Sarah Kay – författare

This is a major reassessment of the relation between the medieval French chansons de geste and the romance genre.Critics have traditionally seen romance as a superior development of the chanson de geste. The chanson de geste are seen as 'formulaic', composed from a public fund of pre-existant and primarily oral narratives and motifs; romance on the other hand, is seen as a more sophisticated product of a newly 'literary' story-telling, line with the more complex social and political conditions of the time. Sarah Kay rejects this 'developmental' model of literary history and, through detailed readings of large numbers of texts - from the well-known Renaut de Montauban or Raoul de Cambrai to the unjustly neglected Doon de la Roche or Orson de Beauvais - reveals the simultaneity of the chansons de geste and romance in medieval culture. Drawing tellingly on recent literary and feminist theory, Kay argues that the chanson de geste and romance are engaged in a productive and telling dialogue; moreover, each genre illuminates the 'political unconscious' of the other: those political conflicts and contradictions that the text attempts to evade and disguise. In particular, Kay contends that romance brings with it new forms of sexism and patriarchy - forms much closer to those of the present - and that these need to be read against the politics of sexual difference inscribed in chansons de geste.

In this lucid and innovative volume, three distinguished scholars trace this history of French literature from its beginnings to the present day. From the oral, unstable anonymous works of the early Middle Ages via the emergence of a print culture in the Renaissance, through to the attempted codification of genres and styles in the nineteenth century and the resourceful experimentation of the twentieth, A Short History of French Literature demonstrates the world importance of French literature, and the extraordinary richness of its range. The three main parts of the volume cover the Middle Ages, the Early Modern period, and the Modern period, and offer wide-ranging, personal, and detailed coverage of major writers and movements. Writing for the interested general reader as much as for students, the authors range expertly between authors and their works, historical events, and literary movements, offering as a whole an authoritative and innovative account of the history of French literature.

This book traces the history of French literature from its beginnings to the present. Within its remarkably brief compass, it offers a wide-ranging, personal, and detailed account of major writers and movements. Developments in French literature are presented in an innovative way, not as an even sequence of literary events but as a series of stories told at varying pace and with different kinds of focus. Readers can thus take in the broad sweep of historical change, grasp the main characteristics of major periods, or enjoy a close appraisal of individual works and their contexts. The book is written in an accessible and non-technical style that will make it attractive to students and to all those who enjoy French Literature.

The songs of the troubadour poets of the south of France were a pervasive influence in the development of the European lyric (and indeed other genres) from the twelfth century to the Renaissance and beyond. Much troubadour poetry is on the topic of love, and is composed from a first-person position. This book is a full-length study of this first-person subject position in its relation to language and society. Using theoretical approaches where appropriate, Sarah Kay discusses to what extent this first person is a 'self' or 'character', and how far it is self-determining. Dr Kay draws on a wide range of troubadour texts, and provides close readings of many of them, as well as translating all medieval quotations into English in order to make the discussion accessible to the non-specialist. Her book will be of interest both to scholars of medieval literature, and to anybody investigating subjectivity in lyric poetry.

The songs of the troubadour poets of the south of France were a pervasive influence in the development of the European lyric (and indeed other genres) from the twelfth century to the Renaissance and beyond. Much troubadour poetry is on the topic of love, and is composed from a first-person position. This book is a full-length study of this first-person subject position in its relation to language and society. Using theoretical approaches where appropriate, Sarah Kay discusses to what extent this first person is a 'self' or 'character', and how far it is self-determining. Dr Kay draws on a wide range of troubadour texts, and provides close readings of many of them, as well as translating all medieval quotations into English in order to make the discussion accessible to the non-specialist. Her book will be of interest both to scholars of medieval literature, and to anybody investigating subjectivity in lyric poetry.

The dazzling culture of the troubadours - the virtuosity of their songs, the subtlety of their exploration of love, and the glamorous international careers some troubadours enjoyed - fascinated contemporaries and had a lasting influence on European life and literature. Apart from the refined love songs for which the troubadours are renowned, the tradition includes political and satirical poetry, devotional lyrics and bawdy or zany poems. It is also in the troubadour song-books that the only substantial collection of medieval lyrics by women is preserved. This book offers a general introduction to the troubadours. Its sixteen newly-commissioned essays, written by leading scholars from Britain, the US, France, Italy and Spain, trace the historical development and setting of troubadour song, engage with the main trends in troubadour criticism, and examine the reception of troubadour poetry. Appendices offer an invaluable guide to the troubadours, to technical vocabulary, to research tools and to surviving manuscripts.

The dazzling culture of the troubadours - the virtuosity of their songs, the subtlety of their exploration of love, and the glamorous international careers some troubadours enjoyed - fascinated contemporaries and had a lasting influence on European life and literature. Apart from the refined love songs for which the troubadours are renowned, the tradition includes political and satirical poetry, devotional lyrics and bawdy or zany poems. It is also in the troubadour song-books that the only substantial collection of medieval lyrics by women is preserved. This book offers a general introduction to the troubadours. Its sixteen newly-commissioned essays, written by leading scholars from Britain, the US, France, Italy and Spain, trace the historical development and setting of troubadour song, engage with the main trends in troubadour criticism, and examine the reception of troubadour poetry. Appendices offer an invaluable guide to the troubadours, to technical vocabulary, to research tools and to surviving manuscripts.

Medieval French literature encompasses 450 years of literary output in Old and Middle French, mostly produced in Northern France and England. These texts, including courtly lyrics, prose and verse romances, dits amoureux and plays, proved hugely influential for other European literary traditions in the medieval period and beyond. This Companion offers a wide-ranging and stimulating guide to literature composed in medieval French from its beginnings in the ninth century until the Renaissance. The essays are grounded in detailed analysis of canonical texts and authors such as the Chanson de Roland, the Roman de la Rose, Villon's Testament, Chrétien de Troyes, Machaut, Christine de Pisan and the Tristan romances. Featuring a chronology and suggestions for further reading, this is the ideal companion for students and scholars in other fields wishing to discover the riches of the French medieval tradition.

Medieval French literature encompasses 450 years of literary output in Old and Middle French, mostly produced in Northern France and England. These texts, including courtly lyrics, prose and verse romances, dits amoureux and plays, proved hugely influential for other European literary traditions in the medieval period and beyond. This Companion offers a wide-ranging and stimulating guide to literature composed in medieval French from its beginnings in the ninth century until the Renaissance. The essays are grounded in detailed analysis of canonical texts and authors such as the Chanson de Roland, the Roman de la Rose, Villon's Testament, Chrétien de Troyes, Machaut, Christine de Pisan and the Tristan romances. Featuring a chronology and suggestions for further reading, this is the ideal companion for students and scholars in other fields wishing to discover the riches of the French medieval tradition.

Žižek is hailed as the most significant interdisciplinary thinker of modern times. His work is a powerful, often explosive combination of Lacanian psychoanalysis and philosophy which tests key psychoanalytical concepts against the ideas of major European thinkers, especially Hegel. It has ignited enthusiasm and stimulated new approaches across a vast range of disciplines, and seems to be attracting an ever-growing readership. In part, this is because Žižek himself has a panoramic range of interests encompassing film studies, literature, cyber culture, ethics, theology and, above all, politics. It is also because he is a highly entertaining writer, having a flair for anecdote, a smutty sense of humour and the knack of capturing complex ideas in concrete form. Sarah Kay’s book provides a lucid and comprehensive introduction to Žižek’s work. His writings to date are presented and evaluated here for the first time, together with an outline of their development and explanations of his key premises, themes and terms. This book will be essential reading for students of cultural studies, literary studies, philosophy and social and political theory.

Žižek is hailed as the most significant interdisciplinary thinker of modern times. His work is a powerful, often explosive combination of Lacanian psychoanalysis and philosophy which tests key psychoanalytical concepts against the ideas of major European thinkers, especially Hegel. It has ignited enthusiasm and stimulated new approaches across a vast range of disciplines, and seems to be attracting an ever-growing readership. In part, this is because Žižek himself has a panoramic range of interests encompassing film studies, literature, cyber culture, ethics, theology and, above all, politics. It is also because he is a highly entertaining writer, having a flair for anecdote, a smutty sense of humour and the knack of capturing complex ideas in concrete form. Sarah Kay’s book provides a lucid and comprehensive introduction to Žižek’s work. His writings to date are presented and evaluated here for the first time, together with an outline of their development and explanations of his key premises, themes and terms. This book will be essential reading for students of cultural studies, literary studies, philosophy and social and political theory.

In the later Middle Ages, many writers claimed that prose is superior to verse as a vehicle of knowledge because it presents the truth in an unvarnished form, without the distortions of meter and rhyme. Beginning in the thirteenth century, works of verse narrative from the early Middle Ages were recast in prose, as if prose had become the literary norm. Instead of dying out, however, verse took on new vitality. In France verse texts were produced, in both French and Occitan, with the explicit intention of transmitting encyclopedic, political, philosophical, moral, historical, and other forms of knowledge. In Knowing Poetry, Adrian Armstrong and Sarah Kay explore why and how verse continued to be used to transmit and shape knowledge in France. They cover the period between Jean de Meun's Roman de la rose (c. 1270) and the major work of Jean Bouchet, the last of the grands rhétoriqueurs (c. 1530). The authors find that the advent of prose led to a new relationship between poetry and knowledge in which poetry serves as a medium for serious reflection and self-reflection on subjectivity, embodiment, and time. They propose that three major works—the Roman de la rose, the Ovide moralisé, and Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy—form a single influential matrix linking poetry and intellectual inquiry, metaphysical insights, and eroticized knowledge. The trio of thought-world-contingency, poetically represented by Philosophy, Nature, and Fortune, grounds poetic exploration of reality, poetry, and community.

Where does courtly literature come from? What is the meaning of "courtly love"? What is the relation between religious and secular culture in the Middle Ages, and why does it matter? This book addresses these questions, as its title indicates, by way of contradiction. Contradiction is central both to medieval logic and to most modern protocols of reading; it therefore informs both the production and the reception of medieval texts. Yet contradiction itself is rarely analyzed, serving more often as a spur to interpretation than as its object.This book works between the complex philosophical culture of the twelfth century (principally the traditions of Aristotle and of philosophical Neoplatonism, which diverge significantly in their treatment of contradiction) and the no less complex thought of Lacan (which is just as bound up with contradictoriness). Situating twelfth-century Anglo-Norman, French, and Occitan literature within this philosophical embrace, the author studies the interaction of three major literary genres—hagiography, troubadour lyric, and romance—an interaction that, in the course of the century, generates what we now call "courtly literature."She shows how preferences for different ways of dealing with contradiction migrate from one genre to another during the twelfth century. She also shows how this movement resulted, by about 1170, in different traditions converging to produce the complex artifacts that canonized literary "courtliness," not only for the Middle Ages but for us as well. Coinciding with this convergence, there is a shift in the locus of contradiction from subject to object. This crucial development not only privileges the object within texts, it also cements the value of texts themselves as object.In a series of comparisons between religious and courtly texts that draws on the writings of Lacan and Kristeva, the author explores how these objects can be variously described in terms of the psychoanalytical concepts of abjection, sublimation, or perversion. The book concludes by suggesting that the historical importance of courtly literature lies in its capacity to mediate, through the centrality accorded to the contradictory object, this transfer from medieval to modern structures of thought and thereby to shape modern forms of enjoyment.

From Jean de Meun in the late thirteenth century to Christine de Pizan in the early fifteenth, medieval French poets often aimed to impart theological, philosophical, or moral ideas. To unify their thought, and to make its outline visible to readers, the poets created vivid images of place, such as gardens, paths, idyllic landscapes, cities, trees, and fountains. For Sarah Kay, these spatial images are a prop of "monologism," helping to communicate (or impose) unity of meaning and interpretation by summoning readers to occupy the same "place" in their thinking as the authors. Because of this monologism, Kay contends, didactic poetry has been ill served by a critical tradition that favors difference, plurality, and dialogism. In The Place of Thought, she seeks radically to reassess this literature and reappraise the pleasure to be derived from reading it.Kay argues that one meaning is not inherently simpler or less interesting than many meanings. Using specific works as examples, she demonstrates that this "one-ness" of thought in French didactic poems can be an excitingly complex and challenging notion, and that it strains the images in which it is placed to the point where they become difficult to visualize. Herein lies the poems' simultaneous intellectual and aesthetic appeal. Focusing on the Roman de la Rose by Jean de Meun, the Breviari d'amor by Matfre Ermengaud, the Ovide moralisÉ, PÈlerinage de vie humaine by Guillaume de Deguileville's, Le Jugement dou roy de Navarre by Guillaume de Machaut, Le Joli buisson de Jonece by Jean Froissart, and Le Livre du Chemin de long estude by Christine de Pizan, Kay traces the works' backgrounds in scholastic thinking, illuminating them when appropriate with modern reflections on the same ideas.

Focusing on songs by the troubadours and trouvères from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries, Medieval Song from Aristotle to Opera contends that song is not best analyzed as "words plus music" but rather as a distinctive way of sounding words. Rather than situating them in their immediate period, Sarah Kay fruitfully listens for and traces crosscurrents between medieval French and Occitan songs and both earlier poetry and much later opera. Reflecting on a song's songlike quality—as, for example, the sound of light in the dawn sky, as breathed by beasts, as sirenlike in its perils—Kay reimagines the diversity of songs from this period, which include inset lyrics in medieval French narratives and the works of Guillaume de Machaut, as works that are as much desired and imagined as they are actually sung and heard. Kay understands song in terms of breath, the constellations, the animal soul, and life itself. Her method also draws inspiration from opera, especially those that inventively recreate medieval song, arguing for a perspective on the manuscripts that transmit medieval song as instances of multimedia, quasi-operatic performances. Medieval Song from Aristotle to Opera features a companion website (cornellpress.manifoldapp.org/projects/medieval-song) hosting twenty-four audio or video recordings, realized by professional musicians specializing in early music, of pieces discussed in the book, together with performance scores, performance reflections, and translations of all recorded texts. These audiovisual materials represent an extension in practice of the research aims of the book—to better understand the sung dimension of medieval song.

Blending lyrical text with non-fiction, this book celebrates every aspect of New York City from the crowded streets to sprawling Central Park and the bagel stands to the Statue of Liberty.Written by New York poet Sarah Kay and illustrated with warmth and detail by award-winning artist Ryan Johnson, this vibrant book captures the heart of the big city.

An exciting reassessment of the works of Chrétien, making use of modern critical theory to test orthodox opinion.This co-written, multi-stranded book challenges assumptions about Chrétien as the author of a canon of works. In a series of lively exchanges, its five authors reassess the relationship between lyric and romance, between individuality and social conditions, and between psychology and medieval philosophy. The idea of "logical time" is used to open up such topics as adventure, memory, imagination, and textual variation. Recent research on Troyes and on the political agency of women leads to the reappraisal of subjectivity and gender. Throughout, the medieval texts associated with the name of Chrétien are highlighted as sites where thought emerges; the implications of this thought arehistoricized and further conceptualized with the help of recent theoretical works, including those of Lacan.ZRINKA STAHULJAK, VIRGINIE GREENE, SARAH KAY, SHARON KINOSHITA and PEGGY McCRACKEN are professors at the University of California, Los Angeles, Harvard, New York University, the University of California, Santa Cruz and the University of Michigan respectively.