Arguably the single most influential literary work of the
European Middle Ages, the "Roman de la Rose" of Guillaume de Lorris
and Jean de Meun has traditionally posed a number of difficulties
to modern critics, who have viewed its many interruptions and
philosophical discussions as signs of a lack of formal organization
and a characteristically medieval predilection for encyclopedic
summation. In "Fortune's Faces," Daniel Heller-Roazen calls into
question these assessments, offering a new and compelling
interpretation of the romance as a carefully constructed and
far-reaching exploration of the place of fortune, chance, and
contingency in literary writing.
Situating the "Romance of the Rose" at the intersection of
medieval literature and philosophy, Heller-Roazen shows how the
thirteenth-century work invokes and radicalizes two classical and
medieval traditions of reflection on language and contingency: that
of the Provencal, French, and Italian love poets, who sought to
compose their "verses of pure nothing"in a language Dante defined
as "without grammar," and that of Aristotle's discussion of "future
contingents" as it was received and refined in the logic, physics,
theology, and epistemology of Boethius, Abelard, Albert the Great,
and Thomas Aquinas.Through a close analysis of the poetic text and
a detailed reconstruction of the logical and metaphysical concept
of contingency, "Fortune's Faces" charts the transformations that
literary structures (such as subjectivity, autobiography,
prosopopoeia, allegory, and self-reference) undergo in a work that
defines itself as radically contingent. Considered in its full
poetic and philosophical dimensions, the "Romance of the Rose" thus
acquires an altogether new significance in the history of
literature: it appears as a work that incessantly explores its own
capacity to be other than it is.
General
| Imprint: |
Johns Hopkins University Press
|
| Country of origin: |
United States |
| Series: |
Parallax: Re-visions of Culture and Society |
| Release date: |
December 2003 |
| First published: |
2003 |
| Authors: |
Daniel Heller-Roazen
(Professor of Comparative Literature)
|
| Dimensions: |
229 x 152 x 19mm (L x W x T) |
| Format: |
Hardcover
|
| Pages: |
224 |
| ISBN-13: |
978-0-8018-7191-7 |
| Categories: |
Books
Promotions
|
| LSN: |
0-8018-7191-3 |
| Barcode: |
9780801871917 |
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