The Romance of the Rose

The Romance of the Rose occupies a unique position in the medieval French literary tradition, widely recognized as the most circulated and well-known French narrative poem across Europe, from the late thirteenth to the early sixteenth century. This chapter attempts to situate the two parts of the romance, attributed to two authors, within the production of verse narrative in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. By evoking the transition from orally-produced epic poetry to learned adaptations of Latin and Celtic narratives in the French vernacular, it attempts to articulate the profound impact of the Rose upon the establishment of the figure widely known as the clerkly narrator. The first author, Guillaume de Lorris, definitively developed the figure of the first-person narrator/lover figure, while the second, Jean de Meun, used the fictional ambiguity of dual authorship to create a paradigm of the deceptive narrator that will have a rich afterlife in late medieval literature.

Lê Tuyên’s literary criticism and Camus’s existentialist philosophy

Lê Tuyên was among the most notable literary critics of South Vietnam during the period 1954 – 1975. He has been best known for being one of the first Vietnamese to adopt and apply phenomenological criticism, especially Bachelardian analysis of the imaginaire and poetic reveries. However, in our opinion, there are other philosophical views rather than Bachelardian thought embedded in Lê Tuyên’s literary criticism, one of which is existentialist ideas. In this paper, based on the fact that Lê Tuyên frequently cited Camus and published several articles introducing Camus’s ideas, we would like to discover the notable relationship between Lê Tuyên and Albert Camus with an aim to get deeper insight into the existential perspective in Lê Tuyên’s literary criticism. We thus make a comparison between Camus’s existentialist philosophy and Lê Tuyên’s view of human life presented in his works of literary criticism. There are two main similarities. Firstly, Camus and Lê Tuyên both focused on discovering and analyzing the absurdity of human condition. They also both argued that absurdity is not a property of life, but an experience formed in our relationship with the world. Secondly, while analyzing the revolt of heroes and heroines in Vietnamese late-medieval literature agaisnt absurdity, Lê Tuyên agreed with Camus that illusory hopes, metaphysical beliefs and ignorant rebellions should be criticized, but it is crucial to dialogue with life, to fully understand what life is and what we truly are.

David K. Coley, Death and the Pearl-Maiden: Plague, Poetry, England. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 2018, 220 pp.

David K. Coley (Associate Professor of English, Simon Fraser University, British Columbia) has produced an intriguing new book examining the four poems of the Pearl Manuscript, Cotton Nero A.x. – Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – in the context of late-medieval English and European plague treatises, texts, and discourses. Coley considers the Black Plague as a cultural trauma, which deeply affected the poet, who, motivated either by subconscious post-traumatic feeling or conscious artistry, used the same language and exempla used in plague texts in key passages of his poems. Coley indicates that his goal in the book <?page nr="470"?>is “to investigate how the history of the medieval plague experience might be simultaneously forgotten and remembered in late medieval literature” (5) and, more specifically, to examine:

Transformationen Vergils in der spätmittelalterlichen Literatur: Sangspruchdichtung und Ablassverzeichnisse

The narrative complex about Vergil the magician, which is increasingly present in the Latin literature since the 11th century as well as in the vernacular literature since the 13th century, gave rise to various researches. Not all testimonials of reception are however documented, especially those of the late medieval literature. Primarily genres like the Mirabilia Romae or the Indulgentiae ecclesiarum Urbis Romae remained widely unconsidered on that premise although several facets of Vergil as a literary figure were being invoked here. Moreover, only little attention is paid so far to the question of the function that corresponds to the Vergil-narratives within the individual texts. This contribution focuses on the transformations of Vergil as a literary figure within the Indulgentiae ecclesiarum Urbis Romae as well as their functionalization in these texts. With a view to the Sangspruchdichtung of the 14th and 15th century, the possible interpretations of the narratives are being explored. Der narrative Komplex um den Zauberer Vergil, der in der lateinischen Literatur ab dem 11. Jahrhundert und in den volkssprachigen Literaturen ab dem 13. Jahrhundert zunehmend präsent ist, hat zu verschiedenen Untersuchungen Anlass gegeben. Dennoch sind nicht alle Rezeptionszeugnisse vor allem der spätmittelalterlichen Literatur erfasst. Insbesondere Gattungen wie die Mirabilia Romae oder die Ablassverzeichnisse (Indulgentiae ecclesiarum urbis Romae) blieben unter dieser Prämisse weitgehend unberücksichtigt, obwohl hier verschiedene Facetten Vergils als literarische Figur aufgerufen werden. Überdies hat man der Frage, welche Funktion den Vergil-Narrativen in den Einzeltexten zukommt, bisher nur wenig Beachtung geschenkt. Im Zentrum des Beitrags stehen die Transformationen Vergils als literarische Figur in den Indulgentiae ecclesiarum urbis Romae und deren Funktionalisierung in diesen Texten. Mit Blick auf die Sangspruchdichtung des 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts werden die Deutungsmöglichkeiten der Narrative ausgelotet.