Like Two Autistic Moonbeams Piercing the Windows of My Asylum: Chaucer's Griselda and Lars von Trier's Bess McNeill

Through a comparative analysis of Chaucer's "The Clerk's Tale" and Lars von Trier's film "Breaking the Waves," this essay wonders what happens when two texts and one reader happen to each other and open up a singular adventure that is also a moment of ‘futurition’ that opens up new horizons of meaning, both human and inhuman. How can we reckon the weird realism of fictional figures which possess something like the vibrant ‘thing-power’ – a sort of quasi-force to persist in existing – that Jane Bennett argues ‘refuses to dissolve completely into the milieu of human knowledge’