Glenn Burger

Since I expected it to make some kind of connection with Queer Nation, the title could be more descriptive (but contents do show the distinction between a merely 'gay' reading and a queer reading, that is, the recuperative model versus the discover of the contingency and construction of the normal). It's mostly about marriage as a privileged site for the 'gentil' imaginary in late 14th c. England, especially Southern England. It's to be praised for its care in reading the communal self-conceptions/creations in the CT in/as their present moment (that is, not as simply reflected past, stolid medieval valuesor with Chaucer as the first modern, nor even an an anticipation or groundwork for the Lancastrian national imaginary of the 1420s); nowhere does the CT, in Burger's reading, know what's coming next. That's great, and, for what it's worth, I don't think I've seen that done before.

BUT, at times it sets up the target of a medieval past (notably with his dismissal of the Knight's Tale) that is as stolid as any 'traditional' scholarship. It would have been better to emphasize more about how the CT pasts the past (which is, after all, just as confused and contingent a place as any moment), rather than just to assume that the CT was jettisoning something holding it back from its fresh! new! self-authenticating! communal forms! Moreover, the book's strata are jarring: large chunks come from articles published as early as 1992, mostly clustered in late 90s, so some portions full of Deleuze and Guattari, and some portions have none at all.… (mais)