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THE LUDIC(ROUS) AS UMPIRE by ANNIE LEE NARVER A

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THE LUDIC(ROUS) AS UMPIRE by ANNIE LEE NARVER A MAPPING HUMAN VIRTUE AND THE ETHICS OF DESIRE: THE LUDIC(ROUS) AS UMPIRE by ANNIE LEE NARVER A DISSERTATION Presented to the Department of English And the Graduate School of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy June 2019 DISSERTATION APPROVAL PAGE Student: Annie Lee Narver Title: Mapping Human Virtue and the Ethics of Desire: the Ludic(rous) as Umpire This dissertation has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in the Department of English by: Warren Ginsberg Chair Anne Laskaya Core Member Stephanie Clark Core Member David Wacks Institutional Representative and Janet Woodruff-Borden Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Graduate School. Degree Awarded June 2019. ii © 2019 Annie Lee Narver iii DISSERTATION ABSTRACT Annie Lee Narver Doctor of Philosophy Department of English June 2019 Title: Mapping Human Virtue and the Ethics of Desire: the Ludic(rous) as Umpire Building on the assumption that society constructs ideology through, according to Louis Althusser, “apparatuses,” this dissertation explores how medieval romances written from the twelfth through fourteenth century exploit alterity by repurposing the Chanson de Roland’s portrayals of Eastern others and women to negotiate the exigencies contemporary to them. The proof texts, in addition to the Oxford Roland, include martial romances, deemed martial because the hero serves a liege lord rather than a lady: Guy of Warwick and The Sowdone of Babylone. In these texts, knights prove themselves men by vanquishing a sensationalized Eastern foe. This project also examines amorous romances, in which affections for a lady initiate the hero’s achievements. These texts likewise employ depictions latent in the Roland; they distinguish women as separate from men and as objects partly constitutive of male identity. The Middle English Floris and Blancheflour and Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde both exhibit such ideological representations. By selecting ludic elements from each poem, including depictions of and references to games, laughter, play, and humor, this project draws on the theories of Johan Huizinga, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Henri Bergson to explore hermeneutics of the ludic(rous). These textual elements reveal how the medieval texts in question sought to produce new and revised definitions of masculinity that defined man against what he is iv not, in these instances, non-Christians and females. The masculinities espoused in each text relate to the historical moment that produced them, which is evident in reviewing historical sources and by comparing insular texts to the continental sources from which they were translated and adapted. In this project, ludic(rous) elements, which, from alternative perspectives are at once ludic and ludicrous, hence, “ludic(rous),” are ambiguously gameful, ridiculous, as well as earnest and consequential. They expose mechanisms by which medieval romance produces ideologies constitutive of male identity. As much as the ludic(rous) elements’ ambiguity burdens characters in each text with interpreting their meaning, they invite medieval audiences to make calls as would today’s umpires as to how one might behave as a Christian in the Latin West. v CURRICULUM VITAE NAME OF AUTHOR: Annie Lee Narver GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED: University of Oregon, Eugene Boise State University DEGREES AWARDED: Doctor of Philosophy, English, 2019, University of Oregon Master of Arts, English Literature, 2013, Boise State University Bachelor of Arts, Secondary English Teaching, 2007, Boise State University AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST: Medieval Romance Translation Postcolonial Studies Women and Gender Studies PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE: Adjunct Instructor, Department of English, Boise State University, 2017-2019 Graduate Employee, Department of English, University of Oregon, Eugene, 2014- 2017 Graduate Assistant, Boise State Writing Center, Boise State University, 2012- 2013 Teaching Assistant, Department of English, Boise State University, 2012-2013 Instructor of English, Council Jr. / High School, Council, ID, 2008-2011 GRANTS, AWARDS, AND HONORS: Graduate Teaching Fellowship, Department of English, University of Oregon, 2014-2017 vi Maveety Scholarship, University of Oregon, 2014 Outstanding Master’s Thesis, Boise State Universiy, 2013-2014 Graduate Teaching Fellowship, Department of English, Boise State University, 2012-2013 Magna cum Laude, Boise State University, 2007 PUBLICATIONS: Narver, Annie. “Reconciling the Uncanny: Forgiveness, Caritas, and Compassion for Malory’s Palomides.” Arthuriana. Under second review. Knowles, Annie. Postmodern Sludge from the Girl Next Door. Inkwater Press, 2010. vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I thank Dr. Ginsberg for his tireless attention to my drafts, for in his care, my words grew ever more eloquent even as my ideas came into focus; without his support and expertise, from which this interdisciplinary, border-crossing work draws, I would have lacked the spirt, at one point, to entertain it. This project also owes a great debt to Dr. Laskaya for her thoughtful and generous conversations, which lent this project inspiration under the auspices of her seminars. Dr. Clark I thank for challenging my un- indoctrinated mind while offering writing and researching heuristics that made this project manageable. Without Dr. Wacks’s insights, however, this project’s attempt at cross-cultural comparison would likely have failed long ago. To him I owe thanks for his encouragement as well as his clear, kind, indispensable feedback and guidance. In addition to the support of my committee, I extend my thanks to my husband, Andy, for even as he negotiated the travails of medical residency, his support for this endeavor never flagged. He, like my parents, Pat and Cheryl, has afforded me no less than unconditional love, and without such support, this project would surely never have reached its terminus. At the last, I thank my friends and my colleagues. I would be remiss in failing to acknowledge Boise State University’s English department, and in particular, its First- Year Writing Program, for giving me a workplace to call home when circumstances displaced me from that in Oregon. When others in such unique circumstances might give up, I knew I could not, for I would not disappoint the chorus of cheerleaders who flanked me with constant support, especially my former mentor, Linda Marie Zaerr. viii For my family. ix TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. SKETCHING THE TERRITORY: METHODS, BACKGROUND, RATIONALE, AND SUMMARY ................................................................................................. 1 II. MAPPING INCONSISTENCIES IN THE CHANSON DE ROLAND, GUY OF WARWICK, AND THE SOWDONE OF BABYLONE: SUBTERFUGE AND LUIC(ROUS) PERVERSIONS ............................................................................. 26 III. FASHIONING NARRATIVE, REFASHIONING MASCULINITY: PLAYING WITH ARTS OF CULTURAL HYBRIDITY IN FLORIS AND BLANCHEFLOUR ................................................................................................ 107 IV. PLAYING BY THE RULES? ETHICAL AMBIGUITY IN THE GAMES OF CHAUCER’S TROILUS AND CRISEYDE AND JUAN RUIZ’S LIBRO DE BUEN AMOR ......................................................................................................... 178 V. ROLLING UP THE MAP....................................................................................... 254 REFERENCES CITED ................................................................................................ 259 x CHAPTER I SKETCHING THE TERRITORY: METHODS, BACKGROUND, RATIONALE AND SUMMARY What qualities and behaviors circumscribe and delimit a virtuous human, a man, or a Christian? The answers are contingent on cultural and historical context because they are ideological, and ideology arises from techniques of power in a particular time and place.1 In his Ideology and the State, Louis Althusser establishes how dominant culture maintains its status through the influence of ideology on the working class. It reproduces “submission to the rules of the established order” (133), thereby maintaining that order. Though the era of capitalism, and the subject of Althusser’s work, fully emerged well after the Middle Ages, the role of ideology nonetheless applies. What he calls state apparatuses, including schools, families, and cultural productions (143), which help designate and distribute power, had their medieval counterparts (154). The medieval church structured and regulated daily life; feudal alliance bonded men and their households; and imaginative literature, though later reproduced in popular, “unofficial” iterations removed from “state control,” each corresponds to the cultural productions cited within Althusser’s theory. In particular, medieval, chivalric romances staging encounters with the Muslim world and with women likely provided an individual “with the ideology which suits the role it has to fulfil in class society” (155). Regardless of whether the texts were designed to influence or control social practices, these cultural productions affected public perceptions and inflected the ways in which cultures defined roles in society, which is, necessarily, related to identity. 1 Ideology resembles a fiction: it presents an imaginary construct of reality, one that endorses, or critiques, a particular worldview, and it shapes how people
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