Fortune's faces: The 'Roman de la Rose' and the poetics of contingency

This dissertation reconsiders the place of the Roman de la Rose of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun in the diverse traditions of medieval poetry, poetics and philosophy. In contrast to the classical philological and critical works on the two-part romance, which fault it for its discontinuities and apparent lack of unity, Fortune's Faces suggests that the significance of the Roman de la Rose as a whole lies precisely in the ruptures and digressions that characterize it. It argues that the poem, at each of its interruptions, presents itself as capable of being other than it is and, in this sense, as the work of a genuine poetics of contingency.;The dissertation is composed of four chapters, each of which seeks to unfold and define the possibilities of contingency for poetic language. Chapter One articulates the general theoretical and philosophical problematic of the study as a whole; it argues that, in the tradition of medieval philosophy and logic, speech that bears on contingency constitutes a limit form of discourse that can be defined as a model for the vernacular literary languages of the Middle Ages. Chapter Two, which opens the discussion of the Roman de la Rose, considers the "I" of the poem as the cipher of a literary subjectivity that marks the entire romance as an essentially contingent work. Chapter Three interprets the figure of Fortune in the two parts of the poem as the fundamental persona ficta of the contingency at work in the construction of the romance. Chapter Four analyzes the extended discussion of free will and divine prescience in the concluding part of the romance, situating it with respect to its appropriation and displacement of the medieval philosophical and theological problem of future contingents.;As a whole, the dissertation thus defines contingency as a fundamental problem in medieval philosophy of language and poetics (Chapter One) and, then, examines its operation in the Roman de la Rose as a formal structure (Chapter Two), a rhetorical figure (Chapter Three) and, finally, as a quaestio that is at once philosophical and literary (Chapter Four).