Showing papers in "The Romanic Review in 1995"

Unspeakable Pleasures: Alain De Lille, Sexual Regulation and the Priesthood of Genius

Abstract: 1. The Long Shadow of Medieval Sexuality(1) With the appearance of Alain de Lille's De planctu Naturae sometime between 1160 and 1180, the figure Genius became a priest.(2) Originally a Roman tutelary god, he had already been elevated to an important cosmic functionary in Bernardus Silvestris's Cosmographia, where his office was the originary "union of form and matter."(3) But Bernardus also used the term at the end of the work to describe the testicles, the "twin brother's" in charge of propagation.(4) As Winthrop Wetherbee remarks in his still indispensable Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century, the sacramental role Alain assigns Genius conflates these disparate significances, and confirms the completeness of man's intellectual, moral, and sexual participation in cosmic life."(5) One measure of the power of this synthesis can be found in its considerable posterity. Genius plays a similar priestly role in two of the later Middle Ages' most influential vernacular poems, the Roman de la Rose, and the Confessio Amantis of John Gower. Moreover, this tradition provided an important staging point for the modern notion of genius: that secular deification of intellectual creativity, which, as Christine Battersby has shown, retains strong conceptual links to "male procreativity."(6) Perhaps the death of the author will mean the death of genius. If so, however, this will no doubt be a death like Nietzsche's death of God: its shadow will linger for a long time to come.(7) Modernity's debt to the medieval figure may have been obscured in part because the coherence of the medieval tradition itself has proved elusive. For many scholars the problem has been the disjunction between the figure's moral significance and its rhetorical variability. The conclusion to De planctu presents Genius as the voice of orthodoxy, while his sermon advocating procreation in the Roman de la Rose is clearly parodic. Gower's Genius is less clerical than Alain's, but nevertheless clearly a moralizer. It is possible to argue that the figure conveys orthodoxy from start to finish.(8) However, that requires reading him entirely straight in the De planctu and the Confessio, and as a simple burlesque in the Roman-that is, insisting on the figure's ideological coherence to the complete exclusion of its rhetorical specificity. (Is the figure didactic or ironic? How could it have started as one, became the other, and then just as indiscriminately changed back?) In this essay I will take a different tack. Using Wetherbee's discussion as my point of departure, I will suggest that sexuality rather than orthodoxy underlies Genius's specificity as a rhetorical figure. Taken in its most obvious sense, this suggestion should be unexceptionable. It amounts to little more than a summary statement of some very basic plot details. In each of the three works, Genius's pastoral functions involve mainly encouraging or forbidding various types of erotic behavior, and in each case he carries out this function by employing discursive practices of the church: excommunication, preaching, or confession. Of course, each of these practices are distinct, as are both the taboos with which Genius is concerned, and the stance he takes toward them. In De planctu, he is the excommunicator of homoeroticism, in the Roman de la Rose, the advocate of adultery, and in the Confessio Amantis, the analyst of incest. Nevertheless, in all of these texts Genius marks a series of moments where a single, specific practice of a single, if central, institution confronts a broad area of sexual behavior. These confrontations accomplish two things. First, they point quite emphatically to the dependence of these taboos on artificially constructed regulatory structures that are historically variable in the extreme, although obviously the taboos have a durability beyond their particular instantiations in these texts. Second, the very textuality of these metaphorical confrontations between taboo and institutional form suggest that sexual regulation is itself characteristically discursive. …

Critical Editions, Hypertexts, and Genetic Criticism

Abstract: During the past two decades or so, a stereotype has arisen--among some of the writers on textual matters--in which an Anglo-American approach, characterized by the production of a single "critical" text for each work, is contrasted with a continental approach that emphasizes the multiple stages in the textual evolution of works.(1) The former is supposedly associated with a focus on authors' final intentions, the latter with a concentration on textual instability and the totality of textual variation. Like many stereotypes, this one greatly oversimplifies a complex set of issues and, indeed, offers an obstacle to dear thinking on the subject. Although it is not true, I believe, that scholarly editors in the English-speaking world have neglected genetic approaches to texts, many literary critics have undoubtedly paid insufficient attention to textual variants; and a movement like critique genetique, emphasizing the critical significance of textual development, is therefore particularly welcome. My concern here, however, is not to define national trends but to examine the inseparability of the two allegedly conflicting editorial emphases--the one that results in critical reconstructions of intended texts and the other that produces literal transcriptions of documentary texts. A bit of history may be in order first, since it can also serve to introduce the basic issues. One can regard the key event in the formation of the stereotypical view of the Anglo-American presentation of texts to be the establishment by the Modern Language Association of America in 1963 of the Center for Editions of American Authors (CEAA). Because Fredson Bowers had championed the approach set forth in W. W. Greg's 1949 address "The Rationale of Copy-Text" (which was aimed at establishing authorially intended texts of Renaissance English plays) and had effectively argued its appropriateness for all post-medieval literature, that approach was incorporated into the CEAA's guidelines. Thus it came to be that a point of view emerging from an English tradition for editing Shakespeare and his contemporaries was given institutional sanction in the United States for a concerted effort to edit writings by nineteenth-century American authors. Whatever the strengths and weaknesses of the CEAA's position were (and by now they have been thoroughly discussed), it seems clear that the CEAA's very existence and the editorial principles it promulgated combined to play a dominant role in fostering the myth of a monolithic Anglo-American insistence on a single editorial procedure and goal.(2) This notion was a myth because, in the first place, the CEAA position aroused considerable controversy among British and American scholars from the beginning, and even those who supported it recognized that it was not the only responsible way to produce a scholarly text.(3) Furthermore, the CEAA dealt primarily with published texts; but many texts of unpublished writings, such as drafts, journals, and letters, were simultaneously being made available in detailed transcriptions, often in "genetic" (or inclusive) form with cancellations, insertions, and other revisions displayed within the main texts. (For reasons that will become clear, I prefer the term "inclusive" for a text that incorporates the apparatus of variants(4) into the body of the text.) Indeed, the post-World War II movement to edit American authors bore its first significant fruit in the form of transcriptions of manuscripts. In 1955 Fredson Bowers published (in Whitman's Manuscripts) transcriptions of the final manuscript drafts of the new poems in the third edition (1860) of Leaves of Grass, with the manuscript alterations recorded in footnotes. Then in 1960 both an edition of Melville's letters (edited by Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman) and the first volume of Emerson's journals (edited by Gilman and others) appeared, and in 1962 came Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor (edited by Harrison Hayford and Merton M. …

Cities of the Plain: The Rhetoric of Sodomy in Peter Damian's "Book of Gomorrah."

Abstract: Sodomy is named for a city(1) Reversing the familiar scenario where the body supplies a set of metaphors for the body social, "sodomy" and its cognates invoke a civic community to represent a set of bodily acts(2) The logic of the etymology, of course, is that the men of Sodom as described in Genesis 19 were indeed sodomites When viewed from a distance, however, the story of Sodom appears neither to confirm nor to deny this conjecture: instead, the story functions as the point of departure in the process of naming sodomy, whereby both Sodom and Gomorrah, the cities of the plain, become "by-words" for moral and in particular sexual iniquity(3) The fable of Sodom thus reveals more about the genealogy of moral language than about the physical behavior of its citizens As recent discussions of the metaphorical properties of sodomy have shown, there is much to be gained from referring the term back to the communities of discourse in which it has been used(4) "Reclaiming Sodom"(5) from sodomy affords not only a different view of the bodies and pleasures hitherto stigamatized, but also a reintroduction to the city itself This essay is a preliminary attempt to describe the rhetorical institution of sodomy in the eleventh century, a decisive moment also in the institution, materially and rhetorically, of the city in western Europe Many historians now see the urban revolution of the eleventh-century West as equivalent in scale and importance to that which took place in the ancient Near East over three millennia previously(6) In both cases, what made possible the founding of cities was the mobilization by a ruling elite of an agricultural surplus sufficient to support their needs and expanding ambitions A new degree of social differentiation among this elite was both cause and consequence of the forcible organization of peasant labor -- in particular the sharp definition of a class of religious specialists The priesthood so constituted often found themselves in an ambivalent ethical position, acting as both the guardians and the critics of the new social order It is, perhaps, in the context of such priestly uncertainty over the moral status of the city that we should seek to understand the emergence of a discourse on sodomy in the eleventh century What modern scholars may celebrate as "the urban revival" or the "transformation of the year one thousand",(7) a contemporary cleric was inclined to describe as the resurrection of Sodom, the "rebuilding of the defenses of that were razed by fire"(8) In his view, calling forth the memory of the Sodomites appeared -- deceptively as it turned out -- to offer a timely analysis and solution to social and moral tensions arising among the diversifying elite in an unfamiliar urban landscape Our text is the Book of Gomorrah, a violent condemnation of sodomitical behaviour among the clergy composed in the latter half of 1049 by the Italian ascetic Peter Damian Writing to Pope Leo IX, Damian sought to attract papal attention to this new and urgent danger: In our region a certain abominable and most shameful vice has developed The befouling cancer of sodomy is, in fact, spreading so through the clergy or rather like a savage beast, is raging with such shameless abandon through the flock of Christ that for many of them it would be more salutary to be burdened with service to the world than, under the pretext of religion, to be enslaved so easily under the iron rule of satanic tyranny(9) Much of the treatise is couched in this strongly figurative language Thus Damian depicts the despotism of "Queen Sodom" over her knights, "stripped of the armour of virtue", and her slaves, "defiled in secret and dishonored in public"(10) Near the start of his discussion, however, Damian does enumerate exactly what he means by sodomy and how it is being committed "There appear to be four varieties of this criminal vice", namely masturbation, mutual masturbation, interfemoral intercourse, and anal intercourse …

The Politics of Courtly Love: 'La Prise d'Orange' and the Conversion of the Saracen Queen

Abstract: I. "Women," writes cultural critic Barbara Harlow, "have long been at the center of the conflict between East and West...as phantasmic representations of Western designs on the Orient. The misunderstandings of the woman's place and role in the respective societies have continued through the centuries to scar relations between the different cultures.... Possession of Arab women came to serve as a surrogate for and means to the political and military conquest of the Arab world."(1) Though Harlow's observation comes from a study of the photographic representation of North African women in the age of French colonialism, her words seem oddly appropriate to what might arguably be called a medieval example of literary Orientalism, the Old French epic La Prise d'Orange. Set in a mythical ninth century during the reign of Charlemagne's son King Louis the Pious, this twelfth-century text recounts epic hero Guillaume Fierebrace's conquest of the city; through both trickery and force of arms, he acquires the name by which he is best known to literary history: Guillaume d'Orange. A pivotal part of this adventure, however,is his amorous siege and conquest of the superb queen Orable. Wife of Tiebaud, the Saracen emir across-the-sea and stepmother of Arragon, who holds the prized city of Orange in fief from his father, she abandons husband and faith in order to deliver the city to the Frankish invaders, accepting baptism at their hands-all for the love of the handsome conqueror Guillaume Fierebrace. The prominence of this love plot, together with the comedic elements it entails, have proven something of an embarrassment for critics concerned that they somehow irreparably compromise the poem's epic seriousness and narrative coherence. Like the heroes of epic, Guillaume Fierebrace is a warrior whose personal conquests extend the borders of the Frankish kingdom, coextensive with the hegemony of Christendom itself; like the heroes of romance, on the other hand, he frequently appears ridiculous in the process of wooing and ultimately winning the beautiful, highborn lady with whom he is desperately in love. "[A] mi-chemin entre l'epopee et le roman courtois," write Claude Lachet and Jean-Pierre Tusseau in the introduction to their translation of the text: "position ambigue, de contraste, qui favorise le comique."(2) In contrast, strikingly little attention has been paid the poem's representation of the idealized, feminized Other. This is a curious omission, for Guillaume's quest of Orable is key to his acquisition of Orange, jewel in the crown of Emir Tiebaud's magnificent empire. It is Guillaume's fascination with her reported beauty that leads him to undertake his expedition in the first place; it is through his seduction of this enemy queen that he gains the weapons he needs to wage war against her protector and stepson; finally, it is her conversion to Christianity and her marriage to Guillaume that stamp the seal of legitimacy on the count's military conquest of the Islamic south. Yet the role played by the Saracen queen has interested critics primarily as a motif that allows them to ascertain lines of influence among chansons de geste, as well as between Old French epics and other pre-existing literary and oral traditions. Perhaps this is because, as Maria Rosa Menocal suggests in a polemical article recently appearing in the pages of Romanic Review, modern readers of medieval French literary texts tend to take the representation of non-Christian characters or settings as ornamental: exotic but ultimately irrelevant detail. Interested in questions of form and genre, guided by (often unacknowledged) presuppositions about "a medieval Europe of simple paternity and unambiguous truths and meanings," they rarely take into account the "historical-cultural axis" of these "astonishingly polyvalent and relativistic products of a culture critically more pluralistic and culturally (and ideologically) diverse than our cultural institutions have wished to see in our own `heritage. …

Widowhood, Sexuality, and Gender in Christine De Pizan

Abstract: Christine de Pizan's rich and varied oeuvre, as it appears in the major manuscripts whose compilation she herself supervised, involves a set of multiple subject positions, that are both essential and constitutive ("built in," as it were) with regard to the oeuvre as such.(1) There is, however, first of all, Christine's authorial subject, implicitly guaranteeing the overall coherence of each of her major single-author mss., as well as the conceptual literary entity in which all the mss. are presented, both implicitly and explicitly. Then there are the various subject positions utilized by Christine-author to construct her public persona as a professional writer within the specific historical exigencies required by the context of early fifteenth-century Paris.(2) Christine's strategies of self-representation in this public arena involved, over the course of the first fifteen years of her literary career, an innovative combination of different "institutionalized" identities, configured so as to authorize what she presents as her new female-gendered authorial voice by means of suppressing her "conventional" sexuality as a woman. At the heart of this project of historically contingent auto-mimesis is Christine's radical separation of gender from sexuality.(3) That is, she officially establishes her authority as woman author by distancing herself from any possible sexual identity as historically specific woman. Central to this strategy is Christine's "autobiographical" self-representation as widow, in which she presents herself as a "corrected" Dido who is both a mother and an author.(4) It is this provocative combination of three gendered subject positions -- virtuous widow, caring mother and female author -- that Christine uses to establish her authority within the public discursive space of the early fifteenth-century Parisian literary establishment. In this enterprise of public self-definition, the key negative element is that of the female sexual object of desire, and/or the sexually desiring female subject. For during the decade and a half following her husband's death, the period during which her literary career was definitively established (1390-1405), Christine de Pizan carefully and programatically detached her female-gendered authorial persona from the economy of sexual desire, normally associated with courtly discourse. Thus in the first of her Cent Ballades (ca. 1395-1401) she speaks as a grieving widow, whose first-person subject matter in the collection to follow must necessarily be confined to lamentations, while her impetus to write is presented as originating in the requests of her patrons. This stance functions to distance Christine's subject position as author from the various first-person courtly voices (male as well as female) that she will utilize over the course of the collection. The central ballade (number fifty) carries yet further the detachment of Christine-author from the position of courtly desiring subject: "d'amours je n'ay tourment / joye ne dueil"(5) [I feel no torment, nor joy, nor pain from love]. In the concluding ballade (number one hundred), she speaks as a professional writer successfully completing a commission: "cent balades ay cy escriptes /... si en sont mes promesses quites / a qui m'en pria chierement" [I have written a hundred ballades and I have thus fulfilled my promise to the one who eagerly asked me to do so].(6) In the Mutacion de Fortune (1402-03), she recounts an autobiographical fable in allegorical terms, which presents the central event of her life (affectively, legally, and literarily) as being her husband's death and her subsequent widowhood. The transformation of Christine-protagonist from wife to widow is presented as an Ovidian metamorphosis involving gender change: widowhood transforms her from a woman into a man. Both the specific Ovidian model evoked (Iphis, from Met. IX) and the actual narration of Christine-protagonist's (metaphoric) gender change are carefully de-eroticized. …

Pound, Joyce and Eco: Modernism and the "Ideal Genetic Reader." (Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Umberto Eco)(International Symposium on Genetic Criticism)

Abstract: Wishing to address both Pound and Joyce in this presentation, I realize that I will not have enough space to engage with the broad and ambitious issue of what I would like to call the discovery of "genetic Modernism". I shall limit my demonstration to Joyce, briefly referring to Pound so as to give a sense of an (ideally) much broader context. Joyce and Pound are exemplary figures in that they show how Modernism has forced critics to take the reading act into account, an act which also stresses the progressive and historical mode of any textualization (by which I mean all the procedures which contribute to the production of the text as we read it). Pound uses the textual tradition and its accidents in his Cantos in such a way that his radical departure launches the modernist Odyssey as a textual voyage, presenting the writer as a re-reader and misquoter of a vast array of texts. This gives birth a the modern "textual condition", which takes its point of departure in errors, repetitions, interpolations which foreground not only textuality, but all the material trappings indispensable to the constitution of an archive. Thus, a line which is often repeated in the Iliad and the Odyssey: Diogenes, Laertiade, polumechan' Odusseu (it is Calypso's phrase in Od. V, 203) happens to be used twice (Od. XI, 60 and 92) in the Nekuia episode which Pound translates in what becomes his first Canto--not translating directly from the Greek original, but using a Latin translation from the 16th Century, in a Latinized Odyssey he found by chance in a bouquiniste of the Paris quays. The repetition is often thought to be an interpolation, and does not appear in Berard's translation for instance. However, Andreas Divus keeps it, perhaps because the Greek text he had to work from said: "digonos" (twice-born, double) instead of "diogenes" (issuing from Zeus, therefore noble). He thus translates the first occurrence, spoken by Elpenor, as: Nobilis Laertiade, prudens Ulysse, and the second occurrence, spoken by Tiresias, as: Cur iterum o infelix linquens lumen Solis Venisti, ut videas mortuos . . ."(1) Pound's own rendition of Tiresias's apostrophe becomes: "Man of ill star, why come a second time, / Leaving the sunlight . . . " (Canto I). The literal translation of iterum suddenly suggests that Odysseus has already been to Hell, and moreover that each and every voyage of exploration is merely a repetition. The Freudian idea of a repetition of what never took place then triggers a series of later associations of the poet with various ghosts or shades: when Pound sees Mussolini as Dionysos, the loaded "Diogenes" is punned into "digenes" or "digonos" (twice-born). Recently, Ronald Bush has shown how the famous opening of the Pisan Cantos was originally an afterthought which added a political reference (the death of Mussolini) and went back to the beginning of the Cantos as the draft reprocesses the DIGENES image: DIGENES, but the twice crucified where in history will you find it(2). Pound indeed behaves as a "man of genius" according to Joyce, for his errors are "volitional and are the portals of discovery" (Ulysses, Gabler edition, Penguin, 1986, p. 156). This central point has been developed by Christine Froula's excellent book(3). Having very little to add to this, I shall turn to Joyce's similar type of textual serendipity, using the insights into his creative process afforded by the recently published Paris Journal of Stuart Gilbert. Gilbert notes in January 1931 that Joyce has started working again on Finnegans Wake, making extensive use of five volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica: He has made a list of 30 towns, New York, Vienna, Budapest, and Mrs. [Helen] Fleischmann has read out the articles on some of these. I "finish" Vienna and read Christiana and Bucharest. Whenever I come to a name (of a street, suburb, park, etc. …

Post-Genetic Joyce

Abstract: D.F.: This title should not be understood as a more or less private allusion to an anthology(1) published ten years ago and which played its small part in bridging the gap between French and American criticism, as I hope this conference will do. Of course, no Joycean can resist the pleasure of recondite allusions and jokes for the happy few--but this title has more relevant over-tones. First, it might be taken as a portmanteau word, combining "post-structuralist" and "genetic". This carries a double suggestion: one could say that genetic criticism stands in the same relation to traditional genetic studies as post-structuralism stands in relation to structuralism. It does not reject them but subsumes them, and reinterprets them from a different point of view (which is precisely based on a post-structuralist conception of the text). But one might also consider that this reinterpretation is only a shift of emphasis, that this point of view (including the so-called post-structuralist conception of the text) was already virtually present in those studies; that the power of the Joycean text and avant-texte had already induced a practice of reading that largely anticipated theorisation. For genetic studies are nothing new in the Joycean field. Seventeen years ago Michael Groden published a decisive book called "Ulysses" in Progress which is still the starting point for any genetic study of Ulysses today, and he is going to devote his part of our talk to a reconsideration of a few aspects of this book. But he had several important predecessors: one need only mention the names of A. Walton Litz, Robert Scholes and David Hayman, but we could even say that Stuart Gilbert's pioneering study James Joyce's Ulysses, written with the help of Joyce, is partly genetic, since it makes extensive use of a genetic document (the famous chart) and probably of some of the Notebooks. Joyce's works were so intimidating that one felt from the start that one needed all the help one could get, including whatever clarification of intentions was to be discovered in the available manuscripts. But the manuscripts, far from making things simpler, introduced new levels of complexities, inducing new modes of reading. Beside these two ideas--the relation of genetic criticism (at least Joycean genetic criticism) to a "post-structuralist" conception of the text and the claim that genetic criticism is not identical to itself, entertaining a complex relationship with its own past--our title could convey two more possibilities, which we will be able to take up only briefly today. -- The genetic process is largely retrospective: teleology is not a critical artefact, it is built in the writing process itself in which constant reinterpretations and recontextualisations are at least as important as projections and intentions. -- But this does not mean that the printed text is the terminus ad quem of this process: genetic criticism must take into consideration the apres-texte as well as the avant-texte (the post-text as well as the pre-text), the text being only one possible realization of a matrix that precedes it and in some cases goes on after it. We will be able to present only some illustrations of these ideas. Michael Groden will take his examples from Ulysses, and more specifically the "Cyclops" episode, and then I will take my examples from the transition between Ulysses and Finnegans Wake and from Finnegans Wake. M.G.: "Ulysses" in Progress is representative of a genetic-teleological model of writing. It argued that Joyce wrote Ulysses in three stages--which it labelled as early, middle, and late--with the early stage focussed on the novelistic story of Leopold Bloom, Molly Bloom, and Stephen Dedalus; the middle stage a transitional one in which Joyce turned to parody styles; and the late stage concerned mainly with stylistic elaboration, symbolistic details, and Homeric parallels. I took for granted that a literary work was characterized, even defined, by unity--even if Ulysses itself caused a lot of problems for this assumption. …

Critiques De la Critique Genetique

Abstract: On ne sait trop ce qu'est la critique genetique, mais on s'accorde sur sa date de naissance: petit paradoxe qui en annonce de plus grands. En vertu d'un consensus que le Dictionnaire Historique de la Langue Francaise(2) couvre desormais de son autorite savante, elle peut done feter aujourd'hui son premier quart de siecle. C'est un age canonique pour une recherche--et les etudes de genese vent en effet passees au rang d'un canon. On ne trouve plus guere en France de manuel ou de panorama de la critique dont elles ne fassent l'ouverture ou la conclusion. Wiles ont essaime par-dela l'ocean et fait souche au nord et, plus vigoureusement encore, au sud du continent Americain. Bref, pour la critique genetique le temps semble venu de quitter l'actualite et de prendre place dans le cortege des theories dont on ecrit l'histoire, comme c'est aujourd'hui la mode pour le structuralisme. Or, par un defi imprevu, c'est sur ses vieux jours, Vingt ans apres, qu'elle mobilise la polemique. Deux textes a tonalite de manifeste se vent trouves affrontes au meme moment: Bernard Cerquiglini ecrit en ouverture de son essai Eloge de la variante: L'ampleur du mouvement ne laisse pas d'impressionner. Ainsi, la critique genetique arrive, telle une maree furieuse et desiree, apres quelques annees d'eaux basses ou, pour un peu, on serait retourne a l'histoire litteraire(3). alors que dans la presentation du premier numero de mesure on lit sous la plume de Michel Crouzet: Les barricades ont about) a la "scientificite" et celle-ci au croisement assez monstrueux de la "deconstruction" [. . .] et du positivisme a la loupe qui veut, par exemple, saisir dans les manuscrits, l'etude des grains du papier, des virgules, des jambages, des majuscules, le secret de la naissance de l'ecriture(4). Le lecteur sera impressionne par ces cataclysmes de la nature et de la societe, convoques autour d'une recherche ordinairement decriee plutot pour son austerite. Mais la polemique ne frappe pas seulement par une vivacite que l'on croyait disparue de notre epoque. Elle se distingue aussi par une ampleur et une persistence peu communes. Le debat a gagne les revues, les institutions, a retenti jusque sous la Coupole--et les cinq dernieres annees ont ete marquees par l'abondance et, bien souvent, la qualite des publications consacrees a ce qu'il faut bien nommer la nouvelle querelle de la genetique. Une querelle d'ailleurs assez singuliere par le caractere croise des critiques: la recherche se trouve accusee, tour a tour ou simultanement, de modernisme (M. Crouzet) et de passeisme (P. Bourdieu), de destruction (R. Melancon) et de conservation du texte (revue Critique genetique), de rodomontades theoriques (J. Molino) et d'absence de doctrine (G. Falconer)--encore n'ai-je pas tout cite. Sommee de faire tete sur des fronts opposes, elle se trouve de surcroit entrainee a ferrailler sur des terrains qui ne vent pas les siens--philosophie de la litterature ou de l'histoire--et ou le pied risque de lui glisser. Elle ne peut pourtant s'y derober tout a fait. Les accusations qui la prennent en tenaille ont le merite de designer, en les decoupant, les domaines qui appellent une clarification et parfois meme un temoignage direct. Et a reflechir aux objections qu'elle rencontre, la genetique peut gagner a se mieux definir et--pourquoi pas?--a mieux songer aux questions qu'elle se pose a elle-meme. Revolution ou tradition La plus recente et la plus vive des critiques vient d'etre formulee ainsi par Pierre Bourdieu: Par un etrange retour des choses, la critique "creatrice" cherche aujourd'hui une issue a la crise du formalisme profondement antigenetique de la semiologie structuraliste en revenant au positivisme de l'historiographie la plus traditionnelle avec une critique appelee, par un abus de langage, "genetique litteraire" [. …

Modernism, Genetic Texts and Literary Authority in Virginia Woolf's Portraits of the Artist as the Audience

Abstract: Genetic texts not only document the evolution of literary works through the stages of their compositional history but--both by resituating texts within their documentary histories and by enlarging them beyond their formal boundaries--emphasize their interdependence with historical conditions. While every work of art comes into existence and form shaped by historical contingencies and continues to depend upon historical conditions (which it may also influence) for its preservation, dissemination and reception, certain modernist works recast notions of authority to acknowledge rather than obfuscate that interdependence. For example, the genetic text of Ezra Pound's Cantos shows error to be inseparable from intentionality and authority in the interminable wandering of this modernist epic in ways that resonate with features of its final text, challenging both readerly and editorial preconceptions about the nature of its authority.(1) In the course of making this argument about the text of The Cantos, I used Charles Lamb's and Virginia Woolf's opposite responses to a manuscript of Lycidas as paradigmatic stances toward literary authority as such. In A Room of One's Own, the fictionalized yet markedly autobiographical speaker recounts how, while wandering Oxbridge paths earlier trodden by literary and familial forebears from Milton and Lamb to Woolf's father and brother, she remembered an essay in which "Lamb wrote how it shocked him to think it possible that any word in Lycidas could have been different from what it is. To think of Milton changing the words in that poem seemed to him a sort of sacrilege."(2) Woolf was recalling Lamb's impassioned note to his 1820 essay "Oxford in the Vacation" (which he may have written in Cambridge(3)) about how the sight of Milton's revised holograph (and with it the specter of critique genetique) expelled him from the paradise of print to the fallen world of laborious trial-and-error: There is something to me repugnant, at any time, in written hand. The text never seems determinate. Print settles it. I had thought of the Lycidas as of a full-grown beauty--as springing up with all its parts absolute--till, in evil hour, I was shown the original written copy of it, together with the other minor poems of its author, in the Library of Trinity, kept like some treasure to be proud of. I wish they had thrown them in the Cam, or sent them, after the latter cantos of Spenser, into the Irish Channel. How it staggered me to see the fine things in their ore! interlined, corrected! as if their words were mortal, alterable, displaceable at pleasure! as if they might have been otherwise, and just as good! as if inspirations were made up of parts, and those fluctuating, successive, indifferent! I will never go into the work-shop of any great artist again, nor desire a sight of his picture, till it is fairly off the easel; no, not if Raphael were to be alive again, and painting another Galatea.(4) For Lamb, the poetic authority epitomized by Milton is--or rather, must seem--timeless, inalterable, "absolute." A poem transcends its historical beginnings as print transcends the author's erring hand; "print settles" a text by erasing the fragile traces of its human origins and history. While Lamb is perfectly aware that this transcendent authority is an illusion--that the artist's workshop exists, whether or not readers choose to enter--his rhetoric cultivates that illusion with apotropaic fervor ("as if their words were mortal, alterable, displaceable at pleasure! as if they might have been otherwise, and just as good!"). For Lamb, the printed poem is a timeless prelapsarian Eden wherein critique genetique is as unthinkable as the mortal violation of poetry's sacred borders by the snaky, erring traces of fallible intention preserved in the abhorrent holograph he looked upon "in evil hour. …

Textuality and (Homo-)Sexuality in Turnier's 'Les Meteores.'

Abstract: The relations between homosexuality and textuality have been variously analysed. Critics have found no definitive theories of the undeniably intimate bond between sexuality and signification. The sexual relations involved in textual production and the thematics of sexuality have been studied in tandem by Barthes in S/Z, Le Plaisir du texte and Fragments d'un discours amoureux. Barthes may be said indeed to concentrate implicitly on homosexuality, introducing a scenario of a (gay) pickup into his imagining of reading relations: `[l]e lecteur, il faut que je le cherche, (que je le "drague"), sans savoir ou il est'.(1) Yet the privileged status of the homosexual as possible metatextual signifier merits more detailed examination. In French fictions the gay character is frequently presented as sign to be read; his desire is coded and his (c)overt identity constructed. Equally, in his decoding of reality he appears as hermeneut, mirroring the reader of the text. Tournier creates an intertextual and `archetypal' homosexual character in the insatiable cruiser, aesthete and gay uncle, Alexandre Surin. Tournier comments on Alexandre's excessive encroachment on the text of Les Meteores and confesses: `Je me console de cette excroissance imprevue d'un personnage par deux prestigieux precedents. Balzac et Proust n'avaient certainement pas prevu la place exorbitante que prendraient respectivement Vautrin dans La Comedie humaine et Charlus dans A la recherche du temps perdu'.(2) Reading Balzac and Proust through the deciphering grid of his own fiction, Tournier makes the existence of Alexandre determine his attitude to Charlus and Vautrin. While these two characters differ substantially from Alexandre, the exuberant, erotic and refined refuse-collector, Tournier appropriates them, as well as Rene Meinthe from Modiano's Villa Triste (see VP 251), to form a series of illustrations of the subversive power of a homosexual character within a text. Tournier tries to seduce his reader into the belief that: `Tout romancier doit savoir que s'il lache dans son oeuvre le personnage d'un grand homosexual flamboyant, il devra renoncer a le contenir dans des limites congrues' (VP 251). In Tournier's system the homosexual is pre-determined as a recognized character of excess and artifice, carrying the text beyond the hounds of the novelist's order and structure. Writing about Alexandre in Le Vent Paraclet Tournier shows that his function is envisaged as one of revelation and deconstruction: `Alexandra en devenant mon seul point de vue m'a devoile la societe heterosexuelle. C'est cela sans douse sa nouveaute et ce qui a tent indigne certains critiques' (VP 256). Tournier stresses that he is not at all radical in creating a homosexual character. This has been done by Balzac, Proust, Gide and many others,(3) as Tournier reminds us: `Car il y a beau temps que le roman a mis en scene des personnages d' homosexuels, et si l'homosexuel n'a pas encore droit de cite dans la societe civile, dans la societe romanesque c'est chose faite' (VP 256). Instead, as Tournier has stated in interview, the originality of Alexandre, and implicitly of the writer in creating him, `c'est d'attaquer l'heterosexualite au lieu de defendre l'homosexualite comme Gide dans Corydon'.(4) For Tournier, `[l']audace des Meteores, c'est de nommer l'heterosexualite' (VP 257). The inversion of the relation between heterosexuality and homosexuality is typical of Tournier's attempt not necessarily to privilege one over the other but rather to stress that either sexuality is a set of learned codes of behavior and systems of belief which can be elucidated from the viewpoint of the other.(5) Tournier might be seen to subscribe to Judith Butler's view that `gay is to straight not as copy is to original, but, rather, as copy is to copy'.(6) Tournier chooses Alexandre as, in the words of Colin Davis, `the gay deconstructor of Les Meteores'.(7) We in turn may take Davis's statement further to question whether he means that Alexandre is the deconstructor of Les Meteores (who happens to be gay), whether Alexandre deconstructs from the basis of some gay ideology (due to his own sexuality or not as the case may be), or whether in fact there may not be some more intrinsic, intuitive or perhaps artificial relation between Alexandre's sexuality and his textual practice. …

Not a Love Story: Sexual Aggression, Law and Order in Decameron X 4 *

Abstract: In the fourth novella of the Tenth Day of the Decameron, Boccaccio reworks a tale which had originally formed part of the thirteenth "Question of Love" in his Filocolo (1) This essay focuses on Boccaccio's reformulation of the socio-ethical significance of the act of sexual aggression which, in different ways, is the focal point of both versions of the tale (2) In particular I investigate a crucial aspect of the Decameron revision that has gone unobserved in the scholarship to date: its transformation of a tale of passion into a tale of property; a tale of one man's love for a woman into a tale of his exchange of her with another man so as to impose his order and consolidate his power in the community of men In the context of this transformation I discuss the extensive use of legal discourse in the Decameron revision which serves as the prism through which an illicit act of passion is simultaneously elided and legitimated Let me begin by offering a brief summary of the tale, at least insofar as the two versions of it correspond to one another A beautiful, young lady married to a rich, noble man is loved by a knight She, however, has no interest in requiting the knight's love, and he goes off in despair to a nearby city to serve as podesta, or chief magistrate During his tenure there news reaches him of the lady's death who, it happens, was pregnant at the time In a brief interior monologue the knight resolves to go to the tomb where she is buried and have that kiss that was denied him while she was alive He does just that, but gets carried away and begins to fondle her as well In the process he detects signs of lire and takes her away to his home, where, with the help of his mother she is revived At the knight's request she remains at his home, soon giving birth to a son Immediately thereafter the knight invites the lady's husband and many others to a sumptuous banquet where he gallantly presents the lady and child to her husband This then is the basic plot of the tale, remarkably similar in both versions (3) The differences between them, which are great, involve instead such aspects as characterization, discursive style, ideological content, and the narrative context in which the tale is told As is well known, the episode of the Questions of Love in the Filocolo occupies an important place in the textual prehistory of the Decameron, not only because of the link formed by the two versions of the tale under consideration here, but because the narrative frame--or cornice--of these questions anticipates that of the later work (4) Like the liera brigata in the Decameron, the young men and women in the Filocolo decide to pass the hottest hours of the day in a cool, shady garden, telling each other stories There is however an essential difference between these two settings Whereas the Filocolo episode is inspired by the rhetoricolegal form of the quaestio, each tale being a pretext for the disputatio between one member of the group and the queen, in the Decameron this disputational frame is replaced by a thematic one: except for the first and ninth days, and except for Dioneo who is allowed to recount ad libitum, the tales must address a specific theme--fortune, human ingenuity, tragic and happy loves, etc Thus in the Filocolo the tale serves as pretext for this question posed by the narrator, Messallino: "Per che si dubita quai fosse maggiore, o la lealta del cavaliere o l'allegrezza del marito, che la donna e 'l figliuolo, i quali perduti riputava si come morti, si trovo racquistati, priegovi che quello che di cio giudicherete ne diciate" (IV 67, 23) (5) Within the context of the Questions' overarching theme of love, the two sub-themes of the knight's loyalty and the husband's joy are applied in retrospect to the tale In the Decameron the overarching theme of the day is not love but "those who have performed liberal or munificent deeds, be it in the cause of love or otherwise …

Inintelligibles Pour Une Femme Honnete: Sexuality, Textuality and Knowledge in Diderot's 'La Religieuse' and Gautier's 'Mademoiselle De Maupin.'

Abstract: 1. Smokescreens and Similarities The theme of female homosexuality in French literature has vast historical, ideological, and narratological implications. Some texts which include lesbian plots or sub-plots, such as Diderot's La Religieuse, have indeed been treated with a fine-toothed critical comb in recent decades; others, by contrast, such as Gautier's Mademoiselle de Maupin, have been written about only sporadically, with their lesbian themes often dismissed or ignored.(1) In spite of the abundance of critical writing on lesbian themes in La Religieuse and in direct resistance to the tradition of blindness to them in Mademoiselle de Maupin scholarship(2), I would agree that the fundamental significance of homosexuality as at once the thematic and narratological foundation of both texts has been greatly undervalued. A common critical stumbling-block has been the construction of what I will call "thematic smokescreens" behind which homosexuality may be obscured, if not actually hidden: in other words, the urge to prove, either implicitly or explicitly, that the text is really about some "larger" theme than that of homosexuality. With respect to La Religieuse, these smokescreens have included the themes of incest, of Freud's family romance, and of anti-clericalism; with respect to Mademoiselle de Maupin, those of aestheticism, morality, and especially androgyny. By side-stepping homosexuality or undervaluing its significance to the text, critics have (perhaps unconsciously) reproduced the epistemological paradox that will be the focus of my analysis of the novels themselves--the "unspeakabilty" of homosexuality. I agree with Jean-Pierre Jacques, who characterizes the academic treatment of lesbian themes in literature as being of two kinds: those critics who avoid the subject altogether ("... les pudiques, les effarouches, rougissent de devoir ecrire sur les oeuvres saphiques ...") and those who create the thematic "smokescreens" to which I have referred ("... avec eux, le theme lesbien n'est plus que secondaire ; on le node dans une pro blematique passe-par/out: l'androgynat-tres a la mode ces temps-ci du moins en Sorbonne, et qui n'engage a rien-; le determinisme social; le gout de l'epoque pour les sujets extravagants, etc.").(3) Jacques is one of the very few who have pointed out that homosexuality is a theme of great significance in and of itself, and thus must not be dismissed or obscured by relating it to another theme or problematic in the text. Furthermore, this privileged theme has a significant corollary: as has been pointed out by a number of scholars concerning La Religieuse(4) and which I will attempt to demonstrate with respect to Mademoiselle de Maupin, the theme of homosexuality is inextricably intertwined with that of knowledge. These texts written by men are structured not only by female homosexuality, but also by female knowledge and ignorance of it. The relation between homosexuality, as the ultimate secret, as that of which one must remain ignorant, and knowledge, is thus particularly charged and complex. In order to discuss homosexuality in La Religieuse or Mademoiselle de Maupin, one simply must discuss knowledge and vice-versa, and it is precisely their relation that interests me here. In La Volonte de savoir, the first volume of his now-canonical Histoire de la sexualite, Foucault has described modern discourse with respect to sexuality as foregrounding the essential nature of the link between sexuality and knowledge: "Ce qui est propre aux societes modernes, ce n'est pas qutelles aient voue le sexe a rester dans l'ombre, c'est qu'elles se soient vouees a en parler toujours, en le faisant valoir comme le secret."(5) He goes on to say that it seems to be essential that sex be inscribed "non seulement dans une economic du plaisir, mais dans un regime ordonne de savoir."(6) The novels I will study here may be said to function, albeit in very different ways, as historically and conceptually cogent illustrations of Foucault's statements about the fundamental relation between sexuality, discourse, and knowledge. …

Half-Title or 'Julie' Beheaded

Abstract: "Julie ou": head and frail articulation, separated from their body by a certain kind of critical terror. Imagine a book on Richardson that referred throughout to Virtue Rewarded and The History of a Young Lady without ever mentioning Pamela or Clarissa. This is exactly what has happened in the case of Rousseau's novel. One could read all the way through any number of volumes devoted to it without ever learning--without encountering any suggestion--that its author gave it any other title than La nouvelle Heloise. The old "Classiques Larousse" abridgment, through which generations of French and other students first made contact with the work, nowhere so informs the reader, even though editor J.-E. Morel occasionally refers familiarly to "la Julie" (but also "l'Heloise"). Even the authoritative Pleiade edition(1) mentions no Julie on its title page; the recent Folio edition does, but not on its cover--as if the publisher feared confusing a potential reader (i.e., buyer) with an unrecognizable (i.e., real) title.(2) There is thus some pertinence to this question: how did a novel entitled Julie come to be known exclusively by its subtitle? What is it about Julie ou that so taxes the collective memory? First point of call in this inquiry is naturally the historical record, and in particular the author's own references to his book. It is more than slightly significant that, as J. S. Spink remarked, "the Abelard-Heloise model . . . appeared in the title at the very last moment" (165), for this tells us that, far from being the informing concept that generated the text, it was, if not an afterthought, at least a late comparison--probably the result of reading Colardeau's 1758 translation of Pope's Eloisa to Abelard. Rousseau's first working title, Julie ou lettres de deux amants, habitants d'une petite ville au pied des Alpes indeed "corresponds more closely to the substance of the book" (Spink 165). Rousseau recast that title's first part as Julie ou la moderne Heloise, and only as the typesetting was under way in early 1760 did he change this to Julie ou la nouvelle Heloise.(3) From this point until the publication a year later there was never any doubt that the full title was to be an amalgam of two parts, the first being Julie ou la nouvelle Heloise and the second Lettres de deux amants, habitants d'une petite ville au pied des Alpes. Rousseau was highly specific about the layout of the title page,(4) as he was about the rather curious decision to separate these two titles and place Julie ou la nouvelle Heloise separately on the half-title page (this was probably to avoid too cluttered a title page).(5) In fact, Julie dominates, appearing in significantly larger type than ou la nouvelle Heloise. He nonetheless wanted the running head Lettres de deux amants changed to La nouvelle Heloise, and this was done.(6) This fluctuation or hesitation is further evident in discussion of the long "second" preface often referred to as the Preface dialoguee. When he informs Rey about it, mainly in order to specify that he will not include it in the first Amsterdam edition, he calls it Preface de Julie(7); and while he published it under the name Preface de la Nouvelle Heloise: ou entretien sur les romans, its avertissement begins: "Ce dialogue ou entretien suppose etait d'abord destine a servir de preface aux Lettres de deux amants." It would seem that Rousseau was ambivalent about which appelation to favor. The reason Lettres de deux amants holds equal footing in this contest is that Rousseau generally avoided the term roman, referring frequently in the "second" preface, for example, to ces Lettres and ce Recueil, in order to favor the premise that the letters could be real. This apparent ambiguity of title is, not surprisingly, reflected in references by his contemporaries. Le Mercure's first notice, going by the title page alone, lists it as Lettres de deux amants . . . but the extensive summary given in the following issue instead uses the half-title Julie ou la nouvelle Heloise. …

Flaming Words: Verbal Violence and Gender in Premodern Paris

Abstract: Imagine words such as hate and territory and the like -- unbanished still as they always would be -- wait and are waiting under beautiful speech. To strike. Eavan Boland In a Time of Violence Accuser, blamer, soupconner, maudire, railler, condamner, voila ce qu'il y a au bout George Sand Histoire de ma vie During France's first literary polemic, Christine de Pizan attacked a fictional text for its misogynistic representations with the following claim: the Roman de la rose "would better be engulfed in fire than crowned with the laurel" (mieulx lui affiert ensevelissment de feu que couronne de lorier).(1) Such a claim conjures up a scene of book-burning. It suggests a milieu where an absolutist control of language reigned, where any speech or writing deemed contrary to the norms was not tolerated. With such a statement, Christine appears to advocate a form of censorship commonly associated with the premodern world. Her fierce critique of Jean de Meun's misogynistic Rose seems to lead toward flames. Read referentially, it consigns the book to a bonfire -- the fate of other texts in early fifteenth-century Paris.(2) In a polemical context, this fiery scene reads differently. While Christine's claim may indeed refer to book-burning, it also constitutes an act of language. It entails a particular type of performative language that can be labelled negatively as insult, or worse still, as outright condemnation. Rather than represent the physical act of destroying the Rose, Christine's words enact the severest judgment of it through a figure of speech. In terms of the primordial trope of fire, they are meant to burn.(3) Her polemics perform what we call now flaming.(4) However censorious Christine's language may appear, it did not come unprovoked. The controversy over the Roman de la rose was her response to an existing pattern of figuring women in degrading ways based exclusively on their sexual identity. She initiated this controversy in order to confront what she considered a harmful convention of literary composition. "In what manner could it [the Rose] be valuable and directed toward a good end," Christine charged, "that which accuses and blames women so excessively, impetuously and so untruthfully, which defames them by several enormous vices and finds their behavior full of all manner of perversity?" (En quel maniere puet estre vallable et a bonne fin ce que tant et si excessivement, impettueusement et tres nonveritablement il accuse, blasme et diffame femmes de pluseurs tres grans vices et leurs meurs tesmoingne estre plains de toute perversite, Hicks 16). As I have argued elsewhere, Christine's polemic raised the problem of verbal injury.(5) It focused on the impact of various misogynistic representations in the Rose and identified them as injurious to women's names. Even if such figures could be linked to physical abuse, in Christine's estimation, they do damage because they harm the reputation of women. By levying this charge publicly, Christine's flaming words reacted in kind to a damaging language practice already in existence. The Querelle du roman de la rose locked two instances of inflammatory language in an indefinite struggle where Christine challenged jean de Meun's text and its defenders word for word. The exercise of such aggressive, incendiary language in the Querelle gives us a telling case of speech act theory. For it highlights the use to which words are put.(6) It is the activating potential of language that is exploited by such polemics. However accustomed we are to concentrate on the representational capacities of language -- what words say -- linguistic theories in the wake of J.L. Austin have directed our attention to the importance of its performative ones -- what those same words do. More than a provocation to action, words can be events. They are deeds. To approach language-as-action in this manner is not to argue that a verbal act is absolutely identical and equal to a physical act. …

Senancour's 'Oberman': Experiments in the Ascetic Sublime

Abstract: In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no value exists--and if it did, it would have no value If there is any value that does have value, it must lie outside the whole sphere of what happens and is the case For all that happens and is the case is accidental(1) Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico Philosophicus Senancour (1770-1846) occupies an uncomfortable place in French literary history Little read, seldom taught,(2) he has intimidated audiences by a prose style that combines the intensely private and the intemperately descriptive A consummate adversary of plot, an undaunted detractor of gothic frills, Senancour is one of those writers whose stature has depended a great deal on the acknowledgments of a few towering figures--Proust's famous exclamation "Senancour c'est moi," Sainte-Beuve's and Sand's elegiac prefaces of Oberman-but whose actual reputation is based on hearsay, rather than on first-hand knowledge It is undeniable that Oberman (1804) is a long and difficult work(3), one that also had the bad luck of spearheading with some of the more obviously pivotal Romantic novels (Rene, Adolphe, Delphine) Readers who sought in Oberman the confessions of a lesser-known enfant du siecle hardly knew how to respond to this anachronistic stoic, looking for redemption in a self-styled retreat from the world This essay argues that Senancour's epistolary novel is antithetical to most of his contemporaries' writings about the self It is a series of letters that rethinks aggressively the relationship between landscape and subjectivity, between writing and empathy For a semi-autobiographical work, with its share of melancholic etats-d'ame, Senancour manages to thwart any reading that could fulfil the public's need for solace and identification With the severity of a Pascal and the indifference of a Lautreamont, Senancour's Oberman is one of the staunchest manifestations of what would constitute a poetics of renunciation As with any type of writing that depends on a radical expulsion of the self, while operating from the vantage point of the first-person, it treads exciting new grounds in the history of reader-response Had Senancour known Rene at the time he wrote Oberman, then it would be tempting to say that his aesthetics were a reaction against Chateaubriand's self-absorbed, anthropomorphic prose But it would be more accurate to portray Senancour, this steadfast disciple of Rousseau, as a philosophe manque, who would use the rhetoric of the Reveries to conceptualize a self-absorption of a very different kind Senancour's idiosyncratic readings of Jean-Jacques are rooted in a contradictory impulse: to rewrite a history of consciousness based on neglected, peripheral areas of experience--sleep, daydreaming, tea-drinking--areas that humble, rather than elevate the self Senancour's project was to salvage Nature from the burdensome pathetic fallacies of its viewers He achieves this by using the first-person to erect a private, narcissistic edifice, at the same time that this first-person subtly exposes the vanity of such an approach(4) The brilliant and paradoxical demonstration of Oberman is that the self can only be known once it has grasped its own irrelevance Senancour's journey is one of ascetic self-distancing; its originality is that it begins by drawing the reader in (the way a journal intime would), but makes its message more and more abstract and impersonal Senancour writes about a self that is to be emptied of its purely subjective content, raising questions of artistic autonomy that were disseminated by Kant's Critique of Judgement and that have dominated aesthetic theory until today Oberman is one of those rare literary experiments that demands from the reader a genuine rethinking of what reading is all about Senancour clearly felt that literature was becoming synonymous with hedonism, self-indulgence, and a general desire to epater le bourgeois: [l']avidite des extremes …

Marriage and Investment in El Celoso Extremeno

Abstract: Cervantes's El celoso extremeno, the version of his experiments with the decrepit-husband-takes-young-wife plot that he published as an exemplary tale, or novela ejemplar, is one of the most widely studied narratives of his collection. Rich in its intertextuality with other variations of the same basic story by Cervantes--his theatrical farce, El celoso viejo, the interpolated tale in Don Quijote of El curioso impertinente, and the unpublished Porras manuscript of "El zeloso extremeno"--this edifying short narrative offers a surprising departure from Cervantes's own treatment in these works of the viejo cornudo (elderly cuckold) figure, as well as from a long literary and folkloric tradition. (1) After detailed description of the acquisitive Carrizales's marriage to and enclosure of a young teenager in a fortress-like home, in order to be her sole possessor, the story ends with penetration of that private property by an interloper from the streets beyond, Loaysa, his attempted seduction of Leonora, and the discovery of the two exhausted combatants while they sleep. The master of the house, Carrizales, erroneously concludes that he has been robbed of his most prized possession upon witnessing his child-bride sleeping in the arms of this intruder, although the commerce with the enemy that he imagines to have been adultery in fact fell short of consummation. Later, before an emotional family forum, Leonora responds to her husband's revelation of their discovery (133) with the enigmatic and apparently lame statement, "sabed que no os he ofendido sino con el pensamiento" (134) (know that I have committed no offense against you except in thought), that her betrayal and his rival's victory did not materialize except as fantasies or figments of their--as well as his--imagination. (2) She does no more to clarify her innocence, driving not only her husband but also the narrator to distraction, as they attempt to respond to the effects of her sexual contact with the public--in amorous battle with Loaysa--upon Carrizales's worth. The narrator finally ends the exemplary tale with the following inconclusive lines: "Solo no se que fue la causa que Leonora no puso mas ahinco en desculparse y dar a entender a su celoso marido cuan limpia y sin ofensa habia quedado en aquel suceso; pero la turbacion le ato la lengua, y la priesa que se dio a morir su marido no dio lugar a su disculpa" (135). (I simply don't know what caused Leonora not to strive more vigorously to explain her innocence and to make her jealous husband understand how unstained and without offense she had remained in that incident; but confusion tied her tongue, and the quickness with which her husband surrendered to death didn't allow time for her pardon.) Although other literary treatments of real or perceived adultery and the honor theme lead us to anticipate Carrizales's cleansing of his dishonor with the blood of the offenders, Cervantes has the old man opt for a novel resolution of the dilemma. He acknowledges his own fault in establishing the confining marriage (133). Next he revises his will so that all that he has invested in the marriage will not be wasted, but rather that reinvested it might yield both edification to others and, since he has sired no offspring, the continuation of his good name in public renown for his magnanimity: Mas por que todo el mundo vea el valor de los quilates de la voluntad y le con que te quise, en este ultimo trance de mi vida quiero mostrarlo de modo que quede en el mundo pot ejemplo, si no de bondad, al menos de simplicidad jamas oida ni vista; y asi, quiero que se traiga luego aqui un escribano, para hacer de nuevo mi testamento, en el cual mandare doblar la dote a Leonora y le rogare que despues de mis dias, que seran bien breves, disponga su voluntad, pues lo podrfi hacer sin fuerza, a casarse con aquel mozo, a quien nunca ofendieron las canas deste lastimado viejo; y asi verni que, si viviendo, jamas sali un punto de lo que pude pensar ser su gusto, en la muerte hago lo mismo, y quiero que lo tenga con el que ella debe de querer tanto. …

Sade's Ethical Economies

Abstract: Recent criticism has underscored the difficulty of coming to terms with the ethical consequences of literary interpretation. On the one hand, criticism seems unable to avoid ethical judgments. Tobin Siebers, recalling the etymological senses of the word criticism `to cut' or `to distinguish,' argues that literary analysis is obliged to make critical choices that reveal a certain character or ethos: "literary criticism is inextricably linked to ethics" (1). On the other hand, to embrace a deliberately "ethical criticism" would seem to compromise the disinterestedness that, beginning with Kant, is often held up as a prerequisite for aesthetic judgment. An interest in certain moral values threatens to restrict the freedom that is required for unprejudiced rhetorical or formal analysis. Stephen Heath, for example, writes of "a feeling that moral terms are an irrelevant weakening of analytic rigor" (129). Criticism, it would seem, can neither avoid ethics nor reconcile itself to the idea that it must promote a specific moral agenda.(1) A possible way out of this double bind might be to center the discussion of ethics and literature on structures that are economic in nature: circular exchange, sharing, stealing, giving. Focusing on economic structures would seem, on the one hand, to preserve all the advantages of remaining comfortably within the confines of formal analysis, for an "economy" is a law governing a system of value and exchange that is inherently formal or formalizable in nature. At the same time, however, the phenomenon of exchange is necessarily tied up with issues of generosity and magnanimity, issues that seem, in other words, to be inherently ethical in nature. As Marcel Mauss's essay on the gift demonstrates, analyses of systems of exchange, of give and take, seem of themselves to lead to "ethical conclusions" (76). If articulating ethics with economics seems like a good way to face the ethical dilemma of criticism, then two authors who might lend themselves particularly well to such an attempt are Sade and Adam Smith. Smith, the philosopher most closely associated with the law of supply and demand, also wrote a Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) in which many of the same structures that he later used to describe the mechanisms of the market function as the principles of a system of moral judgment (Raphael and Macfie 20-25). Sade, that most radical of eighteenth-century moralists, also has a particular interest in economic structures that has long been an emphasis of critical interpretation (Barthes; Henaff). The interest of a confrontation of Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments with Sade's Justine, ou Les Malheurs de la vertu derives in part from the fact that the analysis of ethical interaction in economic terms seems to lead, in the two books, to diametrically opposed conclusions. For Smith, ethics are essentially economic in nature. While David Marshall rightly insists on the theatrical aspects of Smith's moral philosophy (167-92), the privileged paradigm of ethical interaction in Smith is the marketplace. When distinguishing other human feelings from those sentiments he considers to be specifically moral, Smith often insists on the economic structure of moral sentiments as their defining characteristic. Love, for example, does not figure in Smith's system as a moral sentiment, whereas gratitude does precisely to the extent that it is inscribed in a strictly balanced system of give and take. Whereas love, Smith writes, is pleased with the good fortune of the person loved, "without regarding who was the author of his prosperity," the feeling of gratitude demands that one be personally instrumental in promoting the happiness of one's benefactor (68).(2) Gratitude, it would seem, is like a debt that has been incurred and that must be acquitted. Analogously, Smith uses the same argument to distinguish the feeling of hate, which Smith does not qualify as moral, from the specifically moral feeling of resentment: whereas hatred is satisfied by the mere knowledge that one's enemy has suffered some misfortune, the moral feeling of resentment demands that one be oneself the cause of one's enemy's distress (69). …

La littérature de Martial: Plagiarism as Figure in Sade, Lautréamont, Ouologuem and Sony Labou Tansi

Abstract: Le mal rongeur s'etend sur toute la figure ... (1) Plagiarism is an intertextual literary practice with an abundance of intertexts to its name, not all of them literary. It has a history in legal discourse and its etymologies reveal a violent origin in the real: "PLAGIAT, Delit du plagiaire. Chez les Romains, on appelait plagiaire celui qui etait condamne au fouet (ad plagas) pour avoir vendu comme esclaves des hommes libres.--Dans notre langue, cette qualification s'applique a l'auteur qui s'approprie les pensees d'autrui." (2) Within literary discourse, scenes of real, Oedipal violence have been figured by plagiarism: "Plagiarism is kidnapping. A false fatherhood. The OED points to the Latin plagiarus, 'one who abducts the child or slave of another'"; "Ainsi, pour l'homme, le plagiat est perversion: il equivaut a une relation incestueuse avec la mere." (3) The figural power of plagiarism is a power to name something other than itself. In this article that other thing is writing, restrictively figured as violent, gendered, and historicized by my taking "Sadian" writers as exemplars. My first suggestion is that plagiarism is an appropriate figure of intertextual relations that are characterized by violence. The figurality of plagiarism originates in an elaborate mise-en-scene of the legal question by the Latin poet Martiah4 "Ie te recommande nos Livres, Quinctianus, si toutesfois ie puis dire nostres ceux que ton Poete recite. Si une servitude trop pesante leur donne sujet de se plaindre, vien procurer leur liberte, (5) & ne leur denie point le secours suffisant: Et quand il voudra s'en rendre le maistre, repons qu'ils m'appartiennent, & et que ie les ay affranchis. Que si tu maintiens cela fortement trois & quatre fois, tu feras recevoir au Plagiaire (6) une grande confusion." Martial is representing the court of law where his books, as manumitted slaves illicitly re-enslaved, would have to claim their freedom by the agency of a third party (here, the friend to whom the poem is addressed) since they would not, if shown to be slaves, have had the right to speak for themselves. Though the book-as-slave figure had a certain currency in first-century poetry, Martial's book-stealer as slave-stealer is unique in classical Latin. (7) The originating scene complicates plagiarism as literary figure since the plagiarist's crime is not simply to have alienated the property of another, but specifically to have alienated the freedom of the text. Furthermore, as an abducted ex-slave, victim of an original abduction by the first master (Martial), the text is implicated in a founding (or confounding (8)) history of appropriation and reappropriation. Thus the story of the first text to be figured by plagiarism is already a story of recurring violence. If the association of literary plagiarism with literal abduction seems remote, Suzanne Guerlac, writing of Victor Hugo's L'Homme qui rit (where "a child is kidnapped and disfigured by a band of gypsies who have cut his mouth from ear to ear"), has shown how the child-stealer's crime can derive mythic power from the speaking of its proper and resonantly literary name: the mutilation of the child Gwynplaine by Harquenonne is called a work of art, and Harquenonne is hanged for it "as a plagiarist". (9) The OED's alternative specifications of the plagiarist's crime--child or slave stealer--are actualized in these scenes from Martial and Hugo, though Martial's slave is not actually but only figuratively stolen, and shame is the only punishment imposed. With the arch-plagiarist Isidore Ducasse, Comte de Lautreamont, we are still speaking in figures: the "mutilation" of Hugo's poem "Tristesse d'Olympio", abducted by Ducasse and put to work in his Poesies, if it rivals Harquenonne for "artistry", is not actually violent, and if it is deemed that the crime nonetheless deserves punishment, this too need only be figurative. …

Bodies That Matter in the Court of Late Medieval England and in Chaucer's 'Miller's Tale.'

Abstract: In the fabliau world of Chaucer's Miller's Tale, private parts, furtive sexual encounters, and a so-called "misdirected kiss" constitute the order of the day Indeed, critical discussions of the tale generally take for granted its elaborate concern for body parts and bodily activities, these being understood, if nothing else, as evidence of the tale's generic tethering(1) Equally striking, however, though rarely commented upon, is the way in which the Miller's Tale elides the specificity of those very bodies that it sets quite prominently on display A good example of this can be seen in the tale's representation of the Miller himself The prologue to the Miller's Tale locates the Miller initially in terms of physical positioning, introducing him as someone who drunkenly cuts in front of the Monk, the figure whom Harry Bailly invites to tell the next tale (3120f)(2) Speaking, moreover, in the mode of declamation and oration -- in "Pilates voys" (3124) to be exact -- the Miller assumes the identity of an actor, calling further attention to his physical, dramatic placement as a body on stage The expression "Pilates voys" however, also points to the fact that voice, not body, ultimately constitutes the mainstay of the Miller's performance;(3) indeed, much of what the prologue reveals is the way in which the Miller himself -- his bodily presence, that is -- finally drops out of the picture " [I]f that I myspeke or seye, / Wyte it the ale of Southwark, I yow preye" (3139-40) By shuffling the responsibility for his words onto the ale of Southwark, the Miller effectively locates his speech outside his own body His theatrical delivery thereby turns into a situation of disembodied voice, a narrative instance that detracts from rather than calls attention to the Miller's own bodily location Interestingly, this double act of self-inscription and self-erasure on the part of the Miller undergoes a repeat performance in the subsequent prologue representation of Chaucer the pilgrim For just as the Miller pre-empts the speech of the Monk, so Chaucer the pilgrim cuts in on the Miller-Reeve exchange, thereby inserting himself into the narrative in a pre-emptory manner His speech, moreover, like that of the Miller, provides the occasion for an act of self-effacement: what the pilgrim says pilgrim himself The apologetic tone of his remarks ("Blameth nat me " 3181f), his self presentation as a mere repeater of someone else's words (3172-75), and his effort (however sincere or ironic) to direct readers' attention away from the tale he is about to tell (3176-77) all work together to absent the pilgrimnarrator's body in the very midst of its textual inscription Equally elusive in this respect is the representation of the body of Alisoun, the tale's central character(4) Of the three character portraits given in the tale-Nicholas's, Absolon's, and Alisoun's -- hers is by far the longest and most artistically accomplished, giving the impression of a vividly delineated character Much like "hende Nicholas," moreover, Alisoun herself also seems to be defined by basic and seemingly unequivocal bodily attributes Early on in the narrative Nicholas, we are told, grabs her "by the queynt" (3276), a gesture which for most critics could not be more tellingly graphic or more bodily definitive(5) And yet, Alisoun is also the figure within the tale about whom much bodily information is noticeably withheld In the space of her description, for example, elaborate emphasis is given to her clothes, but not at all the specific body underneath Indeed, every time the specificity of Alisoun's body potentially comes into focus, the language of the description stops short of explicit reference and veers instead in the direction of metaphor: "She was ful moore blisful on to see / Than is the newe pere-jonette tree" (3246-47); "She was a prymerole, a piggesnye " (3268); "Ful brighter was the shynyng of hir hewe / Than in the Tour the noble yforged newe" (3255-56) …

La Critique Genetique, Entre Histoire et Esthetique

Abstract: L'investigation critique au sein des dossiers preparatoires des oeuvres--quand du moins ceux-ci existent--est une part assurement tres restreinte de la perspective "genetique", si l'on entend par perspective genetique l'interpretation generale des conditions de possibilite, d'existence et de diffusion des oeuvres. C'est a cela que tient le malentendu souvent renaissant quis'est developpe autour de la notion de "genese", et surtout autour de l'idee d'une analyse genetique des oeuvres particulieres et des productions culturelles en general. Pourtant, la distinction est importante a faire, et elle a une certaine evidence, entre les perspectives genetiques historiques ou sociologiques larges et les perspectives de genetique textuelle, celles qui comprennent l'etude des dossiers d'oeuvres et des ensembles manuscrits. Les premieres, on pourrait dire de Gustave Rudler(1) a Lucien Goldmann(2) et a Pierre Bourdieu(3), ont un champ d'exercice particulierement vaste, qui inclut les structures historiques, culturelles, generiques, sociologiques, politiques, economiques, et font des oeuvres de pensee et des oeuvres esthetiques des lieux de convergence et d'expression d'ensembles dont celles-ci sont a la fois le produit et la figure. Ce qui interesse de telles "genetiques", c'est l'appartenance des oeuvres singulieres a ces complexites culturelles et sociales qu'elles devoilent et modifient par leur existence meme. On ne peut certainement pas assimiler historiquement ces differentes versions de l'interrogation "genetique", mais ce qui leur est commun pourtant, c'est le souci de demontrer que les oeuvres sont formees par des strategies qui ne leur appartiennent pas en propre, et qui ne relevent pas du seul champ esthetique. C'est aussi la recherche de causalites et de finalites larges, lisibles aussi bien dans la configuration formelle et ideologique que les oeuvres recoivent que dans le status qu'elles acquierent. Les perspectives de la genetique textuelle(4)--ou ce que l'on a pu provisoirement rassembler sous le titre de "critique genetique"--sont, quant a elles, essentiellement-determinees par les objets textuels et graphiques qu'elles se donnent et qu'elles construisent: les dossiers manuscrits d'ocuvres, les ecrits preparatoires, les versions diverges dont la trace subsiste, c'est-a-dire toutes sortes de textes et de documents, aux statuts tres heteroclites, tres divergents souvent, qui se trouvent reunis par le hasard des conservations, des fidelites et des curiosites, c'est-a-dire l'ensemble des "manuscrits" d'un ecrivain. L'unite du dossier est alors celui du travail qui s'y trouve reuni, federe par le nom de son auteur. L'objet de l'investigation est un univers de textes divers, traverse de previsions, d'injonctions, de commentaires, discontinu, troue de lacunes, riche de formes abouties, et de formes en attente. La "critique genetique", si donc on s'attache a cette seule dimension de la "genese" textualisee, et a ce seul espace des manuscrits et documents qui ont ete conserves--les dossiers de l'invention--est ainsi d'emblee dependante de l'existence et de l'historicite de ses objets. Il faut cependant remarquer que cette "critique genetique", dans les formes qui ont d'abord ete les siennes en France dans les annees 1970, est tres eloignee de toute investigation historienne. Wile est apparue d'abord bien plutot comme un developpement des recherches de la poetique structurale, comme une sorte d'ouverture vers un amont du travail de l'ecriture, s'attachant a des recherches d'ordre generique, linguistique, narratologique, sociocritique, psychanalytique ou stylistique, c'est-a-dire comme mise a l'epreuve, sur ces objets textuels mobiles que sont les dossiers de la creation, de recherches developpees autour des notions memes de texte et d'ecriture. Pourtant, le developpement des etudes sur les manuscrits modernes, la recherche d'ensembles complexes significatifs, l'investigation de corpus encore meconnus, ont pour effet de tracer progressivement une histoire et une geographie de ces corpus. …

La Critique Genetique; Un Retour a L'histoire?

Abstract: Il est devenu courant, dans les syntheses et les introductions aux recueils de plus en plus nombreux consacres a la critique genetique, de caracteriser ce mouvement comme un "retour a l'histoire."(1) Generalisation commode pour ceux qui aiment la polemique et les modes culturelles, mais qui m'a toujours semble un peu suspecte. Certes, de par sa nature, l'approche genetique est ancree dans la diachronie; mais la reconstitution de l'histoire d'un texte n'est pas en soi un travail d'historien, au sens propre. Si l'on a pu tirer des lecons historiques d'une serie de brouillons ou de variantes (voir, par exemple, les travaux de Werner sur les manuscrits de Heine), c'est parce qu'on a decide de lire ces brouillons ou variantes en historian: option critique parmi d'autres, relativement rare d'ailleurs, comme en temoigne la table des matieres des quatre premiers numeros de Genesis. Dans la vaste majorite des etudes genetiques recentes, au contraire, la signification historique des diverses formes d'avant-texte tend a etre remise au second plan, sinon totalement occultee, au profit d'une focalisation presque exclusive sur les problemes esthetiques. Approche inevitable, qui a fait ses preuves et que je n'ai nullement l'intention de contester ici, car nous sommes pour la plupart des litteraires, ayant a faire a des objets esthetiques; mais qui n'en comporte pas moins certains dangers. D'abord celui de remplacer le culte de l'oeuvre parfaite par un culte analogue des processus de sa fabrication. Mais surtout celui de privilegier l'auteur et son manuscrit--la notion de l'homme et l'oeuvre ne semble pas tout a fait morte chez les geneticiens--en negligeant des problemes plus generaux. Notre organisation en equipes de specialistes (Valery, Proust, Joyce etc.) est en quelque sorte naturelle, vu la maniere dont la plupart des documents litteraires on ete conserves; et, ayant profite depuis des annees du dynamisme de l'equipe Flaubert, ce n'est pas moi qui vais leur lancer des pierres. Mais n'est-il pas possible d'envisager une autre sorte d'equipe qui travaillerait sur des questions plus larges? En narratologie, par exemple, queue serait la "lecon du manuscrit" pour ccux qui s'interessent a la crise de la representation, a l'introduction progressive du savoir dans les grands textes romanesques du XIXeme siecle, ou aux rapports entre la censure et l'autocensure chez les maitres de l'ironie romantique (Musset, Heine, Byron)? Un tel elargissement d'horizon ne me parait pas trop ambitieux, tout en admettant qu'il serait le fait d'individus et non de groupes reunis en colloques. A l'occasion d'un tel colloque, il est salutaire de rappeler que l'interet des etudes genetiques n'est pas tonjours tres clair pour nos collegues appartenant a d'autres disciplines; qu'il y a plus d'une maniere de fire, c'est a dire d'interpreter un scenario ou des brouillons; et enfin (pour en venir a mon propos d'aujourd'hui), que la lecture historique des documents avant-textuels est d'autant plus sonhaitable que beaucoup d'evidence d'un grand interet pour l'historien tend a disparaitre dans le processus de mise en poesie ou mise en roman. Pour qui s'interesse serieusement a "l'histoire morale (d'une) generation", les notes que Flaubert a rassemblees pour l'Education sentimentale constituent une source d'information, de premiere et de seconde main, tout aussi riche que le roman lui-meme, peut-etre plus riche meme, en ce qu'elles vent relativement pures de l'ironie corrosive qui y domine dans le texte. Malgre le biais esthetique dont il m'arrive de me plaindre, il y a des signes encourageants qu'une genetique plus ouverte a la theorisation et a ce qui se passe ailleurs (dans l'histoire de la peinture et de la sculpture, chez les architectes et les urbanistes) est en vole de se developper. (Par ailleurs, on salt que dans l'histoire de la peinture et de la musique, l'approche genetique est chose courante depuis des generations). Les historiens eux-memes n'ignorent pas l'importance de la "variance" textuelle. …

Gerald of Wales' 'Topographia Hibernica': Sex and the Irish Nation

Abstract: Assessed from a modern perspective, the Topographia Hibernica is of little value as a work of ethnography. Although promoted by its author as a lucid circumscription of Ireland and its inhabitants, it clearly and disconcertingly swerves between fact and fiction; and, although rhetorically endorsed by the testimony of impartial experience, it betrays a variety of authorial prejudices. The result is a written landscape that is inhabited by a bizarre menagerie of outlandish monstrosities and vitiated by inflections of scorn, disdain and slander. If Gerald's zoological observations are to be believed, the Ireland of the 1180's accommodated not only such familiar creatures as eagles, hares, weasels and geese, but also such oddities as a portentous frog, a prophetic werewolf, a population of banished fleas, a flock of unboilable ducks, and a species of fish remarkable for its golden dentures.(1) Similarly, if his ethnological remarks are given any credit, then it must be assumed that the twelfth-century Irish were indeed scrofulous barbarians notable for their addiction to unbounded turpitudes of lust, for these ostensible monsters of perversion allegedly practiced incest, granted bestiality a ritualistic function in ceremonies of kingship, and idiosyncratically displayed the stigmata of hermaphroditism as the physical consequences of their ethnic deviance.(2) In short, if we believe all Gerald tells us, then we must also accept that the nature of twelfth-century Ireland and its inhabitants paradoxically ran "contra naturae cursum" (II, Incipit). The veracity of the Topographia has of course long been discredited, and the earliest systematic demolitions to be undertaken from an Irish perspective were made in the seventeenth century. The first was Stephen White's Apologia pro Hibernia, written in the last decade of the reign of Elizabeth I, and therefore during specifically the period in which the Catholics of Ulster were being forcibly displaced by protestant immigrants;(3) the second, the Cambrensis eversus of John Lynch, was published in the early years of the Restoration and in the aftermath of Cromwell's punitive campaign of 1649.(4) That the work of a medieval author should have gained such celebrity over four hundred years after its composition is in itself remarkable, if not unique. But this attention hardly redounds to Gerald's credit. For both White and Lynch, the Topographia represented a timeless declaration of imperialism and belligerence, its pejorative rhetoric perversely transformed into an immutable truth that could be used to justify any Insular intervention in Irish affairs.(5) In the view of both, therefore, it had become a paradigm, a veritable institution of conflict which had at all costs to be dismantled. There is a great deal that justifies this view. Gerald holds the disreputable distinction of being the first inhabitant of Britain to depict the Irish as idle, disorganized and little better than animals;(6) and he is as an early apologist for foreign invasion, his derogatory treatise often reading as an imperialistically inflected act of containment. It is dedicated to Henry II, who himself led an expeditionary force to Ireland in 1171 and subsequently nominated Prince John as its new Overlord;(6) it documents apparent historical facts interpreted to ratify the Kings of Britain as the rightful monarchs of Ireland;(8) and it performs in its very title a gesture of total appropriation, territory (topos) constituted and regulated by writing (graphia) in facilitating and glorifying rehearsal of the full imposition of Angevin power.(9) Gerald accordingly anticipates later developments both by presenting the Irish in prejudicial terms and by aligning such a stratagem with contemporary Insular movements of territorial and cultural expansionism. And the inferences to be drawn from his text can be summarized through a perverse reasoning, which, with variations of ambiguous subtlety, can still be heard today: if the Irish are in such egregious need of the civilizing and natural culture of Britain, it is specifically because they are so barbarically marginal to the green and pleasant land in which civilization, culture, and presumably also nature itself, so egregiously flourish. …

The Queen's Secret: Adultery and Political Structure in the Feudal Courts of Old French Romance

Abstract: Adultery is a prominent subject of romances, and royal adultery seems to have exercised a particular fascination for medieval French poets. Some of the best known examples of the romance genre recount the story of an adulterous liaison between a queen and a knight. In these stories marriage is a political arrangement that may have sentimental attachments, but it is not motivated by love; love characterizes the queen's adulterous liaison with her knight. Many critics have interrogated the prominent connection of love and adultery in these stories, and the political significance of the queen's adultery is usually acknowledged in studies of the romance love ethic: it is treason against the king to have an affair with his wife. Yet while the effect of adultery on the king's position in his court has been the subject of critical study, the function of adultery within the political structure of medieval romances remains unexamined. The queen's adultery takes place in a royal feudal court and it is constantly scrutinized, often discovered, and repeatedly rehidden. Love has a dual character in these stories: it provokes exemplary loyalty and passion and it is transgressive. The ambiguous status of adulterous love is seen in the ambivalent attitude toward the lovers taken by the narrator and the characters in the romance. They sympathize with the lovers, but they do not condone the adulterous liaison without reserve. The queen and her lover sometimes display a similarly undecided view of how well their liaison must be kept secret. Although they try to hide their relationship from the one party who threatens it the most, the king, they often seem indiscreet, even reckless, and little concerned with maintaining the secret of their adultery. The narrative development and drama of the story create and depend on this ambivalence: the queen and her lover repeatedly try to hide their liaison, their enemies constantly try to discover it, and the king wavers between belief in the lovers' innocence and certainty that they have betrayed him. Some of the best known Old French romances recount the successive discoveries and cover-ups of a queen's sexual transgression, but adultery is not only a narrative structure in these stories. As an integral part of the social and hierarchical organization of the court it is also part of a political structure within which its status is also ambiguous, both necessary and prohibited. This essay explores how the queen's adultery mediates relationships between the king and his vassals and establishes a necessary equilibrium between powerful factions whose contests for power are played out in the feudal court through accusations of adultery against the queen. The Knight's Secret The limitation of women's power in medieval romances is cloaked by the representation of an apparent agency: the courtly lady commands her lover's service and obedience. According to the tenets of love established first in lyric love poetry and adopted in romances that recount courtly love liaisons, the first requirement that the lady makes of her lover is that he keep their affair secret. He must never speak of his lady and above all, he must never reveal her identity. Discretion is required of the male lover as a demonstration of his worthiness to love. A narrative representation of the importance of secrecy in love is found in the thirteenth-century Chatelaine de Vergi, a short romance that recounts the story of the courtly love relationship of the lady of Vergi and her unnamed knight.(1) The story closely follows lyric love poems in its description of the secret liaison between a married lady and a knight, but the narrative's setting in a feudal court provokes a conflict between feudal values and the values of courtly love that leads to a tragic ending for the lovers.(2) In La Chatelaine de Vergi the chatelaine and the knight meet in a secluded garden whenever they can avoid discovery. …

Don Quixote Rides Again

Abstract: In a recent article, "Once Is Not Enough?", I argued that a book word-for-word identical with Cervantes' Quixote wouldn't be a new Quixote, numerically distinct from Cervantes', if it were produced in the manner described in gorges' short story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote." Menard's novel would simply be Cervantes', I tried to show, although admittedly produced in a very odd way. But philosophical issues (such as the individuation of works of art) are one thing, literary interpretation quite another. In this paper I'll be offering a comprehensive interpretation of Borges' story and arguing, against a number of critics,(1) that "Pierre Menard" is philosophically correct, i.e., that the correct interpretation of Borges' story doesn't have Menard as the author of a new Quixote. Even more importantly, I'll be arguing that the story is an extremely penetrating one, with philosophical depths as yet unexplored, although its main interest, metaphysical and otherwise, lies in a direction other than the individuation of works of art. These being my main theses, let me also issue an advance warning that my approach is itself more than a little philosophical. I Given my purely philosophical examination of the duplicate Quixote case, the most direct way to approach Borges' story would be to ask, Why on earth would anyone ever reproduce Cervantes' novel in the way that Menard does? But the more indirect route, and the one I'll be traveling here, is to marshal evidence bit by textual bit, all the while proceeding with the aim of constructing a unified and comprehensive interpretation. That methodology begs no critical questions, as the first one evidently does. Structurally, "Pierre Menard" has three parts. In the first, the setting, dramatic voice, and mode of narration are established; the main character, Pierre Menard, is introduced; the prevailing tone is set; and a number of themes are broached. The story is cast in the form of an elaborate literary obituary and memoir written by an unnamed friend and admirer of Menard. Supposedly, it's an official, formal assessment and appreciation of the great man, an intellectual and a figure of stupendous, even revolutionary, but unfortunately unknown, literary achievement. Superficially, the piece resembles the sort of literary honorarium found not so much in professional journals as in the self-appointed flagships of high art, i.e., in literary magazines with pretensions to high culture. We soon discover, however, that the narrator's assessment may be somewhat biased and skewed--that he may be, in other words, an unreliable narrator. His first few sentences show him to be patronizing and bullying, and within two paragraphs his political conservatism, hauteur, and condescending attitude toward any and all who don't share his convictions are made evident. After first taking an altogether gratuitous snipe at Protestants and Masons, he proceeds to name-drop a title or two, in order, he says, to establish his authority to write an assessment of Menard and his oeuvre, but actually to call attention to himself and his aristocratic connections. Moreover, his prose style is pretentious, bombastic, and affected, and smacks more than a little of the fourth-rate symbolist: One might say that only yesterday we gathered before his [Menard's] final monument, amidst the lugubrious cypresses, and already Error tries to tarnish his Memory.... Decidedly, a brief rectification is unavoidable (Borges 36). Clearly, this is not an assessment to be trusted. But even more clearly, and even more importantly, this is fiction, not non-fiction, despite the obituary/literary-memoir format. No piece of non-fiction would ever be as blatantly prejudiced, arrogant, or inflated as "Pierre Menard." Moreover, given only what has been said so far, it's quite probably a parody of a certain kind of litterateur and literary document, and quite probably a story whose prevailing tone is ironic. …

Bodies and Pleasures: Early Modern Interrogations

Abstract: Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub, in their introduction to Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, note the prevalence of academic criticism's recent focus on the body as a "subject" of culture and of embodiedness as a paradigm of subjectivity. They trace an interesting recent history of this focus on the body (in culture, in history) as related, on the one hand, to feminist inquiry and politics, with its focus on gender and sexual difference as important operative distinctions in culture that carry political implications; and, on the other, to recent political and social developments: "the current containment and control of bodies by technologies and right-wing political discourses," (10) and to the catastrophe of AIDS: Academic critical theory has focused on paradigms of the body and embodiedness, then, just at the moment that the AIDS epidemic and HIV infection have focused social concerns on the human body as a carrier of culture, values, and morality ... This is not a coincidence. AIDS discourses have in many ways catalyzed the operations of cultural analysis ... (12-13) One of the effects of attempts to contain or control the HIV virus by "policing desire" (to use Simon Watney's phrase), is to make strikingly clear, according to Epstein and Straub, the extent to which the cultural production of identity and subjectivity is conducted through the terms of sexuality (13). Thus, the attention to both gender and sexuality as constitutive constructing agents of identity and subjectivity -- and here we might stress as well the discourses of identity construction that focus on racial marking -- that is, an attention to the ways in which subjectivities and identities are organized and categorized according to bodily designations, has brought academic criticism to focus on embodiment. The presentism of this suggestion -- that what turns us to the body are recent social, political, cultural developments that produce the body as a site of representational and discursive struggle -- both illuminates and runs the risk of obscuring thoughts about historical moments in the past as well as the present when the body as subject of culture becomes an "urgent" or "necessary" theoretical concern -- for example, times of famine or of plague, of war or of witch-burning.(1) To counter such a discourse of present urgency, Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury, editors of Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature, argue for the particular salience of analyses of embodiment in relation to the Middle Ages: As the writings of historians Jacques Le Goff, Peter Brown, and Caroline Bynum have demonstrated, the Middle Ages was anything but a purely metaphysical time period. It was, on the contrary, a moment of history governed by what we might call an incarnational aesthetic ... Indeed, everyday life in the Middle Ages was what we in the late twentieth century might see as supremely, if not unrelievedly, `bodily.' (viii-ix) Both approaches tend to obscure somewhat the relation between the body and culture at work in moments when no such "thematic" focus is present. This is the argument Harry Berger makes in "From Body to Cosmos," drawing on the work of anthropologist Mary Douglas: `The social body constrains the way the physical body is perceived. The physical experience of the body, always modified by the social categories through which it is known, sustains a particular view of society.' Thus the body is a representation as well as a presence ... the body naturalizes or detextualizes `the social categories through which it, is known.' It lends them its immediacy and reality as an organism, something humans did not fabricate and therefore cannot change. And in many cultures, nature' -- in exchange for the naturalness it bestows -- borrows logocentric forms which the human body signifies: person, consciousness, presence, and self-presence. …

La Dispositio Dans le Travail De Flaubert

Abstract: Les manuscrits de Flaubert donnent l'impression que ses oeuvres se developpent en continu Mais le travail d'invention et celui de redaction sont heterogenes: il y a la un "saut qualitatif" (selon l'expression de Raymonde Debray Genette(1)) qu'il serait interessant d'examiner de pres La distinction scenarios/brouillons, qui ne recoupe que plus ou moins le partage entre conception et redaction, et qui, dans la pratique, est difficile a faire, m'a paru une base de travail peu satisfaisante; je trouve plus utilisable une division tripartite inspiree de la Rhetorique d'Aristote: inventio-dispositio-elocutio, qui permet de distinguer nettement, a cote de la redaction, les deux processus de l'invention de la matiere romanesque et de son organisation Je voudrais proposer ici les premiers elements d'une etude sur la dispositio: comment la matiere romanesque s'organise-t-elle en un recit(2)? Les "notes de regie" constituent l'essentiel de mon champ de recherche L'expression note de regie est employee par les flaubertiens dans un sens large Parmi les instructions que l'auteur se donne, elle ne devrait designer que celles qui concernent la gestion du texte Il faudrait en distinguer les nombreuses notes sur l'invention, mettant en evidence les lacunes a combler; mais en examinant les preoccupations recurrentes qui s'y manifestent, on retrouve, nous le verrons, le niveau de la regie proprement cite Le veritable probleme, c'est de distinguer la note de regie de la mise par ecrit du donne Ainsi, Giovanni Bonaccorso propose ces trois exemples de notes de regie dans les manuscrits d'Herodias: "sa pose attentive", "lui remonte le moral", "ils en parlent en sous-entendus"(3) Si la premiere notation et la troisieme s'interessent bien a l'organisation du recit (emploi de la description ou du dialogue), la seconde fait partie de la preparation de la matiere romanesque et n'a rien d'une note de regie Mais d'autres cas sont moins clairs Dans une addition marginale, la mere de Frederic lui envoie son manteau pour qu'il ne prenne pas froid; quand Flaubert ajoute: "(contraste avec la durete de la vie de [Deslauriers])", on peut voir la un developpement du donne, mais aussi la volonte de structurer le roman par des contrastes Ce qui me fait retenir ce passage comme note de regie, c'est d'abord qu'etablir des contrastes est un souci permanent de Flaubert C'est aussi la presence de signes materiels de la note de regie: l'utilisation des parentheses, la position marginale (il en est d'autres: l'encadrement du texte, le soulignement, la rature en croisillons serres d'une remarque prise en compte--et la forme interrogative souvent utilisee pour les problemes en suspens) Le lexique des notes de regie meriterait qu'on s'y arrete Montrer, chez Flaubert, a parfois son sens premier, mais plus souvent le sens de "etablir",--ce qui suppose d'aligner des preuves: "(la montrer evaporee)" est tout different de *"caractere evapore d'Emma" Expliquer peut soul-entendre la necessite d'un travail d'invention: en notant qu'il lui faut etre plus clair, Flaubert se signale qu'il devrait lui-meme comprendre plus clairement les choses Les notes de regie sont parfois groupees en ensembles complexes: "l'enfant avait ete mis en nourrice pourquoi? comment-opinion d'Homais (rapide) & de la un peu portrait de sa femme" Apres une question qui releve de l'invention ("pourquoi?"), ce texte s'occupe du rythme du recit ("rapide", "un peu"), de la liaison des passages successifs ("et de la"); il prevoit l'utilisation de la narration retrospective ("l'enfant avait ete mis en nourrice") et du portrait Je serierai les problemes "Le veritable ecrivain, a dit Flaubert, est celui qui, sans sortir d'un meme sujet, peut faire en dix volumes ou en trots pages, une narration, une description, une analyse et un dialogue"(4) C'est par l'organisation generale du recit selon ces quatre modes narratifs que je commencerai …

"Beaucoup De Bruit Pour Rien": Mallarme's 'Ptyx' and the Symbolist "Bric-a-Brac."

Abstract: Les autres symbolistes renferment et agitent un certain bric-a-brac concret de sensations et d'objets aimes par leur epoque . . . Antonin Artaud, 1923(1) Bibelots d'emplois incertains, Fleurs mortes aux seins des almees, Cheveux, dons de vierges charmees, Crepons arraches aux catins. Tableaux sombres et bleus lointains, Pastels effaces, curs camees, Fioles encore parfumees, Bijoux, chiffons, hochets, pantins, Quel encombrement dans ce coffre! Je vends tout. Accepte mon offre, Lecteur. Peut-etre quelque emoi, Pleurs ou rire, a ces vicilles choses Te prendra. Tu paieras, et moi J'acheterais de fraiches roses. Charles Cros, 1873(2) Charles Cros begins his 1873 collection Le Coffret de santal with a metaphorical clearing-out of what Artaud would with hindsight call the `bric-a-brac' of `objets aimes', the accumulated so-called clutter of tropes and conventions in the literary attic. The poem can be read as an inventory of refused objects and symbols that make up the various `points d'appui' of Symbolist, Parnassian and Decadent `artes poeticae'. Lurking behind the individual items which collectively make up the `encombrement' we are justified in reading a number of specific literary allusions. Baudelaire is present in the `fleurs mortes' and the `cheveux, dons de vierges', while the `bleus lointains' alludes to another facet of the Romantic/ Symbolist stock-in-trade, the unreachable `Azur' later to figure so prominently in the work of Rimbaud, Mallarme and others. We also have the line containing the conflicting poetic agendas of `Pastels effaces' (Verlaine) and the `curs camees' of Gautier's `sculpte, lime cisele' of Emaux et camees. The whole lot is `sold up' in a literary jumble sale with the message `everything must go', and with the reader as prospective buyer or consumer of this `junk'. But what concerns us here is only tangentially Cros' poem or indeed Artaud's `bric-a-brac'. Our real purpose is to examine the creation of one particular item in the Symbolist `bric-a-brac'--the `ptyx' in Mallarme's `Sonnet en -yx'. In October 1888 Vanier published a book entitled Petit Glossaire pour servir a l'intelligence des auteurs decadents et symbolistes. Written by Paul Adam(3) under the pseudonym `Jacques Plowert', its stated aim was to provide the ordinary reader with a glossary of words used by these poets, of words `aimes par leur epoque'. According to Plowert, the greatest reproach that could be levelled at these writers vise l'etrangete des termes mis en usage par [leurs] oeuvres. On en conclut a une pernicieuse difficulte de lecture pour quiconque n'est pas initie au prestige hermetique des vocables. Aussi semble-t-elle opportune la publication d' un gloss aire cap able d' aplanir le malentendu et de simplifier l'initiation. [ . . . ] Il mentionnera la signification precise de tous les termes rares qu'on ne rencontre point dans les lexiques ordinaires . . .(4) Insofar as the glossary's mission is to explain, clarify and demystify, it purports to be an aid to the reader in ascribing some kind of practical meaning to what Cros describes as `bibelots d'emplois incertains'--objects of uncertain use, but also words of uncertain usage. The book is produced with great attention to detail, giving for each word an example from one of fourteen writers of the period, set out in a list of `auteurs cites': three prosateurs (Adam, Barres, Poictevin), ten poetes (Ghil, Mallarme, Laforgue, Kahn, Moreas, Regnier, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Vignier, Viele-Griffin), and one critique (Feneon). In addition it provides, where appropriate, details of etymology, sources of neologism and examples of declension. We have, for instance, COMATEUX. Adj.--Gateux au sens provisoire . De comateux bavardages dus a des bas-bleus probablement calvinistes. Revue Independante. FELIX FENEON. …

Dreamwork in Rimbaud's "Illuminations". The Scene of the Other in "Bottom"

Abstract: I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream ... The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath hot seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was. (1) Shakespeare's character Bottom, often cited as an intertextual source for Rimbaud's text bearing the same name, poetically relates above a dreamer's estrangement from the scene of the unconscious Other in which s/he unwittingly participates. As dreamers, we observe ourselves in scenes staged in an inner psychical theatre that we cannot fully re-cognize upon waking. Just as a dreaming subject is estranged from the psychical scene that s/he unconsciously desires, so too the self is constructed in relation to its otherness. Whether dreaming or speaking, the subject is alienated thus from desired identity in and through its discourse. For discourse writes the self in terms of signifying relations which reveal the dialogic relation between the unconscious subject of identifications and the speaking subject, where "the moi reveals itself in the present speaking through je by which it is not recognized." (2) My analysis traces this discourse of the split self in Bottom. While Rimbaud erased the text's original title Metamorphoses, its trace remains operative in Bottom where an unconscious play of signifying chains structured like dreamwork configures the desiring subject as the object of its desire. Bottom calls to mind a dream text, not because we assume that Rimbaud transcribes therein an actual dream, but rather because the semiotic practice that its writing exemplifies follows closely the primary processes of dreamwork, displacement and condensation. (3) Corresponding neither to external reference nor to consistent psychological themes, the imaginative writing at play in this poetic text constructs emergent meaning at the level of the signifier where metaphoric and metonymic modes interpenetrate. (4) This creative strategy of dream construction informs our reading of the Other scene in Bottom. We recall that Rimbaud's creative artist, like a dreaming subject, "assiste a l'eclosion de [sa] pensee, ... la regarde ... l'ecoute," "la pensee accrochant la pensee et tirant" (15 mai 1871). When read as a model for creative mental activity, "la pensee accrochant la pensee et tirant" implies association along a syntagmatic axis. This mode operates by contiguity, as dream construction does, selecting and combining significant day residues with memory representations into associative networks or signifying chains. One may question framing Freud's theory of dreamwork in semiotic terms because of his analytical aim to read in a binary fashion the manifest dream content as a metaphor for a latent wish. Such interpretation of dreams having recourse to universal symbolism is not, however, entirely representative of his methodology. (5) To interpret a dream, Freud theoretically began by analyzing its writing, i.e. its text, mapping the metonymic network(s) of signifying chains to construct relations therein. These poetics of free association imply that reading a dream does not reconstruct, but rather constructs connections which subsequent readings may in turn deconstruct. In a recent revision of dreamwork, Stanley Palombo substantiates this view on the basis that "Freud produces no evidence that these connections had once been present and then later destroyed by the dream-work" (194). (6) In reviewing Freudian dreamwork, Palombo supports the affinity assumed here between primary processes (displacement and condensation) and creative mental activity. He states with reference to condensation which works in conjunction with displacement that comparison by superimposition is still the most effective method for identifying the common features in what may appear to be unrelated experiences. It provides a method which permits us to go beyond the limits of our logical categories to construct new connections without having to know the full meaning of those connections in advance. …

Denying Authorship: Sade and the Censor

Abstract: It is hardly disputable that some forms of censorship exist even in countries where freedom of speech is a constitutional right. As Jacques Derrida reminds us, "censorship does not consist . . . in reducing one to absolute silence. It is enough that it limits the range of addressees or of exchanges in general" (12).(1) In his article, Derrida analyzes Kant's concept of censorship, and makes it clear that censorship is not a practice that belongs only to the past; as a matter of fact, he uses Kant's texts on the question to shed light on the relation of censorship to institutions today, and in particular that of the university. Derrida stresses in particular the question of the limit, which he sees as constitutive of censorship: "Whenever a discourse, even if it is not forbidden, cannot find the conditions of a presentation or of an unlimited public discussion, one may speak, however excessive it may sound, of an effect of censorship" (12).(2) In that sense, censorship, at least in some of its forms, is not strictly incompatible with freedom of speech. It is not in principle separated from that right, or perhaps more precisely, it is built within that right. Indeed, since censorship poses the question of the limit, it is worth noticing that censorship is not always happening from the outside, intruding or encroaching on the domain of free speech. A certain restraint in one's discourse may be deemed necessary, the limit being drawn in that case within the discourse itself (and not between the discourse and a censorious agency that would limit its availability or suppress part of it). Self-censorship is a way of internalizing this censorious agency by setting limits on one's discourse, of checking oneself by repressing of one's own accord what it is felt cannot be expressed or studied. The example of Sade's works, rigorously censored during his lifetime and after, is significant in that respect.(3) For Sade's detractors as well as those who admire his works, be they Sade's or our own contemporaries, point out that Sade's discourse is not self-restrained, has not drawn the limit. At the end of the eighteenth century in post-revolutionary France, at a time when slogans advocating unlimited freedom of the press had gained currency, Sade's project of "saying everything" was vindicated in its claim, yet felt too far-ranging by some. One of Sade's contemporaries, the noble emigre Charles de Villers, writes for example of Justine ou les malheurs de la vertu, one of Sade's works which created the most scandal at the time, that "it is one of the strongest arguments against the unlimited freedom of the press" (Laugaa-Traut 74, emphasis mine). Even among those who have publicly expressed admiration for Sade's works, a similar concern is voiced, as appears for example in the case of Jean-Jacques Pauvert, tried in 1957 for having published Sade's work. During the trial, Pauvert's lawyer, Maurice Garcon, agreed that "while books are the noble vehicle of thought, and freedom of speech is an unimpeachable right . . ., still the enjoyment of this right is not unlimited" (L'Affaire Sade 125, emphasis mine).(4) The context in which such an opinion is held is no doubt conducive to self-censorship, yet this assertion strikingly articulates again the congruence to some extent, or precisely within certain limits, of the right to speak and the restriction of this right. We are here still within the terms of Derrida's view of censorship, for an institution (such as the institution of publishing) both recognizes and delineates the "unlimited" right to speak. Turning now to Sade's relation to the censor and his response to the accusation of a lack of self-restraint, it will become apparent that Sade does not so much put in question the setting of limits as such, as much as he displaces them, problematizing in particular the extent of an author's participation in a text, which the censor always assumes to be unlimited. Instead of drawing a limit in his discourse, Sade will argue that a text cannot be unlimitedly attributed to an author. …

Toussaint's Small World

Abstract: We designate things as "small" capriciously and according to different registers of perception. We may focus upon a thing's physical size; or upon its duration, intensity or range; upon its import, its significance; upon the quantity of the elements composing it; upon the simplicity of its structure. What seems to be common to all of those moves is the notion of reduction in relation to some more or less explicit norm. Art that insists upon that reduction and mobilizes it as a constructive principle can be termed minimalist. The term is a loose one, broadly grouping all art that is animated by a concern for stylistic austerity (Baker 9). Observing the phenomenon from afar (that is, from the point of view of a committed maximalist), John Barth has suggested that the remark "Less is more" may be taken as an encapsulation of the minimalist esthetic, (1) an esthetic grounded in the belief that "artistic effect may be enhanced by a radical economy of artistic means" (1). Much minimalist art would appear to be subtended, moreover, by a common epistemological position, the notion that human knowledge is radically limited, and that art can effectively play upon those limits (Marshall and Barksdale 571). Minimalism was first identified as a trend in the plastic arts. Frances Colpitt has defined it in the following manner: "Minimal art describes abstract, geometric painting and sculpture executed in the United States in the 1960s. Its predominant organizing principles include the right angle, the square, and the cube, rendered with a minimum of incident or compositional maneuvering" (1). Centered primarily in Manhattan, the movement included such figures as Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol Lewitt, Robert Morris, Richard Serra, Mel Bochner, Tony Smith, Robert Smithson, and Walter De Maria. Somewhat later, it occurred to critics of music that, inspired by Cage and Stockhausen's experiments, certain young composers like La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Arvo Part, and Wolfgang Rihm had been exploring techniques of reduction and repetition analogous to those used by the plastic artists (Mertens 11, Tarasti i5); thus, the term "minimalist music" was coined. In literature, one can of course argue that the impulse toward economy of expression is a recurrent phenomenon from, say, Democritus to Beckett. But more specifically, minimalism as a school of writing has been identified only recently, in American fiction. According to Kim Herzinger, the core group is composed of Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, Frederick Barthelme, Mary Robison, Tobias Wolff, and Bobbie Ann Mason; other writers sometimes cited as minimalists include Elizabeth Tallent, David Leavitt, Amy Hempel, Richard Ford, and Jayne Anne Phillips. Herzinger argues that minimalist fiction is formally sparse, tonally detached, elliptical, relatively plotless, and concerned with surface phenomena; its characteristic mode is representational (even hyperrealist), and not fabulist; its characteristic subject matter is domestic, quotidian, and banal (73). Surveying the trend in 1986, John Barth qualifies the minimalist "New American Short Story" as "the most impressive phenomenon on the current (North American, especially the United States) literary scene" (1). He suggests that minimalism arises from (and continues to be nourished by) a variety of factors: the "unspeakable trauma" of Vietnam; the energy crisis and consequent reaction against American excess; a national decline in reading and writing skills; dwindling attention spans; a reaction against the fabulist avant-gardists of the previous generation (notably, Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, Stanley Elkin, William Gaddis, William Gass, John Hawkes, Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, and himself); and, finally, a rejection of the hyperbole of American commercial and political advertising (2). In Barth's view, minimalism is both necessary and salubrious in its effect, in that it operates "a cyclical correction in the history (and the microhistories) of literature and of art in general" (25). …