The Erotics of GriefPub Date : 2021-09-15DOI: 10.7591/cornell/9781501758393.003.0005
Megan Moore
{"title":"Toward a Mediterranean Erotics of Grief","authors":"Megan Moore","doi":"10.7591/cornell/9781501758393.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501758393.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter examines what the author characterizes as a kind of Mediterranean elite-affective diaspora, in which emotional exceptionalism goes hand in hand with the construction of elite communities, privileging elite status over geo-cultural specificity. It focuses not only on ancient Mediterranean texts, but also on contemporaneous romances written in Medieval Greek, Middle English, and Old French. The chapter highlights one of the best known and most widely reproduced travel narratives — John of Mandeville's Travels, a fictionalized and highly popular early-fourteenth-century account of an Englishman's travels during the Crusades, transmitted in several versions and languages in over seventy-five manuscripts. The chapter reviews Mandeville's judgments of foreign practices — and specifically of interest to us, the emotions these practices produce — as delineating the contours of the privileged self. The chapter proposes that medieval narratives of encounter deploy an erotics of grief that rely on an emotional intertextuality with an elite, Mediterranean past in order to figure elite practices of power in an interwoven, Mediterranean present. It argues that the erotics of grief that course throughout medieval literature are a deeply Mediterranean, intertextual, and intercultural negotiation of status and community through emotion.","PeriodicalId":167991,"journal":{"name":"The Erotics of Grief","volume":"71 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126276731","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Conclusion: The Erotics of Grief and the Stakes of Community","authors":"","doi":"10.1515/9781501758416-007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501758416-007","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":167991,"journal":{"name":"The Erotics of Grief","volume":"328 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121581420","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The Erotics of GriefPub Date : 2021-09-15DOI: 10.7591/cornell/9781501758393.003.0003
Megan Moore
{"title":"Widows and the Romance of Grief","authors":"Megan Moore","doi":"10.7591/cornell/9781501758393.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501758393.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter investigates how emotional and gender practices entwine to articulate the contours of the story of noble privilege. It looks closely at Chrétien de Troyes's Erec et Enide and his Yvain to explore the relation between grief, gender, and narration in romance. While the chapter reveals much about how gender operates and what it does, it argues that is not simply about aligning grief and suffering with the feminine. Often read as objects of men's desire, widows like Enide are also desirable because women's mourning entails narrative. The chapter discusses grief as a kind of storytelling, one eroticized as it narrates power for the powerful. It seeks to answer the questions such as, whose feelings may be expressed, whose feelings matter? Who can practice desire beyond the bounds of the law?","PeriodicalId":167991,"journal":{"name":"The Erotics of Grief","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124187744","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction: Desire and Death in Elite Medieval Emotional Communities","authors":"","doi":"10.1515/9781501758416-002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501758416-002","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":167991,"journal":{"name":"The Erotics of Grief","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116991151","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The Erotics of GriefPub Date : 2021-09-15DOI: 10.7591/cornell/9781501758393.003.0004
Megan Moore
{"title":"Masculinity, Mourning, and Epic Sacrifice","authors":"Megan Moore","doi":"10.7591/cornell/9781501758393.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501758393.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter navigates how the erotics of grief structure the relationships between leaders and their men in chansons de geste. By focusing on King Arthur's and Charlemagne's eroticization of sacrifice, the chapter suggests reading from the perspective of emotion which permits us to query how a spectrum of love relations work together to uphold and reinforce the codes of a medieval elite shaped by the commemoration of heroic masculinity. The chapter also elaborates on the Chanson de Roland, a recounting of the sacrifice of one of Charlemagne's most trusted men, Roland, in order to save his army by calling for reinforcements. It explores the homosocial emotional world of medieval men in battle in texts such as the Song of Roland, Aliscans, Le roman de Rou, and La mort le roi Artu to better understand how grief, desire, and masculinity intersect in service of elite culture predicated on sacrifice. The chapter argues that the emotional community of the chanson de geste is undergirded by complex performances of masculinity tied to eroticizing grief in service of narrating elite community.","PeriodicalId":167991,"journal":{"name":"The Erotics of Grief","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131158046","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Chapter 4. Toward a Mediterranean Erotics of Grief","authors":"","doi":"10.1515/9781501758416-006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501758416-006","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":167991,"journal":{"name":"The Erotics of Grief","volume":"530 ","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114000039","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The Erotics of GriefPub Date : 2021-09-15DOI: 10.7591/cornell/9781501758393.003.0002
Megan Moore
{"title":"Philomena and the Erotics of Privilege in the Middle Ages","authors":"Megan Moore","doi":"10.7591/cornell/9781501758393.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501758393.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter focuses on a tapestry of grief produced in Philomena, a medieval retelling of an Ovidian tale of rape and infanticide recounted in the Metamorphoses. It explores how communal constraints on emotions mediate the construction of agency in tension between the powerful king and the vulnerable virgin. The chapter also looks at the nightingale's polyvalency as a fruitful way to approach the thematization of desire through suffering, as the nightingale highlights the interconnectivity of two seemingly dichotomous emotions — love and grief — as a way of exploring how emotional exceptionalism constructs stories of noble power. Philomena, as the chapter argues, offers an early test case for an erotics of grief developed more extensively in later romances, and it investigates the relation between the performance of elite emotions and the construction of noble power. The chapter analyses the valences of love and desire, grief and death that enshroud the nightingale as synecdochal of the complex emotional community of privilege within romance.","PeriodicalId":167991,"journal":{"name":"The Erotics of Grief","volume":"89 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124504748","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Appendix 1: Selected Illuminations of Knights Being Grieved","authors":"","doi":"10.1515/9781501758416-008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501758416-008","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":167991,"journal":{"name":"The Erotics of Grief","volume":"40 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129600517","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}