Allegory effects: The romance of redemption, the redemption of romance, and the Queste del Saint Graal

This dissertation interrogates the relationship between medieval French Arthurian romance and Christian spirituality through the lens of the thirteenth-century prose Queste del Saint Graal, part of the Old French Vulgate Cycle of Arthurian romances. Rather than a systematic allegory of mystical theology or an ironic conscription of religious motifs by self-serving fiction, the Queste is an exploration of and reflection on literary narrative\u27s capacity to romance sacred truth without disavowing its own characteristic mode of writing. As such, it is structured by what the dissertation theorizes as an allegory effect constitutive of romance: a sustained textual gesture toward the possibility of narrative\u27s allegorical interpretability that pointedly fails to resolve itself into an authoritative gloss, leaving the reader responsible for any ultimate determination of meaning, and so turning the ongoing activity of reading into a privileged form of ethical experience. In the Queste, the inherent ambiguity of narrative meaning opens the letter of literary language to the possibility of a genuine truth-content that is not so much dogmatic as effective. The absence of a totalizing gloss drives a series of redemptions performed and thematized by the text. In particular, the predestined, seemingly robotic Grail hero, Galaad, is revealed as a figure of human freedom sustained rather than effaced by divine grace, while his secular, superseded father, Lancelot—the embodiment of the Queste\u27s own romance paternity, the literary tradition it both continues and redemptively transforms—is recuperated as the subject and object of a discourse of conversion that also articulates the stakes of romance\u27s rewriting in the Queste, so that romance furnishes the means and occasion for its own spiritualization. In its figuration of reading as a form of pre-eschatological, time-bound redemption made possible by the incomplete and therefore radical legibility of material phenomena, the Queste has deep affinities with the twentieth-century philosophies of history of Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, and the dissertation makes use of their thought to illuminate and frame its reading of the medieval text