Synopses & Reviews
"This book provides the reader with a new, challenging, and sophisticated critical analysis of the Song of Roland." --Choice
"[Haidu's] close reading of the Song of Roland is interesting, informative, and significant... "
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. 237-247) and indexes.
About the Author
PETER HAIDU is Professor of French at UCLA.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Violence: Modern Perspectives on the Medieval and the Modern
1. The Semiotization of Death: Open Text or Closed?
2. THe Gaze of the Other
The Sociological Presentation of the Self
The Intertextuality of the Peerage
3. Excursus I: Aesthetics, Economics, Politics
Beauty, Value, Violence
The Noble, the Knight, the Peasant
The Ideology of Knighthood
4. The Subsystem of the Professional Warrior: Courage, Contradiction, Irascibility
Ideological Value (I): The Constitution and Destitution of Subjects
Ideological Value (II): From Subject to Traitor?
Structure of Structures
5. The Destinator's Multiple Roles: Syncretism or Contradiction?
The Culpable Guarantor
From Individual to Role
6. Excursus II: The Play of Absence and Presence in Medieval Kingship
Carles li reis,...
...nostre emperere magnes
Reis and Emperere Textualized
7. Funerary Rituals
The Unreintegrated Mourner
The Death of Aude, or the Refusal of Exchange
The Transformative Performance
8. Textual Coherence and the Dialectics of Ideology
Textual Coherence: The Narrative
Narrative Programs
Actants
9. Ganelon's Trial, or the Monarch's Revolution
The Actorial Level: Inexorable Structure
The Actantial Distribution
10. Conclusion
The Chanson Ends with the Indeterminacy of Non-Exclusive Disjunction
The Chanson Produces Limited and Specifiable Significations
The Subject of Violence
Nomadic Violence, Sedentary Economics, and the Birth of the State
Notes
Bibliography
General Index
Index of Proper Nouns
Index of Foreign Terms and Phrases