The Song of Silence / Queering the National Myth: Gender, Weirdness and Magical Realism in Le Roman de Silence and Retold Arthuriana

拟议项目的创意部分（约9万字）将重述《沉默的罗马》（Le Roman de Silence），这是一部13世纪的法国诗歌浪漫小说，将一个性别可变的骑士引入了亚瑟王神话。我的重述《沉默之歌》将效仿玛德琳·米勒的《喀耳刻》和其他近期的神话重述，将史诗演绎成魔幻现实主义散文。以口述历史的风格书写，故事将被改写，其结论将被颠覆，提出关于酷儿史学的问题。通过对亚瑟王神话（英国的传奇起源故事）的古怪描述，我希望探索当今英国性别与民族主义之间的交叉点。关键部分（约3万字）将认为，《亚瑟王》（以及更广泛的神话/历史）的酷儿复述可以在魔幻现实主义的传统中表达出来，探索《亚瑟王》的背景和世界，将其作为一个本质上是酷儿的空间，也是追溯政治评论的载体。深入研究唐纳德·霍夫曼最近所说的“亚瑟王衣橱”，我将回顾现有的关于酷儿中世纪主义和流行文化中亚瑟王的酷儿的学术研究，同时对《沉默的罗马》和更广泛的亚瑟王经典进行仔细的酷儿阅读。亚瑟王时期的英国，以其神秘的地理位置和英国文化遗产中“民间历史”的地位，通过其纯粹的怪异构成了一个奇怪的空间吗？在之前的重述中，作为对英国的讽喻反映，它的功能是什么？这个酷儿空间，尽管是非历史性的，能否被作家用来使酷儿叙事的历史性合法化？1990年，西蒙·冈特写道，“赫尔德里斯·德·科努耶的《沉默的罗马》似乎有意涉及现代理论家感兴趣的问题”。《亚瑟王研究杂志》（Arthuriana）于1997年和2002年分别为《沉默的罗马》（Le Roman de Silence）撰写了两期特刊。最近关于亚瑟王的酷儿研究包括对兰斯洛特-圣杯循环和亚瑟王神话的当代重述的酷儿解读，包括唐纳德·l·霍夫曼对亚瑟王电影的酷儿分析，发表在2019年的《亚瑟王》杂志上。霍夫曼区分了“酷儿（同性恋）”和“酷儿（奇特）”，同时认为后者仍然可以被理解为代表前者。在《沉默之歌》和我的评论论文中，我将提出，这种对酷儿的双重理解，对于写《亚瑟王》的酷儿复述特别有用。亚瑟王神话中固有的酷儿（奇特）世界，有龙、奇怪的事件和梦幻般的内在逻辑，为在想象的过去中建立酷儿叙事和角色提供了一个有用的载体。亚瑟王的不列颠是非历史的，但亚瑟王的故事通常坚持自己的历史性，并在英国文化遗产中享有一种奇怪的准历史地位：在这种对比中，有探索现实主义的重要空间。

The creative component of the proposed project (ca 90,000 words) will be a retelling of Le Roman de Silence, a 13th century French verse-romance which introduced a genderfluid knight to the Arthurian mythos. My retelling, The Song of Silence, will emulate Madeline Miller's Circe and other recent mythic retellings in rendering epic poetry as magical realist prose. Written in the style of oral history, the story will be recast and its conclusions subverted, posing questions about queer historiography. By queering the Arthurian mythos - Britain's legendary origin story - I hope to explore the intersections between gender and nationalism in Britain today.The critical component (ca 30,000 words) will argue that queer retellings of Arthuriana (and mythology/history more generally) can be couched within the traditions of magical realism, exploring the setting and world of Arthuriana as a space which is inherently queer and inherently a vehicle for retroactive political commentary. Delving into what Donald Hoffman has recently termed the 'Arthurian closet', I will review existing scholarship on queer medievalism and the queering of Arthuriana in popular culture, while performing a close queer reading of the Roman de Silence and of the wider Arthurian canon. Does Arthurian Britain, with its uncanny geography and status as 'folk history' in British cultural heritage, constitute a queer space through its sheer weirdness? What has been its function, in previous retellings, as an allegorical reflection of Britain? And can this queer space, despite its ahistoricity, be used by writers to legitimize the historicity of queer narratives?In 1990 Simon Gaunt wrote that 'Heldris de Cornouaille's Roman de Silence appears to deliberately engage with problems that interest modern theorists'. Arthuriana, the Journal of Arthurian Studies, has dedicated two special issues to Le Roman de Silence, once in 1997 and again in 2002. More recent scholarship on the queering of King Arthur has included queer readings of the Lancelot-Grail cycle and of contemporary retellings of the Arthurian mythos, including Donald L. Hoffman's queer analysis of Arthurian cinema, published in Arthuriana in 2019. Hoffman differentiates between 'queer (gay)' and 'queer (peculiar)', whilst arguing that the latter can still be read as signifying the former.In both The Song of Silence and in my critical thesis, I will propose that this dual understanding of queerness is specifically useful for writing queer retellings of Arthuriana. The inherently queer (peculiar) world of the Arthurian mythos, with its dragons and strange happenstances and dreamlike internal logic, provides a useful vehicle for grounding queer narratives and characters in an imagined past. King Arthur's Britain is ahistorical, but tales of King Arthur usually insist upon their own historicity, and enjoy a strange quasihistorical status within British cultural heritage: within this contrast there is significant room for the exploration of realism.