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| Title: | The Satanic Self in Chaucer, Milton, and Beckett |
| Authors: | Burnett, Jacob |
| Advisors: | R. V. Young, Committee Chair
Charlotte Gross, Committee Member
M. Thomas Hester, Committee Member |
| Keywords: | Canterbury Tales
God
Paradise Lost
Michel Foucault
Satan
Parson's Tale
The Unnamable
Pardoner's Tale
confession
linguistically constructed self
Anthony Low
fall of man
meaning
St. Augustine
Thomas Aquinas
significance
identity
medieval
renaissance
modernism
postmodernism
Samuel Beckett
Geoffrey Chaucer
John Milton
subjectivity
self |
| Issue Date: | 11-Apr-2007 |
| Degree: | MA |
| Discipline: | English |
| Abstract: | The Satanic self is the autonomous, linguistically constructed subject who cannot support itself but who rebels against any external support. According to Foucault, the autonomous subject should be reconsidered as a function of discourse. This anxiety over the autonomous and autonymous subject is not new, but has antecedents far back in literary history. Chaucer's The Pardoner's Tale, The Parson's Tale, Milton's Paradise Lost, and Beckett's The Unnamable recapitulate the historical progress of the development and decline of the self-authoring subject, a progress of dislocation of significance from—in order—objects, language, and finally the subject itself. The first two writers show how to avert what Anthony Low calls the "disastrous fall into nihilistic subjectivity," while the third can present no such redemption. The withdrawl of meaning through profane kenosis is inextricably linked to the long, slow disappearance of God from Western European cultural consciousness. The rejection of God is the rejection of the traditional grounds of Western subjectivity. |
| URI: | http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/resolver/1840.16/2495 |
| Appears in Collections: | Theses
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