This study brings the songs of the trouvères to an encounter with Lacanian psychoanalytic theories of signification, sexual difference and unconscious desire. In trouvère song desire functions as a means of generic and "genderic" differentiation. The trouvères distinguished between sexual need or lust and desire, the latter usually confined to the masculine voice in high style. Less exalted persons, in whose company women were alreadyimplicitly included, appear as incapable of desire in the 'fin'amors' register. Critics have treated the issue of desire as represented in the courtly chanson but, because criticism has followed the trouvères' distinction between desire and need, discussion of desire has been limited to songs in the courtly register rather than across the system of genres. Desire in Lacan's sense, that is unconscious desire, is present in all genres and voices and this book unearths the unspoken desires of trouvère song by an attention to the characteristic means by which subjects subvert their demands in different genres.
Author(s): Helen Dell
Series: Gallica, 10
Publisher: D. S. Brewer
Year: 2008
Language: English
Pages: 254
City: Cambridge
Acknowledgements vii
Abbreviations ix
Introduction: A Kaleidoscope of différance 1
1. The Song System I 23
An Unstable Hierarchy: The Unmarked Masculine
2. The Song System II 42
The Ignoble Words of Eve: Femininity in the System
3. Desire by Gender and Genre I 69
Low Lusts and High Desires: 'Pastourelle' and 'Chanson'
4. Desire by Gender and Genre II 96
Ignoble Desires of the Triumphalist 'Chanson d’Ami'
5. Chronotopes of Desire I 115
Case-Study of a 'Malmariée': Feminine Space-Times
6. Chronotopes of Desire II 141
The Contained and Containing Heart: Masculine Space-Times
7. Desiring Differently 166
The 'Chanson' in the Feminine Voice
Afterthoughts 204
''[T]hat’s not it' and 'that’s still not it''
Bibliography 211
Index 229
