Tales of Piers and Perceval: Langland, Romance Aventure, and Doing Well

2020 ◽  
pp. 346-368
Author(s):  
Nicolette Zeeman
Keyword(s):  
Piers Plowman ◽  
Internal Conflicts ◽  
Narrative Structures ◽  
Constant Tension

Noting that Piers Plowman has often been described as multi-generic, the conclusion reviews the claim that the five diverse allegorical narrative structures analysed in the book all occur in Langland’s poem. It affirms that in Piers Plowman they bring with them their own internal conflicts and disruptions, but are also in constant tension with each other. They overlay, pressure and contradict one other, illustrating the entrenched nature of the text’s dialecticism and its inexhaustible determination to unpack its own terms. The Conclusion ends with an analysis of the feast of Patience, in which many different descriptions of ‘do-well’ are brought together to ‘undo’ each other. Its implicit claim is that this is the kind of work allegory does best.

The Arts of Disruption

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolette Zeeman
Keyword(s):  
Piers Plowman ◽  
Making Meaning ◽  
Medieval Rhetoric ◽  
Narrative Structures ◽  
The Arts

The Arts of Disruption offers a series of new readings of the allegorical poem Piers Plowman: but it is also a book about allegory. It argues not just that there are distinctively disruptive ‘arts’ that occur in allegory, but that allegory, because it is interested in the difficulty of making meaning, is itself a disruptive art. The book approaches this topic via the study of five medieval allegorical narrative structures that exploit diegetic conflict and disruption. Although very different, they all bring together contrasting descriptions of spiritual process, in order to develop new understanding and excite moral or devotional change. These five structures are: the paradiastolic ‘hypocritical figure’ (such as vices masked by being made to look like ‘adjacent’ virtues), personification debate, violent language and gestures of apophasis, narratives of bodily decline, and grail romance. Each appears in a range of texts, which the book explores, along with other connected materials in medieval rhetoric, logic, grammar, spiritual thought, ethics, medicine, and romance iconography. These allegorical narrative structures appear radically transformed in Piers Plowman, where the poem makes further meaning out of the friction between them. Much of the allegorical work of the poem occurs at the points of their intersection, and within the conceptual gaps that open up between them. Ranging across a wide variety of medieval allegorical texts, the book shows from many perspectives allegory’s juxtaposition of the heterogeneous and its questioning of supposed continuities.

Piers Plowman and the Grail Romances

2020 ◽  
pp. 323-345
Author(s):  
Nicolette Zeeman
Keyword(s):  
Piers Plowman ◽  
Emotional Intensity ◽  
Narrative Structures ◽  
Main Protagonist ◽  
Grail Romances

The previous chapter showed how the large narrative structures of both the Gospel of Nicodemus and the French grail romances, the Queste del Saint Graal and the Perlesvaus, permeate the poetic diegesis and thought of Piers Plowman, albeit reformulated in Langland’s distinctive terms. This chapter homes in on three particular structures that Langland shares in varying degrees with the grail romances: first, travellers in a landscape, whose discovery of imperfect forms of understanding is imagined as ‘news’ transmitted across the landscape; second, multiple quests, seekers and absent objects of desire—some of them seekers who are sought by other seekers; third, narratives that are predicated on a crucial and usually involuntary mistake, often committed unknowingly by a main protagonist. These intertwined narrative structures focus with a distinctive emotional intensity on instances of inadequacy and loss, all of which contribute to the inculcation of desire—both for the protagonists, and for the reader. The chapter tracks these structures in the later parts of Piers Plowman (B.16–20) and then across the poem as a whole. It also explores possible connections between the protagonists Perlesvaus and Piers Plowman, noting the syllable ‘Per’ shared in their names. The last part of the chapter revisits two passages of Piers Plowman to focus on how romance structure is here both intertwined with, and at odds with, ethical instruction.

Devotional Transformation

2005 ◽  
Vol 1 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 237-257
Author(s):  
Ravi Vasudevan
Keyword(s):  
Religious Belief ◽  
Film Genre ◽  
Narrative Structures ◽  
The Status ◽  
Film Spectatorship ◽  
The Relationship

This article focuses on the specific Indian cinematic form of the Hindu devotional film genre to explore the relationship between cinema and religion. Using three important early films from the devotional oeuvre—Gopal Krishna, Sant Dnyaneshwar, and Sant Tukaram—as the primary referent, it tries to understand certain characteristic patterns in the narrative structures of these films, and the cultures of visuality and address, miraculous manifestation, and witnessing and self-transformation that they generate. These three films produced by Prabhat Studios between the years 1936 and 1940 and all directed by Vishnupant Damle and Syed Fattelal, drew upon the powerful anti-hierarchical traditions of Bhakti, devotional worship that circumvented Brahmanical forms. This article will argue that the devotional film crucially undertakes a work of transformation in the perspectives on property, and that in this engagement it particularly reviews the status of the household in its bid to generate a utopian model of unbounded community. The article will also consider the status of technologies of the miraculous that are among the central attractions of the genre, and afford a reflection on the relation between cinema technology, popular religious belief and desire, and film spectatorship.

Orthodoxy and Authority

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander O'Hara
Keyword(s):  
Seventh Century ◽  
Internal Conflicts

The fight against religious deviance and heresy was among the missionary activities of Columbanus’s followers, but the struggle for orthodoxy was also a problem the community had to face, most notably during the Agrestius affair after his death. In 626 Eustasius of Luxeuil had to answer charges of religious deviance at a council in Mâcon. In the end, the abbot of Luxeuil and his counterpart were forced to reconcile, but the conflict still smoldered. This chapter sheds light on the tensions between the missions among the gentes and the role of allegations of heresy in the internal conflicts of the Columbanian community in the 620s against the backdrop of the wider worries about orthodoxy in the seventh century. It also addresses the textual dimension of the issue and tries to illuminate the reasons for how Jonas of Bobbio presents Eustasius and the Agrestius affair in the Vita Columbani.

Organizing Things in Dickens

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elaine Auyoung
Keyword(s):  
Human Body ◽  
Individual Experience ◽  
Bleak House ◽  
Narrative Structures ◽  
Concrete Objects ◽  
Comprehension Process ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Individual Human

This chapter demonstrates how the organization of narrative information can shape a reader’s impression of what is represented. It focuses on two ways in which concrete objects are arranged in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House: as specific members of general categories and as part of causally connected narrative structures. Dickens relies on these representational strategies to capture a scale of reality no longer suited to the individual human body. In doing so, he also reveals that the realist novel’s conventional commitment to individual experience at the scale of concrete particulars reflects constraints on the comprehension process.

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