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

Studying Chaucer’s poem Troilus and Criseyde helps us evaluate current theories of trauma, especially the very different accounts of it provided by Ruth Leys and Cathy Caruth. The poem renders trauma a feature of both linguistic acts and personal pain. Besides citing it in suffering individuals, Chaucer’s text points to a complicated and ambivalent circulation of such wounds both in culture and for it.