| For the most part, medieval criticism is dominated by a generalized Hegelianism that seeks to recuperate the complexities and excesses of medieval literature into an epistemological relation of sameness by foreclosing the realm of alterity. The issues explored in this thesis revolve around the question of ethics as a resistant force against the epistemological and ontological totalities of the Aufhebung---Hegel's stated conditions of relation by which antagonistic elements are brought to a state of recuperation through sublation, or negation qua uplifting. What is at stake in this project is to maintain alterity as it emerges not only within medieval texts, but within critical theory, and between the theory and the texts under investigation. Medieval literature provides an interesting subject by which to make such investigations, since the relationship of the (pre-Hegelian) Middle Ages to modernity is a complicated one, despite the fact that medieval alterity is already appropriated into certain epistemological (Hegelian) structures of modernity. Each of the medieval texts under consideration here contains within its narrative an irreducible element that resists masterful reading and closure. Chapter One examines the Gawain-poet's Pearl through Emmanuel Levinas' famous dictum, "ethics before and beyond ontology"; Chapter Two evaluates Fragment A of the Canterbury Tales through Georges Bataille's notion of general economy; and Chapter Three looks at the 14th century Middle English The Land of Cokaygne by re-evaluating Hegelianism against knowledge as prompted through the work of Slavoj Zizek. |
