Abstracts
p. 360-365
Texte intégral
1Mirror of Sloth. Mirror of God. Theories of vision and poetic discourse in the Roman de la Rose
Michèle GALLY
The Roman de la Rose, written at the beginning and end of the thirteenth century, is an essential text for medieval reflection on the gaze and its poetic uses. How can this dream be put into verse? Such is the wager that the first author, Guillaume de Lorris, gives himself. By choosing to borrow the form of allegory from theological exegesis, he creates a new discourse that exists between iconography and rhetoric, but his poetic and amorous experience leads him to failure and death. His continuer, Jean de Meun, offers to make the case against both Guillaume’s model and the fallacious fullness of the visual. Numerous verses describe the visual traps aimed at humanity. Pygmalion is finally placed in opposition to Narcissus, the mystical park of the Lamb to the worldly orchard of Love, and the mirror of God, where any gap between appearance and reality disappears stands against the mirror of Sloth – the seductive gatekeeper of the orchard. Delivered from the false appearances of the amorous dream, the Lover will then be able to deflower the Rose, the object of his desire.
2Showing, demonstrating. Some modalities of the visible in sixteenth-centurypoetry
Simone PERRIER
To « show » is to put the sensible and the intelligible into play. To do so by writing is to give, on the one hand, the illusion of a presence, and on the other, an organization, subordinated to an intention, that supposes a subject and a receiver. The ambiguity both of the terms that refer to appearance and of the words « figure » and « image » derive from this. This duality can be specified in the corpus of renaissance and baroque poetry. Some parts, and even entire works that can be called descriptive ensure a certain autonomy for the representation of the world, but the task of showing and demonstrating the truth under the veil of appearances remains the naturally accepted goal of any encounter with the sensible universe. Was there a movement toward less devotion to allegory? A movement can be discerned, in any case, toward a pure objectivity: an attempt to speak truly what is difficult to think.
3Seeing the Grail. From theology to the romance: the representation of the invisible in the Perlevaus and the Quête du Saint-Graal
Mireille SEGUY
Both the Perlevaus and the Quête du Saint-Graal, prose romances of the first half of the thirteenth century, present a grail that is seen more than it is questioned. To see the grail in these two romances is to see the mysteries of the incarnation, the passion, and the trinity, i.e., precisely what challenges the gaze as well as the speech or writing that would attempt to convey it. It thus encounters, within the sphere of the romance, Christian attempts to surmount the paradox of a vision without a look and a statement without any speech. This meeting of the romance and the religious, far from involving a subjection of the first to the second, would provide fiction with the opportunity to experiment, on its own account, with modes of representing the invisible elaborated by theology.
4Looking at paradise. On Jean Lemaire de Belge and Dante
Pascale CHIRON
The Bible says little about the celestial paradise: this scriptural lacuna allows poets a relative freedom in representing heaven, but it also raises the questrion of their powers of representation. Studying the movements of the gaze in Jean Lemaire de Beiges’ Temple d’Honneur et de Vertus and Dante’s Divine Comedy can serve as guides in our attempt to define what makes the representation of paradise possible until the moment when silence takes over the text, and the unspeakable overflows the word.
5The rebirth of tragedy of the spectacle of speech. View and speech in the tragedies of Estienne Jodelle
Emmanuel BURON
Humanist tragedy is a vocal genre: action is less important than the recovered presence of the ancient characters, i.e., of their discourse. Jodelle orchestrates the complaint of queens victimized by Rome, and makes the power of a purely expressive speech felt, a power that reveals, without any care for being heard, the speaker’s pain. In Cléopâtre, this restoration of pathetic speech relies upon an active image, which, from the beginning, brings the spectator into sympathy with the queen. In Didon, the voice alone provokes compassion, but it cannot always convince, a task that will be guaranteed by the anachronistic look of the moved spectator. The image loses its pathetic power, but it still exalts the expressiveness of language at the expense of its power of conviction.
6What is heard in the Images : Philostragus, Vigenere, 1578
Olivia ROSENTHAL and Michel JOURDE
Blaise de Vigenère’s abundantly annotated translation (1578) of the Images of Philostratus (second-third centuries) is the occasion for questioning the relations of seeing and hearing in the practice of ecphrasis. Using a series of equivalences between the arts of speech, Vigenère’s book becomes a monument to mimesis, and thus seems to establish a continuity between nature and writing. The article devotes itself to showing that Vigenère questions this continuity by means of a double theory of writing: a « spiritualist » theory, according to which writing would naturally show the eternal truths, and a « mannerist » theory, in which the only eternity is that of the exercise.
7From sensibility to intelligibility. Visual relations and the meaning of the “Melusinian” narratives
Jean-Jacques VINCENSINI
In the « Melusinian » narratives, the looks and the relations that they open up and that their closing interrupts are not only the expression of acts of sensibility. The scopic relations symbolize the synthetic or « com-prehensive » attempt of all mythic narration to bring together terms that, by nature, are diametrically opposed. In this respect, the « Melusinian » fictions that are studied here (Marie de France’s lai de Lanval; Jean d’Arras’ novel Mélusine and Coudrette’s Le Roman de Mélusine on Histoire de Lusignan) are exemplary since they depict a woman who comes from another world and a man who belongs to ours; these two protagonists simultaneously incarnate sexual and ontological differences and the illusion that such oppositions can be lessened.
Consequently, the operations of perception are given direction not only by the games of the imaginary and desire, but also by the intellectual – or speculative – effort that is characteristic of the mythical thought that animates these narratives.
8Perspective and gaze in the Cent nouvelles nouvelles
Marie-Frangoise NOTZ
The emergence of the « nouvelle » beside the « novel » and the meaning of this term, which was chosen, during the fifteenth century, to designate the short narrative will be examined. I will hypothesize that there is a relation between the nouvelle’s incompleteness and the trajectory of a gaze that is always limited, whatever the underlying desire for totality may be. The nonadjustment of the nouvelle appears as a condition for the exercise of the gaze. Nouvelle and gaze thus play upon deception and misunderstanding. The gap between seen and unseen, and interior and exterior is never re-absorbed, whatever efforts – obscene, comic, erotic – are used by the characters of the Cent Nouvelles nouvelles. Seeing remains, in the strict sense, a business of points of view and, for the seer, is simultaneously pleasurable and frustrating.
9Allegory and anamorphosis: the exercise of a double view
Fabienne POMEL
In addition to the « literary anamorphosis » that was often combined with allegory in the Middle Ages (acrostics, carmina figurata), allegory and anamorphosis share the procedure of analogical duplication. Rhetorical combinations and paradigmatic variation are technical equivalents of the mirror or anamorphotic projection. They require the exercise of a double view, literal or figurative, a hermeneutic work that can lead to the divine sign (Raban Maur) or to establishing the limits of the sign beyond the questioning of its univocal functioning (the great Rhetoricians). Anamorphosis, finally, can be envisioned as the model for representing the world and especially both man – the deformed earthly image of God – and the pure soul that penitence must allow to emerge.
10« And believe that the letters will be carved on trees ». The place of carved trees in the Renaissance pastoralLaurence GIAVARINI
This essay will analyze some versions of a topos of pastoral poetry since Antiquity, and which, in the Renaissance, can be encountered in various genres: epic, eclogues, narration, theater. The path thus proceeds by means of a generic reframing and a chronology (from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the first years of the seventeenth), which is sometimes modified by the directions of the problematic. Some constants are disengaged – the double question of mourning and memory » but important modifications in the status of writing are also established: if, in the middle of the sixteenth century, the carved trees can still leave the trace of the fundamental orality of poetry, to which the gaze, finally, is not very important, it will no longer be the same in the « autumn of the Renaissance » when the written signifier participates fully in the complete meaning of the topos. In all cases, it seems that the carved trees can be read in relation to the central question of representation: that of the real presence.
11The appearance of the paratext
Jean-Max COLARD
The invention of the book is also the invention of a reading, of a gaze that bears on the text. This is why this study is concerned with the situation of the paratext at the beginning of the sixteenth century: with the printed book, prefaces, dedications, epistles, sonnets, errata, are multiplied on each side of the text. It is as if a peripheral space that is detached from the text has been created. A border zone is shared between the printer and the writer. This space is both literary and social; it is a matter of following the appearance of the gaze but it is also necessary to examine its indecision and duality.
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