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Shaping Absurdity in Medieval Romance: Reductio ad Absurdum as Narrative Structure.

Record Type:	Electronic resources : Monograph/item
Title/Author:	Shaping Absurdity in Medieval Romance: Reductio ad Absurdum as Narrative Structure./
Author:	Smith, Ryan.
Published:	Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, : 2021,
Description:	271 p.
Notes:	Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 83-01, Section: A.
Contained By:	Dissertations Abstracts International83-01A.
Subject:	Medieval literature. -
Online resource:	https://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/advanced?query=28418865
ISBN:	9798516935695

Shaping Absurdity in Medieval Romance: Reductio ad Absurdum as Narrative Structure.
Smith, Ryan.

Shaping Absurdity in Medieval Romance: Reductio ad Absurdum as Narrative Structure. - Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2021 - 271 p.

Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 83-01, Section: A.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--State University of New York at Buffalo, 2021.

This item must not be sold to any third party vendors.

This dissertation performs an archeology of the reductio ad absurdum in theology and romance texts of the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. Intervening in the fields of romance, logic, and rhetoric, this dissertation asserts the value of this rhetorical structure as an anchoring point for understanding epistemic ruptures within Latin and vernacular traditions. While several canonical theologians during this period implemented the reductio to close off debate and project absurdity onto an argumentative other, thinkers as early as Abelard influenced romance poets with a critical discourse that interrogated the failure of their own institutional ideologies. My thesis re-reads French and English romance by foregrounding the role of the reductio in structuring critical narratives of resistance against generic and social ideologies. In the logical arguments of medieval theology, the reductio is typically found as a protasis-apodosis unit that reveals an absurdity arbitrarily constructed through political and doctrinal biases. Romance, however, narrativizes this form, stretching it across the pages of plots that lead specific ideologies to their absurd conclusions. No currently published scholarship investigates the reductio as a structural feature of medieval romance narratives. Whether in the theological context of affirming audience expectations or romance's critical disillusionment, the reductio functions as a medium for reimagining textual culture in the twelfth- to fourteenth centuries, a medium that insists on relocating logical and rhetorical failure at the core of human experience. In a landmark monograph on medieval poststructuralisms, Philipp Rosemann argues that an "open circle" (i.e. incomplete or imperfect) form of thinking proliferated familiarity with ideological failure within a cultural and literary consciousness. The linchpin of Rosemann's argument is that serious attention to failure, envisioned through an open-circle thought structure rather than a closed-circle system of divine signification, did not appear until Aquinas. Positioning my work alongside revisionary medievalists such as Andrew Cole and Peter Haidu, I open by problematizing Rosemann's chronology. My argument explores the open circle within a reductio framework of signification that predates Aquinas by several centuries. The first chapter argues that during early Scholasticism the reductio, because of its inherent polarization of rhetoric and ideas, re-emerged in response to the eleventh-century radicalization of ratio (reason). Proto-scholastic thinkers such as Odo of Cambrai and Berengar of Tours redefined reason as synonymous with their doctrines. This inherently political rhetoric became the foundation of scholastic logic, setting the stage for Scholasticism's projections of absurdity through the reductio. Anselm's ontological argument, a ubiquitous piece of medieval logic, functions as an extended reductio. Yet virtually no scholarship considers the form's implications for the argument's projections of ideological failure. Nearly two centuries later, we find Roger Bacon not only composing logic within the reductio, but also offering self-reflective analyses of the form's rhetorically polarizing intent. However, it is Peter Abelard who turns the reductio inward, redirecting sin theory away from its Augustinian origins and toward a human-centered approach that values individual ingenium (character). Because of his intentional juxtaposition of the human and divine experiences, the first chapter considers Abelard a primary influence for French romanciers whose narrative structures critique, parody, and reform the absurd ideals at stake in both romance and medieval culture. Chapter two offers a reconsideration of the subversive structures of three Old French romances (Le Pelerinage de Charlemagne, Beroul's Tristan, and Chretien de Troyes' Erec et Enide) in light of the scholarship of Anne Elizabeth Cobby concerning Old French epic, Michel Zink on subjectivity and fiction, and Virginie Greene on the inheritance and performance of logic in fiction. Le Pelerinage fixates on narrative shape, critiquing the romance convention of the circular quest in which the hero completes a circle by actualizing his formulaic qualities. In this text, Charlemagne absurdly caricatures medieval political power. He transports his troops en masse on a geographically nonsensical pseudo-pilgrimage at the whim of a domestic dispute and returns having accomplished nothing, instantiating failure as a hallmark of the nascent genre. Beroul realizes the force of dialogue by locating rhetorical influence in the hands of clerical and female characters whose speeches undermine royalty's epistemological grounding. Building a rapport between audience and characters, Beroul's reductio performs the absurdity of political power as a means of producing rhetorical pleasure, a radical textual resistance to the arbitrary absolutisms of mid-twelfth-century France. Chretien's text pushes the reductio toward social reform, as husband and wife characters articulate a revision of contemporary marriage conventions. Gratian's Decretum outlined what marriage should look like, but he did not deal realistically with the violence endemic to aristocratic practitioners of chivalry. Chretien's narrative shapes itself around the reaffirmation of Erec and Enide's love through acts of violence against those who misinterpret the couple's relationship. This poetics of violence commands a trans-register effect that corrects characters' myopic hermeneutics through physical violence, while disabusing audiences of their societal expectations for marriage. In each of these texts, narrative shape structures the play between epistemology and identity, between failed ideal and lived praxis. Chapter three turns to late-fourteenth-century Middle English romance and its poetic revision of a crumbling chivalric ideal. In the first section of this chapter I examine the Alliterative Revival and repurpose a scholarly focus (e.g., Hanna, Turville-Petre, and Schiff) on whether or not this "movement" expresses nationalism. I argue that two exemplary texts featuring alliterative verse, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Siege of Jerusalem, are framed through a reductio narrative structure that allows the authors to convey variously intentioned communities of ideas. A preliminary reading of Sir Gawain reveals its absurd performances of idealisms such as monarchical solidity and time as a matrix of translatio imperii, while a full engagement with Siege of Jerusalem analyzes its propagandist inscriptions of the virtual Jew as other through absurd violence. The second section turns its full attention to Sir Gawain, the narrative framework of which compels the titular "hero" to actualize the contradictory ideals of chivalry according to parallel structures of premises and results. Playing off the readerly expectation of Gawain as romance hero, the narrative unfolds in a parodic performance of romance's absurd demands. While in the abstract these ideals can function seamlessly, the poet distills them into realizations that conceptually and emotionally link abstract logic with rhetorical performativity. Ultimately, Gawain becomes an object of laughter and shame, reshaping the constitutive elements of the chivalric romance hero. Chapter four argues that Chaucer's Canterbury Tales takes up the reductio as a marker of generic resistance to chivalric romance. The Knight's Tale and the Clerk's Tale perform the increasingly unviable ideals of chivalry from distinct perspectives. Chaucer's knightly narrator actualizes the generic tropes of passion and violence outlined in idealistic romances (the Prose Tristan) and sublimated historical accounts (Histoire De Guillaume de Marechal), resulting in a contradictory vision of a passionless, peaceful chivalry.

ISBN: 9798516935695Subjects--Topical Terms:

3168324
Medieval literature.
Subjects--Index Terms:

Latinate theology

Shaping Absurdity in Medieval Romance: Reductio ad Absurdum as Narrative Structure.
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300 $a 271 p.
500 $a Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 83-01, Section: A.
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502 $a Thesis (Ph.D.)--State University of New York at Buffalo, 2021.
506 $a This item must not be sold to any third party vendors.
520 $a This dissertation performs an archeology of the reductio ad absurdum in theology and romance texts of the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. Intervening in the fields of romance, logic, and rhetoric, this dissertation asserts the value of this rhetorical structure as an anchoring point for understanding epistemic ruptures within Latin and vernacular traditions. While several canonical theologians during this period implemented the reductio to close off debate and project absurdity onto an argumentative other, thinkers as early as Abelard influenced romance poets with a critical discourse that interrogated the failure of their own institutional ideologies. My thesis re-reads French and English romance by foregrounding the role of the reductio in structuring critical narratives of resistance against generic and social ideologies. In the logical arguments of medieval theology, the reductio is typically found as a protasis-apodosis unit that reveals an absurdity arbitrarily constructed through political and doctrinal biases. Romance, however, narrativizes this form, stretching it across the pages of plots that lead specific ideologies to their absurd conclusions. No currently published scholarship investigates the reductio as a structural feature of medieval romance narratives. Whether in the theological context of affirming audience expectations or romance's critical disillusionment, the reductio functions as a medium for reimagining textual culture in the twelfth- to fourteenth centuries, a medium that insists on relocating logical and rhetorical failure at the core of human experience. In a landmark monograph on medieval poststructuralisms, Philipp Rosemann argues that an "open circle" (i.e. incomplete or imperfect) form of thinking proliferated familiarity with ideological failure within a cultural and literary consciousness. The linchpin of Rosemann's argument is that serious attention to failure, envisioned through an open-circle thought structure rather than a closed-circle system of divine signification, did not appear until Aquinas. Positioning my work alongside revisionary medievalists such as Andrew Cole and Peter Haidu, I open by problematizing Rosemann's chronology. My argument explores the open circle within a reductio framework of signification that predates Aquinas by several centuries. The first chapter argues that during early Scholasticism the reductio, because of its inherent polarization of rhetoric and ideas, re-emerged in response to the eleventh-century radicalization of ratio (reason). Proto-scholastic thinkers such as Odo of Cambrai and Berengar of Tours redefined reason as synonymous with their doctrines. This inherently political rhetoric became the foundation of scholastic logic, setting the stage for Scholasticism's projections of absurdity through the reductio. Anselm's ontological argument, a ubiquitous piece of medieval logic, functions as an extended reductio. Yet virtually no scholarship considers the form's implications for the argument's projections of ideological failure. Nearly two centuries later, we find Roger Bacon not only composing logic within the reductio, but also offering self-reflective analyses of the form's rhetorically polarizing intent. However, it is Peter Abelard who turns the reductio inward, redirecting sin theory away from its Augustinian origins and toward a human-centered approach that values individual ingenium (character). Because of his intentional juxtaposition of the human and divine experiences, the first chapter considers Abelard a primary influence for French romanciers whose narrative structures critique, parody, and reform the absurd ideals at stake in both romance and medieval culture. Chapter two offers a reconsideration of the subversive structures of three Old French romances (Le Pelerinage de Charlemagne, Beroul's Tristan, and Chretien de Troyes' Erec et Enide) in light of the scholarship of Anne Elizabeth Cobby concerning Old French epic, Michel Zink on subjectivity and fiction, and Virginie Greene on the inheritance and performance of logic in fiction. Le Pelerinage fixates on narrative shape, critiquing the romance convention of the circular quest in which the hero completes a circle by actualizing his formulaic qualities. In this text, Charlemagne absurdly caricatures medieval political power. He transports his troops en masse on a geographically nonsensical pseudo-pilgrimage at the whim of a domestic dispute and returns having accomplished nothing, instantiating failure as a hallmark of the nascent genre. Beroul realizes the force of dialogue by locating rhetorical influence in the hands of clerical and female characters whose speeches undermine royalty's epistemological grounding. Building a rapport between audience and characters, Beroul's reductio performs the absurdity of political power as a means of producing rhetorical pleasure, a radical textual resistance to the arbitrary absolutisms of mid-twelfth-century France. Chretien's text pushes the reductio toward social reform, as husband and wife characters articulate a revision of contemporary marriage conventions. Gratian's Decretum outlined what marriage should look like, but he did not deal realistically with the violence endemic to aristocratic practitioners of chivalry. Chretien's narrative shapes itself around the reaffirmation of Erec and Enide's love through acts of violence against those who misinterpret the couple's relationship. This poetics of violence commands a trans-register effect that corrects characters' myopic hermeneutics through physical violence, while disabusing audiences of their societal expectations for marriage. In each of these texts, narrative shape structures the play between epistemology and identity, between failed ideal and lived praxis. Chapter three turns to late-fourteenth-century Middle English romance and its poetic revision of a crumbling chivalric ideal. In the first section of this chapter I examine the Alliterative Revival and repurpose a scholarly focus (e.g., Hanna, Turville-Petre, and Schiff) on whether or not this "movement" expresses nationalism. I argue that two exemplary texts featuring alliterative verse, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Siege of Jerusalem, are framed through a reductio narrative structure that allows the authors to convey variously intentioned communities of ideas. A preliminary reading of Sir Gawain reveals its absurd performances of idealisms such as monarchical solidity and time as a matrix of translatio imperii, while a full engagement with Siege of Jerusalem analyzes its propagandist inscriptions of the virtual Jew as other through absurd violence. The second section turns its full attention to Sir Gawain, the narrative framework of which compels the titular "hero" to actualize the contradictory ideals of chivalry according to parallel structures of premises and results. Playing off the readerly expectation of Gawain as romance hero, the narrative unfolds in a parodic performance of romance's absurd demands. While in the abstract these ideals can function seamlessly, the poet distills them into realizations that conceptually and emotionally link abstract logic with rhetorical performativity. Ultimately, Gawain becomes an object of laughter and shame, reshaping the constitutive elements of the chivalric romance hero. Chapter four argues that Chaucer's Canterbury Tales takes up the reductio as a marker of generic resistance to chivalric romance. The Knight's Tale and the Clerk's Tale perform the increasingly unviable ideals of chivalry from distinct perspectives. Chaucer's knightly narrator actualizes the generic tropes of passion and violence outlined in idealistic romances (the Prose Tristan) and sublimated historical accounts (Histoire De Guillaume de Marechal), resulting in a contradictory vision of a passionless, peaceful chivalry.
520 $a Similarly, the Clerk manifests the idealization of chivalric violence dispensed in accordance with canon law, but the story of Walter is a harsh portrayal of untamed marital violence. The poetic construction of intertextual disappointment confronts the reader with the illogical relationship between ideology and practice. Scholarship such as Lee Patterson's work on the fourteenth-century crisis of chivalric identity has done much to explain the general connection between Middle English compositional practices and English institutions, but the reductio's aestheticizing of institutional resistance remains unexplored. This dissertation thinks through this rhetorical form's critical poetics to better understand the performances of absurdity at the center of romance.
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650 4 $a Theology. $3 516533
650 4 $a Rhetoric. $3 516647
653 $a Latinate theology
653 $a Logic
653 $a Narrative theory
653 $a Reductio ad absurdum
653 $a Rhetoric
653 $a Romance
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791 $a Ph.D.
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793 $a English
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