Madness in Medieval French Literature: Identities Found and Lost, by Sylvia Huot

• Lisa Perfetti ^[1]
  1. [1] Provost, Professor of French and Francophone Studies, The College of Wooster, Wayne County, Ohio, Estats Units d'Amèrica
• Localización: Romance philology, ISSN 0035-8002, Vol. 59, Nº. 1, 2005, págs. 162-166
• Idioma: inglés
• Enlaces
  • Texto Completo Ejemplar
• Resumen

  • The subtitle of this book is quite important, for identity information is as much the focus as madness. Covering a wide range of literary texts, Huot demonstrates that the male subject in aristocratic culture "emerges explicitly at the cost of, and by means of the exclusion of, a variety of parodies or caricatures of selhood: not only madness and mental incompetence but also physical deformation, bestiality, sonambulism, transgressive sexualities, femininity, serfdom, and so on". Thus the book traces the myriad ways in wich madmen resemble other liminal figures, including werewolves, sexual deviants, and somnambulists. The book draws from poststructuralist and psycoanalitycal theory to iluminate the "performative process" of identity formation and demonstrate how narratives of madness makes this performance visible.