Spectacular Fictions: The Body Politic in Chaucer and Dunbar

Abstract

Students of rhetoric have often described metaphor as a displacement, a veiling, of the proper name; hence, as the loss of an original presence.1 Similarly, psychoanalytic theorists have considered parapraxis or the tropes of hysteria as traces, veiling yet disclosing the workings of repression and the primary processes of the unconscious. In Lacanian theory, the individual's separation from these primary processes is essential to the very production of the subject: through repression the subject acquires a position in the order in language, in the symbolic relations of family and state.2 The subject becomes an author, a producer of sentences;