Glauch S (2017)
Publication Language: German
Publication Type: Book chapter / Article in edited volumes
Publication year: 2017
Edited Volumes: Von sich selbst erzählen. Historische Dimensionen des Ich-Erzählens
Series: Studien zur historischen Poetik
City/Town: Heidelberg
Book Volume: 26
Pages Range: 307-342
The article focuses on three texts from the 13th and 14th century which could be designated as autobiographies of a poet: Dante’s Vita Nova, Ulrich von Liechtenstein’s Frauendienst, and the Voir Dit by Guillaume de Machaut. It attempts to show that the authors’ identification of themselves as lyrical poets, and the communicative contexts in which they operated as poets, became the engine driving a non-self-explanatory narrative stance; thus the autobiographical tradition as a form has an origin in and deriving from courtly love poetry. As soon as these narratives, whose central theme is the authors’ own lyrical creation, are released from the dichotomy (now obsolete in scholarly theory) between (factual) autobiography and (fictional) novel, they can reveal facets of self-conceptualization around the topics of authorship, poetics, self-recognition, and exemplarity. Comparing the three first-person narratives, Glauch first delineates how the fundamental conflict between the ideal of permanence in courtly love and the necessary narrative eventfulness lead to stagnations in plot and suspension of the affective, respectively, and how the narrative construct thus lends itself to a sublimation and transformation of erotic energy into discursive form. The varying dichotomies
within the narratives are also narrative formations which serve to depict a process of realization.
Finally, Glauch analyzes structural elements such as biographization and allegorization—features of all three narratives, all of which serve to emphasize an exemplary distancing between the narrators and the love stories which are supposedly their own—and asks whether and how the above could be viewed as a tendency towards self-fictionalization. All three authors employ the biographical model of reflection and narrative to illustrate a conversio or conversion experience and, at least implicitly, the protagonist’s recognition that his life has taken a new turn. Thus they subtly introduce the loss or failure of an idealized love story as the achievement of poetic sovereignty and realization, without rejecting the idea of courtly love.
APA:
Glauch, S. (2017). Versuch über einen minnelyrischen Ursprung des Autobiographischen (Guillaume de Machaut, Dante, Ulrich von Liechtenstein). In Sonja Glauch und Katharina Philipowski (Hrg.), Von sich selbst erzählen. Historische Dimensionen des Ich-Erzählens. (S. 307-342). Heidelberg.
MLA:
Glauch, Sonja. "Versuch über einen minnelyrischen Ursprung des Autobiographischen (Guillaume de Machaut, Dante, Ulrich von Liechtenstein)." Von sich selbst erzählen. Historische Dimensionen des Ich-Erzählens. Hrg. Sonja Glauch und Katharina Philipowski, Heidelberg, 2017. 307-342.
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