| This dissertation offers a step-by-step discovery of Guillaume de Lorris' Romance of the Rose as a mnemonic landscape, illustrating the correspondences between Man's conflicting desires, and his place in the "fallen" world.;The first chapter outlines the visual architecture progressively unveiled in the text. Each stage of the hero's quest for the rose is accompanied by key images, designed to fit into a global system of analogies and contrasts.;The second chapter presents textual evidence suggesting that Guillaume's book should be read according to a systematic use of metaphors, associated with images of daylight and awakening. This approach unveils multiple analogies between the hero's, the narrator's and the reader's experiences and the cyclic order of Nature, respectively.;The third chapter analyzes the description of the magic garden where most of the hero's experiences take place. Careful reading of the text reveals that the nature of the garden may be interpreted on four different levels: literal, allegorical, moral and spiritual.;The fourth chapter is focused on the central episode of the "fountain of Narcissus." The visualization of this story reveals that Narcissus died after seeing his own image from four different perspectives, and that he may exemplify four types of readers. His death illustrates the weaknesses of human perceptions and serves as a call for reparation.;The fifth chapter demonstrates that all data presented in the preceding chapters justify a new understanding of the text and of its apparent incompletion. Four successive readings may allow the reader to "see" a complete story.;The rose symbol represents a superposition of mediations, reflecting in succession one ideal mediation between the human and the divine. This archetypal reconciliation is in turn reflected in the Romance of the Rose, whose narrator has attempted to repair language, and to capture an echo of Adam's original speech. The thesis ends with arguments showing that this endeavor may have stemmed from either a religious or an alchemical context. |
