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Desire in the Canterbury Tales by Elizabeth Scala. The Ohio State University Press, 2015.
Elizabeth Scala's most recent monograph, Desire in the Canterbury Tales, reads Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as a discourse of desire. She argues that this discourse is not only rooted in the topics chosen by individual pilgrims in the frame narrative, but can also, more significantly, be found in various acts of misreading occurring in the frame narrative that produce compulsive desires and that can in turn be traced in the structure of the language and in signifying chains connecting the tales. The frame narrative, Scala argues, is where Chaucer sets up a "pretended unity" among the pilgrims, "a unity that then gets tested and discomfited" (2-4) and results in competitive fictions that are often linked to misrecognitions and misreadings of the tale tellers.
Scala's work, as a whole, contributes a structural reading of the tales to ongoing debates in Chaucer studies. But her monograph also productively intervenes in current criticism by linking her structural analysis of Chaucer's language to the psychoanalytical theories of Jacques Lacan. Scala argues that the "conscious means by which speakers pursue various desires and goals" are linked to the "structure of unconscious desire assumed with language" (11). Psychoanalytic theories help her to explain "the subject's position within the complex and socially structured world of symbolization, the Symbolic order" (11). Scala's readings are therefore heavily influenced by Saussure's structural linguistics regarding the signifier in language (the "'audible image' of a sign"), which Lacanian theories separate from the mental concepts the signifier inspires. Lacan's essay on the "Mirror Stage" is referenced more particularly to point to the "imaginary identifications and gestures of communication" which arise from mistaking other subjects as our "selves" (24).
Her individual chapters trace these structural and psychoanalytical theories in the frame narratives and tales of Fragment I, as well as in the marriage group and the religious stories of the Canterbury Tales. Her analyses therefore also consider how desire might be linked to gender and sexuality, as well as to religion. She moreover frames her argument by considering other voices in Chaucer studies (including debates by New Critics and Historicists) and, more specifically, the questions these schools of thought leave unanswered about language, selfhood, and expressions...