Medieval Studies

... But an interview about blogs? And not just that, but a simulacrum of an interview put together from e-mail exchanges? CARL PYRDUM (CP): So, the interview has started already, has it? Or was that just now the prelude to an interview and now I'm supposed to start? ...

We call partus birth and vice versa. Partus has an established etymology— past participle of parere, to produce, root of parturire, to labor bearing life. And then there is the shadow etymology, at least for the ears of an English speaker. Parturition, partus, rings with the sound of fragments, the homological echoes of parts and parting, the breaking of the body that happens at birth. Say instead disjunctus, if you want to be accurate in your Latin, say disvulsus, avulsus, if you want speak of division. Latin has many, many ways to destroy the bonds between object and object, matter and matter, text and text. But partus is the way we speak of the division between the self and the sense of wholeness, between the corpus and the corpus that it bears. Partus, the " radical ordeal of the splitting of the subject, " as Julia Kristeva termed it (Kristeva, 1996, 76), can be queered through its dissolutions. Elizabeth Freeman, in Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, praises Kristeva for offering a vision of birth implicitly aligned with the goals of an anti-identitarian queer theory, as the innate divisibility of the birthing body displaces the rigidity of a socially-reified singularity (Freeman, 2010, 45-6). The image of a singular, corporealized subjectivity, bound in by the harsh dimensions of normative expectation, is undone when we imagine the radical dissolutions of birth, when we invoke the capacity of the human body to move fluidly between its accumulations of identity. Myra Hyrd's

When Geoffrey Chaucer is named the 'Father of English poetry', an inherent assumption about paternity is transmitted. Chaucer's 'fatherhood' is presented as a means of poetic legitimization, a stable mode of authority that connects the medieval author with all the successive generations of English writers. This book argues, however, that for Chaucer himself, paternity was a far more fraught ambition, one capable of devastating male identity as surely as it could enshrine it. Moving away from anachronistic assumptions about reproduction and authority, this book argues that Chaucer profoundly struggled with his own desire to create something that would last past his own death. For Chaucer also believed that men were the humble, mortal playthings of an all too distant God. Medieval Christianity taught that the earth was but a temporary, sorrowful abode for corrupted men, and that the fall from grace was reborn within each generation of Adam's sons.

Chaucer knew that God had set sharp limits upon man's ability to create with certainty, and to determine his own posterity. Yet, what could be more human than the longing to wrest some small authority from one's own mortal flesh? This book argues that this essential intellectual, ethical, and religious crisis lies at the very heart of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Within this masterpiece of English literature, Chaucer boldly confronts the impossibility of his own aching wish to see his offspring, biological and poetic, last beyond his own death, to claim the authority simultaneously promised and denied by the very act of creation.

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