Chaucer's Haunted Aesthetics: Mimesis and Trauma in 'Troilus and Criseyde'

Trauma theory has been and continues to be important to critical work in every period of literary study. This essay argues that the subtle literary strategies of one fourteenth-century poem can help to address a blockage about representation current in that theory. Geoffrey Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde" meditates upon trauma by rendering visible the formal properties of its representation. In this article, the author argues that Chaucer's poetics--his use of trope, ambiguity, and voicing--direct to the "mobility" of trauma in culture, an issue crucial to the complex politics of traumatic witness. (Contains 32 notes.)