AGONIZING GRISELDA: THE STATUS OF THE HUMAN IN THE CLERK’S TALE
Details
WHERE:
The Graduate Center, CUNY
365 Fifth Avenue
ROOM:
4406: English Student Lounge
WHEN:
November 20, 2015: 4:00 PM
ADMISSION:
Free
Description
A talk by Holly Crocker, University of South Carolina
Griselda has always challenged the status of the human, even though critics have long sought to elucidate prized human characteristics through her behavior as wife, mother, and political subject. Despite these efforts, our moral investments in Griselda-quite literally, the ways we have sought to associate her with a host of social and moral prescriptions concerning personhood, femininity, maternity, and sovereignty-are confounded by her unyielding submission. Griselda is unfeeling, but she gains a horrible autonomy that critiques patriarchal tyranny. Griselda affirms women’s material investment in the household, but to do so she sacrifices all ethical bonds outside those mandated by her pre-marital pact with Walter. Griselda is transcendent, but she is alienated from a mortalist finitude that affirms a common humanity. By revisiting a few of these aspects of The Clerk’s Tale, and by attending to the ways they make critics uncomfortable, I suggest Griselda’s narrative is a site for thinking about the potential for what, following Bonnie Honig, we might call an “agonistic” model of the human. I suggest Griselda neither upholds nor violates our expected norms for the human. As a consequence, she is a more disquieting figure, both in terms of ethics and politics, than those who sit on either side of the non/human divide.
Co-sponsored by PhD Program in English and Medieval Studies Certificate Program