Graduate Studies
MPhil in European Literature & Culture | Course content | Modules | Fr Medieval - Vision and Illusion in French medieval texts
MPhil in European Literature & Culture
French | FR Medieval
Identity and hybridity in Arthurian romance
(Convenor: Prof S Huot)
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The issue of identity is often at stake in French prose romance of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The figure of the hybrid is one that is central to the construction of identity in these romances: Palamedes, in the prose Tristan, is a Saracen-Christian; Galehot, a powerful lord and knight rendered powerless by his love for Lancelot, is a half-giant; and Merlin is half demonic, half divine, able to change his shape at will. The fourteenth-century Perceforest abounds with extraordinary creatures and outlandish characters, many of whom may be read as hybrids who unsettle and rearrange normative romance notions of identity. Many prose romance narratives explore the ways in which identities are formed through genealogy and social interaction, and how they are threatened by confrontations with religious traditions and social and sexual norms. Prose romance cycles are intricate and complicated layerings of gloss, commentary, and continuation, and often interrogate within their form and content the way in which cyclic textual identity and integrity are constructed and understood.
The figure of the hybrid therefore raises a number of issues when reading French prose romance. In this seminar series, we would explore the crucial place of the hybrid within prose romance; we would also seek to examine the use of hybridity as a means of describing literary form within this genre which combines multifarious strands of narrative. We will be drawing largely, but not exclusively, on psychoanalytic and postcolonial theory in examining ways that the texts construct or problematise personal and cultural identity and hybridity but we welcome as well other theoretical perspectives.
Questions to be explored in the seminars would include:
- Does identity depend on hybridity?
- What is the relationship between the hero and the hybrid?
- What kind of knowledge and meaning do hybrids propose?
- Are hybrids always monstrous?
- Can texts and authors be described as hybrids?
- How do gender and sexuality figure in the representation of the hybrid?
- How are discourses of religion, culture and ethnicity used to represent hybridity?
Students who wish to write in their course essay on relevant texts other than those prescribed or suggested in the module may do so. Students who wish to concentrate on a particular aspect covered in the general remit of the course are also welcome to do so.
Reading list
Primary sources (specific selections to be announced at the beginning of the course)
Robert de Boron, L'Estoire de Merlin, ed. Alexandre Micha (Geneva: Droz, 1979).
Le Livre du Graal, 3 vols., ed. Daniel Poirion, sous la direction de Philippe Walter, avec la collaboration d'Anne Berthelot, Robert Deschaux, Irene Freire-Nunes and Gerard Gros, Collection Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 2001-?)
La Suite du Roman de Merlin, ed. Gilles Roussineau, (Geneva: Droz, 1996).
Lancelot, ed. Alexandre Micha, 9 vols. (Geneva: Droz, 1978-83).
Le Roman de Tristan en prose, ed. Renée L. Curtis, 3 vols: i (Munich: Max Hueber, 1963); ii (Cambridge: D.S Brewer, 1985); iii (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1985)
Le Roman de Tristan en prose, gen. ed. Philippe Ménard, 9 vols (Geneva: Droz, 1987-97).
Perceforest (première partie, deuxième partie [2 vols.], troisième partie [3 vols.], quatrième partie [2 vols.], ed. G. Roussineau, TLF 279, 506, 540, 365, 409, 434, 343 (Geneva: Droz, 1979-2001).
Lods, Jeanne, ed. Les Pièces lyriques du Roman de Perceforest. Société de Publications Romanes et Fran�aises 36 (Geneva: Droz and Lille: Giard, 1953).
Secondary sources (to be supplemented at the start of the course and by interest)
Bettina Bildhauer and Robert Mills (ed.), The Monstrous Middle Ages (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003)
John Block Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge MA; London, 1981)
Caroline Walker Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity (New York: Zone Books, 2001)
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Hybridity, Identity, and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain: On Difficult Middles (New York; Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)
_____, Medieval Identity Machines (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p. 188-221
_____, Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages (Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999)
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (ed.), Monster Theory: Reading Culture (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996)
Simon Gaunt, Love and Death in Medieval French and Occitan Courtly Literature: Martyrs to Love (Oxford: OUP, 2006)
Miranda Griffin, The Object and the Cause in the Vulgate Cycle (Oxford: Legenda, 2005)
Erika E. Hess, Literary Hybrids: Cross-Dressing, Shapeshifting, and Indeterminacy in Medieval and Modern French Narrative (New York ; London : Routledge, 2004)
Sylvia Huot, 'Love, Race and Gender in Medieval Romance: Lancelot and the Son of the Giantess' in Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 37:2, (Spring 2007), 373-391
_____, Postcolonial Fictions in the 'Roman de Perceforest': Cultural Identities and Hybridities (Cambridge : Boydell & Brewer, 2007)
_____, Madness in Medieval French Literature: Identities Found and Lost (OUP, 2003)
_____, "Unspeakable Horror, Ineffable Bliss: Riddles and Enigmas in the Prose Tristan," Medium Aevum 71 (2002): 47-65
_____, 'Others and Alterity', in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval French Literature, ed. Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008), pp. 238-50
Debrah Strickland, Saracens, Demons and Jews (Princeton UP, 2003)
David Williams, Deformed Discourse: The Function of the Monster in Mediaeval Thought and Literature, (Exeter, 1996)
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