Browsing by Subject "Medieval literature"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4

Hacia Cervantes : confluence of the “Byzantine” and the chivalric literary traditions in the Quijote
(2011-05) Meierhoffer, Lynn Vaulx; Zimic, Stanislav; Litvak, Lily; Lindstrom, Naomi E.; Harney, Michael D.; Biow, Douglas G.
Miguel de Cervantes’s novel El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha Part One (1605) and Part Two (1615) has delighted readers for centuries. The literary criticism analyzing just this one product of Cervantes’s literary genius is voluminous. In particular, the novel’s structure has received significant scrutiny, and discussions regarding its unity, or lack thereof, abound. This debate rages today with Cervantine experts still espousing various theories. Puzzling over this quandary and asking why a truly convincing explanation regarding the structure has not emerged, we arrive at a partial answer. We believe that there is unity in the Quijote and that Cervantes created a unified work by ingeniously taking full advantage of the elements of both the “Byzantine” and the chivalric literary traditions, combining them in a harmonizing synthesis. Moreover, he resolved the problem of unity within variety by establishing thematic consistency throughout. The purpose of our study is to explore the confluence of the “Byzantine” and chivalric literary traditions in works that precede Cervantes and to examine how Cervantes innovatively worked with this element in the Quijote of 1605. We present a panoramic view of works written between the thirteenth and the mid-sixteenth centuries, which reveal writers’ efforts to combine, consciously or unconsciously, the various characteristics of the “Byzantine” and chivalric literary traditions. For this project, we look at six representative works written in Spanish or Italian that represent significant antecedents to the Quijote and Cervantes’s unique method of synthesizing the traditions: Libro de Apolonio, Libro del caballero Zifar, Orlando innamorato, Orlando furioso, Palmerín de Olivia, Los amores de Clareo y Florisea y los trabajos de la sin ventura Isea. We investigate each author’s approach at coupling the two traditions and determine his/her degree of success in merging them artistically to produce a coherent whole. Our analysis reveals that not only does Cervantes systematically integrate the two literary traditions in his parody, but he also skillfully devises a way to unify thematically the delightful variety in his work. To wit, Cervantes embraces the theme of literature (fiction) and life (reality) and explores the need for distinguishing judiciously between them.
The Rökstone as an educational stone
(1999) Crockett, Michelle Lynn; Weinstock, John M., 1936-
To cut the past : queer touch, medieval materiality, and the craft of wonder
(2016-05) Jewell, Brianna Carolyn; Lesser, Wayne; Cvetkovich, Ann, 1957-; Birkholz, Daniel; Johnson, Michael
This dissertation emerges from a multivocal conversation in queer, affect, and medievalist scholarship, which privileges encounters with fragmentary details to create and describe connections between bodies separated in time and space. From Carolyn Dinshaw’s metaphorics of touch and “partial connection” across time to Roland Barthes’s punctum that joins disparate bodies, scholars invoke and rely on the fragmentary to describe and generate affective connections. This project makes that shared understanding explicit, literal, and literary – and also gives it a deeper history – by showing how medieval poets crafted and emphasized fragmentary tropes to enable connections that might not otherwise exist. Each chapter reads a medieval literary object – the bodily cut; stained glass; and, the grafted tree – as a fragmentary trope through which mutually exclusive entities (the dead and the living, the past and the present, and the earthly and the celestial) can be imagined as coming together and coexisting. Through graphic and sustained descriptions of the body and bodily sensations, both medieval and contemporary authors betray an interest in the visceral qualities of their fragmentary tropes, and rely on that viscerality to describe various forms of partial connection. _To Cut the Past_ works to show that wonder, and specifically the openendedness and multiplicity that wonder generates, is the primary affect in establishing affective relationships between metaphysically disconnected entities. Encounters with the fragmentary objects I read create wonder, and that wonder in turn creates a portal or touchstone that allows access to perhaps otherwise unreachable worlds and things. The medieval texts I read show the process by which wonder connects. Ultimately, as I outline, this insight can be extended to pedagogy. By accepting an invitation from contemporary scholarship and medieval poets, we may encourage students to become alive to the fragments that stick out to them (the textual details to which they connect viscerally) in medieval and postmedieval texts, and to use those fragments as points of access to initiate their readings. This reading orientation works not only to make medieval literature relevant and interesting to students, and to offer a new way of understanding themselves and what matters to them; it also provides historically-enriched insight into the medieval past.
Unknowing the Middle Ages : how Middle English poetics rewrote literary history
(2014-08) Taylor, Christopher Eric; Heng, Geraldine; Birkholz, Daniel, 1967-
The concept of the unknown captivated medieval theologians, mystics, lovers, and travelers for centuries, and yet literary scholars too readily reduce this topos to a romance trope. "Unknowing the Middle Ages" reconsiders the grounds of late-medieval literary discourse by showing how canonical Middle English literary texts eschew the historical knowledges that informed them and, instead, affirm impossibility as a productive site for a literary poetics. My dissertation identifies what I call a "poetics of unknowing" as an important component of a budding late-medieval literary discourse that offers a way to discuss not only what can be known, but also that which exceeds exegetical, geographic, historical, and sensory comprehension. "Unknowing the Middle Ages" makes its argument through four chapters, each of which focuses on a narrative tradition extending at least five hundred years. Each chapter follows a figure---Herod the Great, Prester John, the Pearl, and Criseyde---from the texts that established their axiological significance to their appearances in Middle English texts, which attempt to unknow these figures. In their Middle English narratives these figures negotiate between an inherited religious ethics and an intellectual context compelled increasingly by that which eludes comprehension. In each case, material concerns regarding the unknowable infiltrate the formal composition of the text itself, and resonate at the level of a literary ethics. The "poetics of unknowing" that inhabit these texts reveal an epistemology less encumbered by the practical demands of clarity to which other modes of medieval writing are beholden, and also---perhaps of interest to scholars of modern literature and contemporary theory---refute the critical tendency to view the epistemological valorization of the unknown as a distinctly modern phenomenon.