Abstract
These epigraphs map out three intersecting dimensions of the central problem that this book seeks to address.1 Basing its approach on close readings of fictional figures of women poets within a specific corpus of thirteenth-through fifteenth-century French works, it aims to rethink portrayals of literary creation, as performed by gendered bodies, within a cultural context in which individual authorship remains a problematic concept. This is not a study of author figures; it is a study of some of the figures who appear in what Foucault calls the “gaps,” “breaches,” and “openings that [the author’s] disappearance uncovers.”
The author is not a medieval concept.
Bernard Cerquiglini, In Praise of the Variant
What does it mean to read (for) the woman writer when the Author is Dead?
Nancy K. Miller, “Changing the Subject”
It is not enough, however, to repeat the empty affirmation that the author has disappeared. […] Instead, we must locate the space left empty by the author’s disappearance, follow the distribution of gaps and breaches, and watch for the openings that this disappearance uncovers.
Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?”
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Notes
Epigraphs from Bernard Cerquiglini, In Praise of the Variant (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), p. 8.
Nancy Miller, Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 107.
Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in Dits et Ecrits I: 1954–1988, ed. Daniel Defert, François Ewald, and Jacques Lagrange (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), p. 824.
Josué V. Harari in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), p. 145 [141–60].
Virginie Greene, “What Happened to Medievalists After the Death of the Author?” in The Medieval Author in Medieval French Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 205–27.
Stephen Nichols, “The Medieval ‘Author’: An Idea Whose Time Hadn’t Come?” in The Medieval Author, pp. 77–102.
Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (London: Scolar Press, 1984), p. 12.
Anne Berthelot, Figures et fonction de l’écrivain au 13e siècle (Montréal: Institut d’Etudes Médiévales, 1991), p. 24.
R. Howard Bloch’s magisterial The Anonymous Marie de France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
Elizabeth Grosz, “Sexual Signatures: Feminism After the Death of the Author,” in Space, Time, and Perversion (New York: Routledge: 1995), pp. 9–24.
Albrecht Classen, The Power ofa Woman’s Voice in Medieval and Early Modern Literatures (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2007).
Peter Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
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Nichols, “Medieval Women and the Politics of Poetry,” in Displacements: Women, Tradition, Literatures in French, ed. Joan DeJean and Nancy K. Miller (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), p. 108 [99–125].
Anne L. Klinck, “Introduction,” in Medieval Woman’s Song, ed. Klinck and Ann Marie Rasmussen (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), pp. 1–5.
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Joan Ferrante, Woman as Image in Medieval Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), pp. 6–7.
Roberta Krueger, “Desire, Meaning, and the Female Reader: The Problem in Chrétien’s Charrete,” in Lancelot and Guinevere: A Casebook, ed. Lori J. Walters (New York: Garland, 1996), esp. pp. 229–30 [229–45].
Burns, Bodytalk: When Women Speak on Old French Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), p. xii.
Simon Gaunt, Retelling the Tale: An Introduction to Medieval French Literature (London: Duckworth, 2001), pp. 58–60.
Carolyn Cooper, Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender, and the “Vulgar” Body of Jamaican Popular Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995).
Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), p. 133.
Foley, “Orality, Textuality and Interpretation,” in Vox intexta: Orality and Textuality in the Middle Ages, ed. A.N. Doane and Carol Braun Pasternack (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), pp. 34–45.
Nichols, “Voice and Writing in Augustine and in the Troubadour Lyric,” in Vox intexta: Orality and Textuality in the Middle Ages, ed. A.N. Doane and Carol Braun Pasternack (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), pp. 139–41.
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Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 36.
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Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, Shaping Romance: Interpretation, Truth, and Closure in Twelfth-Century French Fictions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), pp. 178–79.
Griffin, “Gender and Authority in the Medieval French Lai,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 35 (1999): 42–43 [42–56].
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© 2012 Brooke Heidenreich Findley
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Findley, B.H. (2012). Introduction Authors, Writers, Singers, and Women: Gendering Literary Creation in Medieval French Culture. In: Poet Heroines in Medieval French Narrative. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137113061_1
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