Daniel
Heller-Roazen.
Fortune's Faces: The Roman
de la Rose and the
Poetics
of Contingency.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.
Parallax:
Re-visions of Culture and Society series.
224pp.
Hardback
ISBN
0801871913, $45.00.
Publisher's
recommended price $45.00
Arguably
the single
most influential literary work of the European Middle Ages, the Roman
de la Rose of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun has
traditionally
posed a number of difficulties to modern critics, who have viewed its
many
interruptions and philosophical discussions as signs of a lack of
formal
organization and a characteristically medieval predilection for
encyclopedic
summation. In Fortune's Faces, Daniel Heller-Roazen calls into
question
these assessments, offering a new and compelling interpretation of the
romance as a carefully constructed and far-reaching exploration of the
place of fortune, chance, and contingency in literary writing.
Situating
the Romance
of the Rose at the intersection of medieval literature and
philosophy,
Heller-Roazen shows how the thirteenth-century work invokes and
radicalizes
two classical and medieval traditions of reflection on language and
contingency:
that of the Provençal, French, and Italian love poets, who
sought
to compose their "verses of pure nothing" in a language Dante defined
as
"without grammar," and that of Aristotle's discussion of "future
contingents"
as it was received and refined in the logic, physics, theology, and
epistemology
of Boethius, Abelard, Albert the Great, and Thomas Aquinas.Through a
close
analysis of the poetic text and a detailed reconstruction of the
logical
and metaphysical concept of contingency, Fortune's Faces charts
the transformations that literary structures (such as subjectivity,
autobiography,
prosopopoeia, allegory, and self-reference) undergo in a work that
defines
itself as radically contingent. Considered in its full poetic and
philosophical
dimensions, the Romance of the Rose thus acquires an altogether new
significance
in the history of literature: it appears as a work that incessantly
explores
its own capacity to be other than it is.
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