On Parodied Desires: An Intertexual Study of The Miller’s Tale

Abstract

In The Miller’s tale, Chaucer parodied the Arcite’s transcendental laughter in Teseide, the Moses’ peep at God’s back-part in Bible and its exegesis proposed by Augustine. With fabliaux mode of writing, the tale is assimilating, pastiching, and even criticizing its pre-texts in the network of dialogues between them. Meanwhile，the intertexuality ferrets out the tale’s special signified meaning that shunts the real reference into another moment or another level forming a endless process to seek for the signified and the signifier. The thesis aims at analyzing, in the Miller’s tale, how the laughter writes the desire to transcend earthliness, how the confusion of orifices makes the desire to peep prominent and how the narration of body undermines human knowledge.