The Medieval Studies Program at Cornell and the Medieval Studies Graduate Association welcome you to a lecture:

Micah Goodrich, Boston University

"Reading the Pardoner Like Trans Readers"

Abstract:

What happens when we, as literary scholars, approach Chaucer’s Pardoner – his description, prologue, and tale – from a trans perspective? As many scholars have suggested, the Pardoner’s gendered and sexual ambiguity is part of reading him. I propose that instead of reading the Pardoner as trans, I want to show how we can read the Pardoner “like trans readers” – in other words, against a cisnormative interpretative reading practice. I will turn to the long history of criticism on the Pardoner, which has focused on the figure’s fragmentation and dismemberment. By asking how a hermeneutics of mutilation accommodates a suspicious cisgender gaze, I show how fragmentary logics limit how we can read the Pardoner. I propose a relationship between trans embodiment and the hole. The Pardoner himself draws our attention to various holes – his purse, his mitten, his crystal stones – to divert the suspicious reader from reading his own body. I show how the Pardoner’s own interpretative mode betrays fragmentation, by asking the reader of a text – and a body – to disengage from both surface interpretation and the unveiling act of close reading.

Bio: 

Micah Goodrich is Assistant Professor of English with affiliations in the Global Medieval Studies Program and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Boston University. He is currently working on his first monograph, Mercurial Forms: Trans Hermeneutics and Chaucerian Bodytexts, which traces a literary history of bodily and textual mutability in the work of Geoffrey Chaucer.

At this lecture, the 24/25 winner of the Tom Hill Award in graduate student writing will be announced!