The Final Frontier: Living Death in Medieval French and English Literature

虽然生与死可以被认为是终极的二元对立，但在中世纪文学中，它们之间的边界是可渗透的，并被一种边界区域所包围，在这种边界区域内，属于一方的人物可能会侵犯另一方。死者会回来对生者提出要求，而生者则会预见、组织、有时甚至渴望自己的死亡。将死亡、垂死和死者融合在一起，使生命得以延续，这对个人和社会秩序构成了重大挑战。虽然有时旧秩序被重申，但在其他情况下，可能会发生变化或建立新秩序。因此，死亡既有毁灭的潜力，也有再生的潜力。AHRC休假将使我能够完成一本题为《最后的边疆：中世纪法国和英国文学中的死亡》的专著，在这本书中，我调查了这些主题对经常回到他们身边的中世纪作家和观众的特殊意义。我在11世纪到15世纪的重要法国和英国文学作品中探讨了这个问题，即《罗兰之歌》、非循环散文《兰斯洛特》、《维隆的遗嘱》、乔叟的《公爵夫人之书》和《好女人的传说》以及《珍珠》。在讨论英语文本和法语文本时，我把它们放在适当的语境中;中世纪英国和法国之间的文化连续性没有得到充分的重视。中世纪对死亡的态度长期以来一直引起历史学家的兴趣，文学评论家对个别文本做了细致入微的研究，包括最近的一些专著，重点关注牺牲或精神分析学家雅克·拉康所说的“两次死亡之间”。我的项目建立在这项工作的基础上，同时在新的主题和方法方向上进行。我的研究项目的中心在于拉康对身体死亡和社会死亡或象征性死亡之间区别的发展。象征性的死亡可能在身体死亡之后（如在现代英国社会中，在葬礼或纪念仪式中）。但它也可能先于它，当疯狂或痴迷使一个人“对世界死了”。拉康认为，这两次死亡的分离打开了一个空间（“两次死亡之间”），在这个空间中，伦理和政治问题可以重新谈判，导致个人和社会的恢复和更新。我探讨这一点和相关的想法与中世纪的材料，选择其主题重点和文学的重要性。我的方法不仅限于精神分析，这是当代中世纪主义者可用的广泛的批判工具之一。我还借鉴了人类学对两次死亡的讨论，不同文化中的埋葬和纪念;弗洛伊德的精神分析对死亡驱力、记忆、哀悼和重复的解释;现象学对人类主体的洞察;性别研究和酷儿理论对著名的有争议的性别和性的精神分析解释的批评。我的工作是英国和法国中世纪研究之间以及美国和英国实践之间的桥梁。像我这样的理论方法在中世纪的法语研究中被广泛接受，但在中世纪的英语中，迄今为止在美国比在这里更发达。我的目标是将这些不同的传统中最好的联合收割机结合起来。

Although life and death may be considered as the ultimate binary opposition, in medieval literature the boundary between them is permeable and surrounded by a kind of frontier zone within which figures belonging properly to one side may encroach on the other. The dead return to place demands on the living, while the living foresee, organize and sometimes even desire their own deaths. Integrating death, dying and the dead in such a way as to allow life to continue poses a major challenge to the individual and to the social order. Although at times the old order is reasserted, at others change may be initiated or a new order founded. Thus death has the potential to regenerate as well as to destroy. AHRC leave will allow me to complete a monograph entitled The Final Frontier: Living Death in Medieval French and English Literature, in which I investigate what special significance these themes held for the medieval writers and audiences who returned to them so frequently. I explore this question in important French and English literary works dating from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries, namely the Chanson de Roland, the non-cyclic Prose Lancelot, Villon's Testament, Chaucer's Book of the Duchess and Legend of Good Women, and Pearl. In discussing English texts with the French I replace them in their proper context; the cultural continuum between medieval England and France is inadequately appreciated.Medieval attitudes to death have long interested historians, and literary critics have done fine detailed work on individual texts, including some recent monographs focusing on sacrifice or on what psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan calls 'the between-two-deaths'. My project builds on this work while carrying it in new thematic and methodological directions. The centre of my project lies in Lacan's development of the distinction between bodily and social or symbolic death. Symbolic death may follow bodily death (as, in modern British society, in the funeral or memorial ceremony). But it may also precede it, as when madness or obsession makes a person 'dead to the world'. Lacan sees the separation of these two deaths as opening up a space ('the between-two-deaths') in which ethical and political issues can be re-negotiated, leading to restoration and renewal for both individuals and societies. I explore this and related ideas in relation to the medieval material, selected for its thematic focus and literary importance. My approach is not limited to psychoanalysis, which is one of a wide range of critical tools available to contemporary medievalists. I draw also on anthropological discussions of the two deaths, of burial and memorialization in different cultures; on Freudian psychoanalysis for its accounts of the death drive, memory, mourning and repetition; on phenomenology for its insights into the human subject; and on gender studies and queer theory for their critiques of the famously contentious psychoanalytical accounts of gender and sexuality. My work acts as a bridge both between English and French medieval studies and between US and UK practice. Theoretical approaches such as mine are widely accepted in medieval French studies but in medieval English have to date been more developed in the US than here. My aim is to combine the best of these various traditions.