Chaucer's Book of the Duchess, I argue for reading Chaucer's poetic "I" in terms of his treatment of the melancholic symptom as a literary device. The logic of identification which brings together the nested narratives in the Book, I argue, can be understood in a distinctly non-Oedipal sense, indicating a kind of aesthetic subjectivity by which we melancholia might be seen as more open-ended than a pathology constantly teetering on the edge of sinfulness. In the last chapter, I turn to the poetry of Thomas Hoccleve, arguing that there is within his writing a novel take on the genre of complaint, which I read in terms of the Lacan's later revision of his account of the symptom. Complaint for Hoccleve is a benignly narcissistic genre: the "I" of Hoccleve's texts is Hoccleve, and the emergence of these texts out of and beyond the depressive isn't in the service of paranoid projection or the fetishization of some loved object. Rather, the complainer simply seeks to continue complaining.
533 $a Electronic reproduction. $b Ann Arbor, Mich. : $c ProQuest, $d 2024
538 $a Mode of access: World Wide Web
650 4 $a Medieval literature. $3 1148457
650 4 $a Gender studies. $3 1179195
653 $a Psychoanalysis
653 $a Transgenders
653 $a Sex
653 $a Pathology
653 $a Melancholia
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710 2 $a ProQuest Information and Learning Co. $3 1178819
710 2 $a The University of Chicago. $b English Language and Literature. $3 1190199
773 0 $t Dissertations Abstracts International $g 84-12A.
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