Aux levres du roman: Ingestion et hybridite generique dans le roman en vers au XIIIe siecle

This dissertation examines different forms of generic hybridity in the thirteenth-century courtly verse narrative. Positing Chretien de Troyes\u27s generic, discursive, and thematic ideal of conjointure, joining together, as the controlling model of romance composition in the twelfth century, I examine the ways in which courtly romances of the following century engage in, and experiment with, a poetics of disjunction. My inquiry is especially centered on the interferences between courtly romance and courtly lyric, and it is structured around the insistence, in the lyrical-narrative text, of representations of ingestion. From the ubiquitous motif of the Eaten Heart, in which a lover\u27s heart is fed by the jealous husband to an unsuspecting lady, to courtly restagings of the Original Sin, where the sharing of a fruit inaugurates the new reign of the God of Love, I argue that verse romance\u27s predilection for such symbolically and culturally charged images of incorporation (from cannibalism to the Eucharist) was also significant in terms of its own generic hybridity. In my reading of three verse romances, the Lai d\u27Ignaure, the Roman du Castelain de Couci, and the Roman de la Poire, as well as a few troubadour vidas and razos, I focus on the representation of ingestion as an inscription of the generic clash between romance and lyric (at formal, discursive and thematic levels). The purpose of the dissertation is thus to bring together various narrative forms (a lai, a romance with lyric insertions and an allegorical romance) as equally self-conscious narratives highlighting the generic hybridization of romance and lyric in the thirteenth century