| This dissertation has two primary objectives. First, a descriptive, analytical study designed to examine tectonics and compositional strategies in Chretien and Chaucer is undertaken. Special emphasis is placed on hitherto overlooked elements of medieval dispositio. Time relations, for example, are explored in terms of order, duration and frequency. The second aim, is to demonstrate how discourse and narration in Yvain and Troilus are shaped by remnants of orality and by a gradually evolving textuality. The attempt is made to define this new textuality and to describe its dynamics. To this end, such issues as acts and levels of narration, communicational processes between narrator and narratee, moments of enunciation, as well as the expanding role of the secular auctor, are probed. While Genettian narratology is employed in the scrutiny of dispositio in the first part of this thesis, Anglo-American narratology, with its emphasis on pragmatics, is deployed in the exploration of narratio in the second part.;The fundamental goal of such a narratology would be to attempt an adequate answer to the questions "what is literature?" and "what is writing?" in the high and late Middle Ages. The answers advanced in this dissertation are partially based on the examination of the conflict between the medieval principle of clarity, or manifestatio, and the ambiguity engendered by the written word. The medieval author is torn between "clarifying" his text, on the one hand, and opening the door for polysemy, on the other. Without doubt, the roots of this tension have to be sought in the transition from orality to textuality. Sophisticated modi legendi and metafictional gloss, dramatized narrator-focalizors, elaborate authorial personae, and authorial signatures in abstracts and codas, are means by which Chretien, Chaucer and others control their writing and facilitate reception and decoding. (Abstract shortened with permission of author.);Chretien's and Chaucer's works are placed synchonically within the larger context of medieval literary tradition. The findings, hypotheses and arguments proffered, however, remain corpus-specific and can not be transferred wholesale to other works of the same period. Consequently, this dissertation is a first step towards the elaboration of a "medieval narratology" which would ideally be suited for the scrutiny of the problematics of any medieval narrative. |
