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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies > Classical, early & medieval
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Courtly Contradictions - The Emergence of the Literary Object in the Twelfth Century (Hardcover)
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Courtly Contradictions - The Emergence of the Literary Object in the Twelfth Century (Hardcover)
Series: Figurae: Reading Medieval Culture
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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Where does courtly literature come from? What is the meaning of
"courtly love"? What is the relation between religious and secular
culture in the Middle Ages, and why does it matter? This book
addresses these questions, as its title indicates, by way of
contradiction. Contradiction is central both to medieval logic and
to most modern protocols of reading; it therefore informs both the
production and the reception of medieval texts. Yet contradiction
itself is rarely analyzed, serving more often as a spur to
interpretation than as its object.
This book works between the complex philosophical culture of the
twelfth century (principally the traditions of Aristotle and of
philosophical Neoplatonism, which diverge significantly in their
treatment of contradiction) and the no less complex thought of
Lacan (which is just as bound up with contradictoriness). Situating
twelfth-century Anglo-Norman, French, and Occitan literature within
this philosophical embrace, the author studies the interaction of
three major literary genres--hagiography, troubadour lyric, and
romance--an interaction that, in the course of the century,
generates what we now call "courtly literature."
She shows how preferences for different ways of dealing with
contradiction migrate from one genre to another during the twelfth
century. She also shows how this movement resulted, by about 1170,
in different traditions converging to produce the complex artifacts
that canonized literary "courtliness," not only for the Middle Ages
but for us as well. Coinciding with this convergence, there is a
shift in the locus of contradiction from subject to object. This
crucial development not only privileges the object "within" texts,
it also cements the value of texts themselves as object.
In a series of comparisons between religious and courtly texts that
draws on the writings of Lacan and Kristeva, the author explores
how these objects can be variously described in terms of the
psychoanalytical concepts of abjection, sublimation, or perversion.
The book concludes by suggesting that the historical importance of
courtly literature lies in its capacity to mediate, through the
centrality accorded to the contradictory object, this transfer from
medieval to modern structures of thought and thereby to shape
modern forms of enjoyment.
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