Hate Speech and French Mediaeval Literature

Hate speech is spoken or written word which expresses a hostile attitude of a dominating majority towards any kind of minority. The author analyses a few examples of hate speech in literary history and concludes that such a phenomenon is typical of The Song of Roland, whether uttered in a direct way or spoken between the lines. One will expect hate speech in epic and heroic poetry, less in the Troubadour poetry. Yet we come across this awkward characteristic even in their love poetry. To be quite clear, in the poetry of Bernart de Ventadorn. The last part of the article is about the courtly romance. The author concludes that hate speech can only be controlled by love, not any, but the love that makes one a better person, and which the Troubadours called fin’amors.

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Abschlussschwäche? Die closure des höfischen Romans zwischen Mediengeschichte und Kulturpoetik

POETICA ◽

10.30965/25890530-05102004 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 51 (3-4) ◽

pp. 276-311

Author(s):

Florian Kragl

Keyword(s):

Literary History ◽

Media History ◽

Middle High German ◽

Static State ◽

Courtly Romance ◽

Cultural Poetics ◽

Narrative Progression

Abstract The article deals with the closure of the, mostly Middle High German, courtly romance, taking as primary example Heinrich von Veldeke’s Eneide. ‘Courtly closure’ is defined as a slow and tenacious fading of narrative progression, by means of gradually transforming this progression into a virtually static state, namely, the description of an enduring courtly feast. It is argued that this way of bringing a romance or a novel to its end – unusual in the course of European literary history – is motivated by several factors. Amongst these, special attention is paid to media history (episodic narration, recital) and to cultural poetics (didactic qualities of the courtly romance).

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Unmasking Color Racism

Dialogue and Universalism ◽

10.5840/du20213114 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 31 (1) ◽

pp. 41-67

Author(s):

Robert Elliott Allinson ◽

Keyword(s):

Racial Discrimination ◽

Hate Speech ◽

Minority Group ◽

Racial Prejudice ◽

The Political ◽

The Social ◽

Prejudice And Discrimination ◽

Psychological Foundation ◽

Political Economic ◽

Hostile Attitude

One reason Aristotle is distinguished as a philosopher is that he thought the philosopher investigated the causes of things. This paper raises the question: What are the causes of racial prejudice and racial discrimination. All ethical beings know that racial prejudice and racial discrimination are morally wrong, deplorable and should be completely eradicated. Deanna Jacobsen Koepke refers to Holt’s definitions in distinguishing racism from prejudice: “Racism is defined as hostility toward a group of people based on alleged inferiorities. Racism is a system of power and privilege that is at the foundation of society’s structures rather than prejudice, which is a hostile attitude toward a person based on trait he or she is assumed to have due to group membership.” This concept squarely places racism as the culprit to be extinguished. In this article, it is to be argued that to define racism as the target is only to observe the manifest phenomenon. The argument of the article is that racial prejudice and discrimination rest upon four pillars: political, economic, social and cultural. For simplicity of explanation, the social and cultural pillars shall be considered under the category of the political pillar, although the distinction between these pillars shall be noted. This article argues that these four pillars themselves, rest upon a foundation. The foundation is the deep psychological fear of the current, existing dominant economic group that the current existing dominated minority group will eventually usurp the power of the dominant economic group. The manifest form that this type of fear assumes is racial prejudice and discrimination. In its most extreme forms it then manifests as hate speech, hate action, hate brutality and hate murder.2 These manifestations provide the fuel that maintains the power imbalance and provides a camouflage for the four pillars that lie beneath the racist exterior. In this article, the political and economic pillars that underlie color racism will be examined first. The underlying deep psychological foundation shall be treated separately. In the end, the argument of this article is that color racism cannot be fully extinguished until its role as providing a mask for the underlying four pillars that consistently support inequality between different groups or classes are uprooted and the deep psychological fear that underlies them is eliminated.3 The masked function of color racism is its enormous power in perpetuating inequality; hence, the title of this paper, Unmasking Color Racism.

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Stolen Song

10.7591/cornell/9781501747571.001.0001 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Eliza Zingesser

Keyword(s):

Cultural Identity ◽

French Literature ◽

Literary History ◽

Cultural Appropriation ◽

Medieval Studies ◽

New Approach ◽

Troubadour Poetry

This book documents the act of cultural appropriation that created a founding moment for French literary history: the rescripting and domestication of troubadour song, a prestige corpus in the European sphere, as French. This book also documents the simultaneous creation of an alternative point of origin for French literary history—a body of faux-archaic Occitanizing songs. Most scholars would find the claim that troubadour poetry is the origin of French literature uncomplicated and uncontroversial. However, this book shows that the “Frenchness” of this tradition was invented, constructed, and confected by francophone medieval poets and compilers keen to devise their own literary history. The book makes a major contribution to medieval studies both by exposing this act of cultural appropriation as the origin of the French canon and by elaborating a new approach to questions of political and cultural identity. It shows that these questions, usually addressed on the level of narrative and theme, can also be fruitfully approached through formal, linguistic, and manuscript-oriented tools.

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The Writer's Audience is Always a Fiction

PMLA ◽

10.2307/461344 ◽

1975 ◽

Vol 90 (1) ◽

pp. 9-21 ◽

Cited By ~ 130

Author(s):

Walter J. Ong

Keyword(s):

Literary History ◽

Oral Communication ◽

Spoken Word ◽

Written Communication ◽

Oral Performance ◽

Human Communication ◽

The Real ◽

Diary Writing ◽

Written Word ◽

The Way

AbstractWhereas the spoken word is part of present actuality, the written word normally is not. The writer, in isolation, constructs a role for his “audience” to play, and readers fictionalize themselves to correspond to the author's projection. The way readers fictionalize themselves shifts throughout literary history: Chaucer, Lyly, Nashe, Hemingway, and others furnish cases in point. All writing, from scientific monograph to history, epistolary correspondence, and diary writing, fictionalizes its readers. In oral performance, too, some fictionalizing of audience occurs, but in the live interaction between narrator and audience there is an existential relationship as well: the oral narrator modifies his story in accord with the real—not imagined—fatigue, enthusiasm, or other reactions of his listeners. Fictionalizing of audiences correlates with the use of masks or personae marking human communication generally, even with oneself. Lovers try to strip off all masks, and oral communication in a context of love can reduce masks to a minimum. In written communication and, a fortiori, print the masks are less removable.

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