Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer's Fecopoetics

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Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer's Fecopoetics (The New Middle Ages)

By Susan Signe Morrison

This interdisciplinary book integrates the historical practices regarding material excrement and its symbolic representation, with special focus on fecopoetics and Chaucer’s literary agenda. Filth in all its manifestations—material (including privies, dung on fields, and as alchemical ingredient), symbolic (sin, misogynist slander, and theological wrestling with the problem of filth in sacred contexts) and linguistic (a semantic range including dirt and dung)—helps us to see how excrement is vital to understanding the Middle Ages. Applying fecal theories to late medieval culture, Morrison concludes by proposing Waste Studies as a new field of ethical and moral criticism for literary scholars.

Chuck Palahniuk - Pygmy

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Pygmy

By Chuck Palahniuk

"What will he think of next?" asked the flabbergasted critic from the New York Times Book Review. Indeed, while several reviewers praised the novel as a darkly humorous commentary on American society, most agreed it contained serious flaws. Palahniuk's tenth novel seems designed to flummox readers with its extreme profanity, graphic sexual violence involving minors, and portrayal of adults as either brainless buffoons or shameless perverts. Critics were also split on the author's repeated use of an undefined syntax, reminiscent of pidgin English, throughout. What readers, after all, will have the patience to read sentences like, "Revered soon dying mother, distribute you ammunitions correct for Croatia-made forty-five-caliber, long-piston-stroke APS assault rifle"? Overall, critics acknowledged that diehard Palahniuk fans might savor Pygmy but that most folks would find it too stomach-turning.