Transitions and thresholds in the work of Maurice Sceve

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My research will explore transitions and thresholds in the work of sixteenth-century Lyonnais poet Maurice Scève. Existing scholarship (notably seminal work by Hans Staub, 1967) has advanced the idea that a dynamic of movement underpins Scève's poetry, a movement which is always carried through to completion (1967: 35-36). I argue that transitional or 'threshold' points within the scope of such wider teleological movements may act as fruitful portals into Scève's poetics. I will examine how, by depicting evolving or fluctuating states of being in processes such as waking, remembering, and learning, Scève engages with sixteenth-century conceptions of cognitive acts, with humanist ideas concerning the transmission and reception of knowledge, and with curiosity surrounding sleep and oneiric experience. The ancient art of dream interpretation and epistemological theories, such as those of Italian astronomer and self-professed dream-interpreter Girolamo Cardano (1501-1576), were in vogue in sixteenth-century France. My research will ask, for instance, how representations of the passage into and out of sleep in Délie (1544), Saulsaye (1547), and the Microcosme (1562), inform our reading of the epistemological and ethical stakes of these texts. While attending to these thematic thresholds, my study will draw on Gérard Genette's (1987) conception of the narratological threshold established by paratexts - namely the sonnets and devises that bookend Scève's works. I adopt a hybrid methodological approach, drawing together narratological theory (Genette) and socio-cultural ideas, as I consider the thematic, conceptual, and structural thresholds that inflect our experience of reading Scève. Following Michèle Clément's efforts to rehabilitate Scève's lesser-known works (Microcosme, Arion, Saulsaye), my project also gives space to a wider scevian corpus, too often restricted to Délie.