title: [The presence of the corpse and semiotic effectiveness in Geoffrey Chaucer and Caïn in Mctatio Abel].
abstract: This article grapples with the question of the corpse through two particular literary texts. Rather than an elucidation of the physiological principle of the human body by means of dissection, the play Mactatio Abel, written in England in the 15th century, stages the difficulty of the relation to the corpse, via an amplification of the biblical narrative of Abel's murder by Cain. As for Chaucer's work, The Book of the Duchess, it rewrites Ovid's and Machaut's texts featuring the figure of Morpheus in a way that distinguishes between an imitation of the living and its simulacrum in the sense Wolfgang Iser gives this concept. Chaucer's Morpheus, instead of promoting verisimilitude, forbids it. Indeed, he animates a corpse from within instead of simulating an apparition of the deceased. The simulacrum, rather than a mimetic copy of the real, blocks all representational illusion, in order to formulate absence. The readability of the corpse in both works is relational. Both literary texts express the corpse as being always already grounded in a relational and narratorial space.
authors: Département de langue et littérature anglaises, Faculté des Lettres, Université de Genève, 5, rue De-Candolle, CH-1211 Genève 4. guillemette.bolens@unige.ch
authors: Guillemette
authors: G
authors: Bolens
mesh_terms: D001633:Bible; D002102:Cadaver; D004739:England; D049668:History, 15th Century; D049690:History, Ancient; D006708:Homicide / Q000266:history*; D006801:Humans; D008037:Linguistics / Q000266:history*; D008093:Literature, Modern; D008513:Medicine in Literature; D011037:Poetry as Topic / Q000266:history*; D012068:Religion and Medicine