ABSTRACT
Carolyn Dinshaw's scholarly training incorporated both the New Criticism of the likes of Robert Burlin and exegetical historicism still prevalent at Princeton, where Dinshaw did her doctorate. Dinshaw's early interest in feminist criticism provided the starting point for her first, and perhaps most important, re-envisioning of Chaucer's audience. Her understanding of all reading, and all readers, as fundamentally gendered leads her to perform an analysis of the way in which Chaucer presents the gendered nature of reading, and questions or challenges the models he has received from the hermeneutic tradition. As Dinshaw shows in her discussion of medieval hermeneutic theories in Sexual Poetics, metaphors for the reading process are almost always eroticized. She clearly differentiates Chaucer's medieval audience from his modern audience, and an awareness of this historical distance informs her criticism. In her work, Dinshaw clearly wants to turn the past to political purposes of present, in a way that could be seen as appropriative or exploitative.
