Sign-In
Cart
Fortune's Faces: The Roman de la Rose and the Poetics of Contingency
Hardcover
Series: Parallax: Re-Visions of Culture and Society
Literary CriticismPoetry Criticism
ISBN13: 9780801871917
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: Oct 9 2003
Pages: 224
Weight: 0.97
Height: 0.73 Width: 6.12 Depth: 9.36
Language: English
Arguably the single most influential literary work of the European Middle Ages, the Roman de la Rose of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun has traditionally posed a number of difficulties to modern critics, who have viewed its many interruptions and philosophical discussions as signs of a lack of formal organization and a characteristically medieval predilection for encyclopedic summation. In Fortune's Faces, Daniel Heller-Roazen calls into question these assessments, offering a new and compelling interpretation of the romance as a carefully constructed and far-reaching exploration of the place of fortune, chance, and contingency in literary writing.
Situating the Romance of the Rose at the intersection of medieval literature and philosophy, Heller-Roazen shows how the thirteenth-century work invokes and radicalizes two classical and medieval traditions of reflection on language and contingency: that of the Provençal, French, and Italian love poets, who sought to compose their verses of pure nothingin a language Dante defined as without grammar, and that of Aristotle's discussion of future contingents as it was received and refined in the logic, physics, theology, and epistemology of Boethius, Abelard, Albert the Great, and Thomas Aquinas.Through a close analysis of the poetic text and a detailed reconstruction of the logical and metaphysical concept of contingency, Fortune's Faces charts the transformations that literary structures (such as subjectivity, autobiography, prosopopoeia, allegory, and self-reference) undergo in a work that defines itself as radically contingent. Considered in its full poetic and philosophical dimensions, the Romance of the Rose thus acquires an altogether new significance in the history of literature: it appears as a work that incessantly explores its own capacity to be other than it is.
Also in
Poetry Criticism
The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry
Laux, Dorianne
Addonizio, Kim
Paperback
Letters to a Young Poet: With the Letters to Rilke from the ''Young Poet''
Searls, Damion
Rilke, Rainer Maria
Kappus, Franz Xaver
Hardcover
Poem a Day: 366 Poems, Old and New - One for Each Day of the Year
McCosker, Karen
Albery, Nicolas
Paperback
Faeries, Sprites & Malevolent Spirits: An Anthology of Classic Poetry & Stories
Thorne, Aurora
Hardcover
Flint and Feather: The Complete Poems of E. Pauline Johnson, Tekahionwake (1922)
Johnson, E. Pauline
Paperback
Poetry from Spaceship Earth: Empire and Ecology in Post-1945 American Poetry
Rahimtoola, Samia
Paperback
The Answer / La Respuesta (Expanded Edition): Including Sor Filotea's Letter and New Selected Poems
de la Cruz, Sor Juana Inés
Paperback
The Enclosures of Free Verse: Racializing Poetic Form in the Modernist Era
Kappeler, Erin Joyce
Paperback
Toward a Living Archive of African Poetry: Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani on the New-Generation African Poets Chapbook Series
Dawes, Kwame
Abani, Chris
Paperback
Leaves of Grass: The Complete 1855 and 1891-92 Editions: A Library of America Paperback Classic
Whitman, Walt
Paperback