Viva Modern Critical Interpretations The Pardoner’s Tale

The Associationof castration, blindness, and death, so crucial in Freud, is already a given in Chaucer, just as the strangely authentic power of the Pardoner’s sermon, which transcends his overt tricksterism, testifies to the weird prolepsis of Dostoevsky in the Canterbury Tales. A Professional hypocrite who yet can invoke the terror of eternity, truly despite himself, the Pardoner is the most powerful representation of depravity we can find in English before the creation of Shakespeare’s Iago and Edmund. VIVA MODERN CRITICAL INTERPRETATIONS presents the best current criticism on the most widely read and studied poems, novels and dramas of the Western world, from Oedipus Rex and the Iliad to such modern and contemporary works as William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Don Delillo’s White Noise.