Le Bel Inconnu: A Semiotic Topography (France)

This study is a Greimasian semiotic reading of the twelfth-century French romance. The analysis describes the syntactic structure of the text in terms of narrative programs and narrative progression, actantial arrangement and duplications and manipulation as a narrative technique. The semantic development in the narrative is examined in inter-isotopic connections in the spatial arrangement and the fantastic elements in the romance as well as in the analogy established between the narrator and the hero of the romance. Literary and cultural, specifically socio-economic, intertextualities are examined with regard to the paradigm of romance and the cultural (con)text of medieval French aristocracy. The semiotic reading focuses on the compositional non-closure of the text in the epilogue that results from the analogy of narrator and hero. The rejection of the closure of the narrative simultaneously confronts the paradigm of romance and subsumes the narrative to the enunciation. Ultimately, the epilogue of the text is shown to imply a conflict of genres in Le Bel Inconnu, an interaction of the romance, the lay and the chanson lyrique.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

French

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

1983

Author dc:creator

• Guthrie, Jeri Schaeffer

• Literature, Medieval

Identifier

(UMI)AAI8309947

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/71033