Desiring Bodies

Gregory Heyworth

Description

Gregory Heyworth’s Desiring Bodies considers the physical body and its relationship to poetic and corporate bodies in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Beginning in the odd contest between body and form in the first sentence of Ovid’s protean Metamorphoses, Heyworth identifies these concepts as structuring principles of civic and poetic unity and pursues their consequences as refracted through a series of romances, some typical of the genre, some problematically so.

Bodies, in Ovidian romance, are the objects of human desire to possess, to recover, to form, or to violate. Part 1 examines this desire as both a literal and socio-political phenomenon through readings of Marie de France’s Lais, Chrétien de Troyes’ Cligès and Perceval, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, texts variously expressing social, economic, and political culture in romance. In part 2, Heyworth is concerned with missing or absent bodies in Petrarch’s Rime sparse, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and Milton’s Paradise Lost and the generic rupture they cause in lyric, tragedy, and epic. Throughout, Heyworth draws on social theorists such as Kant, Weber, Simmel, and Elias to explore the connection between social and literary form.

The first comparative, diachronic study of romance form in many years, Desiring Bodies is a persuasive and important cultural history that demonstrates Ovid’s pervasive influence not only on the poetics but on the politics of the medieval and early modern Western tradition.

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Medieval
• HISTORY
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Perceval
• María de Francia (poetisa)
• Edad Media
• Lais
• Simmel
• Elias
• General officer
• Middle Ages
• Latin America
• Immanuel Kant
• Lais (homonymie)
• General
• Élie (prénom)
• Milton
• Weber
• Perceval (légende arthurienne)
• Marie de France
• Emmanuel Kant
• Georg Simmel

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 30 juillet 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268081607
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

Ovidian Romance

Cult of Form

B o D i e sD e s i r i n g

Ovidian D e s i r i n g B o D i e s Romance and ThE Cult of Form

GreGory HeywortH

d e s i r i n g b o d i e s

D E S I R I N G B O D I E S

Ovidian Romance

and the

Cult of Form m

G R E G O R Y H E Y W O R T H

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana

Copyright ©2009by University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana46556 www.undpress.nd.edu All Rights Reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data

Heyworth, Gregory,1967–  Desiring bodies : Ovidian romance and the cult of form / Gregory Heyworth.  p. cm.  Includes bibliographical references and index.  ISBN 13:9780268031060(pbk. : alk. paper)  ISBN10: 0268031061(pbk. : alk. paper) 1Medieval—History and criticism. Literature,  2. Literature, Medieval—Roman influences.3. Ovid,43B.C.–17or18A.D.— Influence. 4. Human body in literature.5in literature.. Desire 6. Romances—History and criticism.7English—History. Romances, and criticism.8. English literature—Early modern,1500–1700— History and criticism. I. Title.  PN681.5.H492009 809'.933561—dc22 2009017561

This book is printed on recycled paper.

Contents

Acknowledgments and Note on Translation

Polemical Preface

Introduction

PA R T I . The Sociology of Romance

1

2

3

Hunting for Civilization: Marie de France and the Sociology of Romance

Economies of Romance: Systems of Value in Chrétien de Troyes

States of Union:Maiestas, Marriage, and the Politics of Coercion in theCanterbury Tales

PA R T I I . Romance Form and Formality

4

5

Missing Bodies and Changed Forms: Literal Metamorphosis in Petrarch’sRime sparse

Playing for Time: Generic Disunities and Ludic Dimensions inRomeo and Juliet

vii

ix

1

25

59

103

179

229

vi

6

Contents

Legends of the Fall: Epic Flights and Indecorous Descents inParadise Lost

List of Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliography

Index

261

295

297

325

349

Acknowledgments

Several people have read and commented on this book in various stages of its ontogeny. The following list gives them public exemp tion from my follies and gratitude for their wisdom: John Fleming, Earl Miner, Larry Danson, Robert Hanning, T. P. Roche, Ivo Kamps, and Rosette Liberman. I am grateful as well to the anonymous readers from the University of Notre Dame Press. On matters classical, I owe debts to Jamie Masters and Kirk Zavieh. Earlier versions of portions of this book have appeared as articles inNeophilologus(vol.84, 2000), Yearbook of English Studies (vol.30, 2000), andRomania (vol.120, 2002), and I wish to thank the editors and publishers for permission to reprint. For everything above and beyond the commas, I owe my wife, Sandra Knispel. This book is dedicated to the memory of Earl Miner.

Note on Translation

I have attempted, as far as possible, to use standard English transla tions of texts, primary and secondary. For Ovid and the Latin classics, for example, I have used the Loeb. The translations from Old French are my own. On occasion, I have needed to correct translations from other languages in available editions or make my own. For that rea son, I have provided the original, either in the text or the notes, for nonEnglish sources.

vii

Polemical Preface

A preface, it seems to me, is an appropriate place to claim what a book is and does, to warn of what it isn’t and doesn’t, and to dispel miscon ceptions of how it does and aims to do. This book does not contribute to studies of classical influence in the traditional sense. It does not survey sources and analogues. The archeology of literary allusion falls outside its province. Stones are left unturned. While this book negoti ates passages of literature at close quarters, it discovers in them issues of intellectual history and social and generic form. At its broadest, this is a history of what Norbert Elias called the “civilizing process” of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, a collab orative fantasy between society and the literature of civic values that shapes and provides the material grounds of culture. For Elias, the lo cus of this process lay in courtesy manuals. For me it lies in romance, a genre that absorbs from Ovidian models a struggle between the de sire for individual selfrealization and the desire for group identity, between inclusion and exclusion, between the love of the body as a material thing and as a synecdoche of the larger body of society. The animating theory of this book turns on the odd contest in the first sentence of Ovid’sMetamorphoses between the termscorpus andforma,which function as structuring principles of civic and poetic unity. Their thematic importunity and connection to Ovid’sperpe tuumcarmen, however, also suggest an anxiety underlying the work, a sense that formal cohesion, societal or poetic, cannot truly exist or that if it does exist it cannot long endure. If theMetamorphosesteaches one lesson, it is that the defining moment of humanness realizes a reversion to animalism. As the bodies of Ovid’s protagonists devolve, so too do the associational bonds that limn our collective humanity,

i

x