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"Explores the ways in which vernacular works composed in Occitan, Catalan, and French between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries narrate multilingualism and its apparent opponent, the mother tongue. These encounters are narrated through literary motifs of love, incest, disguise, and travel"--Provided by publisher.
The Occitan literary tradition of the later Middle Ages is a marginal and hybrid phenomenon, caught between the preeminence of French courtly romance and the emergence of Catalan literary prose. In this book, Catherine Léglu brings together, for the first time in English, prose and verse texts that are composed in Occitan, French, and Catalan-sometimes in a mixture of two of these languages. This book challenges the centrality of "canonical" texts and draws attention to the marginal, the complex, and the hybrid. It explores the varied ways in which literary works in the vernacular composed between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries narrate multilingualism and its apparent opponent, the mother tongue. Léglu argues that the mother tongue remains a fantasy, condemned to alienation from linguistic practices that were, by definition, multilingual. As most of the texts studied in this book are works of courtly literature, these linguistic encounters are often narrated indirectly, through literary motifs of love, rape, incest, disguise, and travel.
Specialists in other languages offer perspectives on the widespread use of French in a range of contexts, from German courtly narratives to biblical exegesis in Hebrew. French came into contact with many other languages in the Middle Ages: not just English, Italian and Latin, but also Arabic, Dutch, German, Greek, Hebrew, Irish, Occitan, Sicilian, Spanish and Welsh. Its movement was impelled by trade, pilgrimage, crusade, migration, colonisation and conquest, and its contact zones included Muslim, Jewish and Christian communities, among others. Writers in these contact zones often expressed themselves and their worlds in French; but other languages and cultural settings could also challenge, reframe or even ignore French-users' prestige and self-understanding. The essays collected here offer cross-disciplinary perspectives on the use of French in the medieval world, moving away from canonical texts, well-known controversies and conventional framings. Whether considering theories of the vernacular in Outremer, Marco Polo and the global Middle Ages, or the literary patronage of aristocrats and urban patricians, their interlocutions throw new light on connected and contested literary cultures in Europe and beyond.
An Introduction to Old Occitan is the only textbook in print for learning the language used by the troubadours in southern France during the Middle Ages. Each of the thirty-two chapters discusses a subject in the study of the language (e.g., stressed vowels, subjunctive mood) and includes an exercise based on a reading of an Occitan text that has been edited afresh for this volume. An essential glossary analyzes every occurrence of every word in the readings and gives cognates in other Romance languages as well as the source of each word in Latin or other languages. The book also contains a list of prefixes, infixes, and suffixes and a dictionary of proper names. An accompanying compact disc includes discussion of the pronunciation of the language, with illustrations from the texts in the book, and musical performances by Elizabeth Aubrey, of the University of Iowa.
Although it seemed in the mid-1970s that the study of the troubadours and of Occitan literature had reached a sort of zenith, it has since become apparent that this moment was merely a plateau from which an intensive renewal was being launched. In this new bibliographic guide to Occitan and troubadour literature, Robert Taylor provides a definitive survey of the field of Occitan literary studies - from the earliest enigmatic texts to the fifteenth-century works of Occitano-Catalan poet Jordi de Sant Jordi - and treats over two thousand recent books and articles with full annotations. Taylor includes articles on related topics such as practical approaches to the language of the troubadours and the musicology of select troubadour songs, as well as articles situated within sociology, religious history, critical methodology, and psychoanalytical analysis. Each listing offers descriptive comments on the scholarly contribution of each source to Occitan literature, with remarks on striking or controversial content, and numerous cross-references that identify complementary studies and differing opinions. Taylor's painstaking attention to detail and broad knowledge of the field ensure that this guide will become the essential source for Occitan literary studies worldwide.
How can untranslatability help us to think about the historical as well as the cultural and linguistic dimensions of translation? For the past two centuries, theoretical debates about translation have responded to the idea that translation overcomes linguistic and cultural incommensurability, while never inscribing full equivalence. More recently, untranslatability has been foregrounded in projects at the intersections between translation studies and other disciplines, notably philosophy and comparative literature. The critical turn to untranslatability re-emphasizes the importance of translation's negotiation with foreignness or difference and prompts further reflection on how that might be understood historically, philosophically, and ethically. If translation never replicates a source exactly, what does it mean to communicate some elements and not others? What or who determines what is translatable, or what can or cannot be recontextualized? What linguistic, political, cultural, or historical factors condition such determinations? Central to these questions is the way translation negotiates with, and inscribes asymmetries among, languages and cultures, operations that are inevitably ethical and political as well as linguistic. This book explores how approaching questions of translatability and untranslatability through premodern texts and languages can inform broader interdisciplinary conversations about translation as a concept and a practice. Working with case studies drawn from the francophone cultures of Flanders, England, and northern France, it explores how medieval texts challenge modern definitions of language, text, and translation and, in so doing, how such texts can open sites of variance and non-identity within what later became the hegemonic global languages we know today.
This volume brings together literary and musical compositions of medieval France, including the Occitanian region, identifying the use of voice in these works as a way of articulating gendered identities. The contributors to this volume argue that because medieval texts were often read or sung aloud, voice is central for understanding the performance, transmission, and reception of work from the period across a wide variety of genres. These essays offer close readings of narrative and lyric poetry, chivalric romance, sermons, letters, political writing, motets, troubadour and trouvère lyric, crusade songs, love songs, and debate songs. Through literary, musical, and historiographical analyses, contributors highlight the voicing of gendered perspectives, expressions of sexuality, and power dynamics. The volume includes feminist readings, investigations of masculinity, queer theory, and intersectional approaches. The contributors interpret literary or musical works by Chrétien de Troyes, Aimeric de Peguilhan, Hue de la Ferté, the Chastelain de Couci, Jacques de Vitry, Christine de Pizan, Anne de Graville, Alain Chartier, and Giovanni Boccaccio, among others. Gender and Voice in Medieval French Literature and Song offers a valuable interdisciplinary approach and contributes to the history of women’s voices in the Middle Ages and Early Modern periods. It illuminates the critical role of voice in negotiating culture, celebrating and innovating traditions, advancing personal and political projects, and defining the literary and musical developments that shaped medieval France. Contributors: Lisa Colton | Emily J Hutchinson | Daisy Delogu | Tamara Bentley Caudill | Katherine Kong | Meghan Quinlan | Lydia M Walker | Rachel May Golden | Anna Kathryn Grau | Anne Adele Levitsky
Bi- and multilingualism are of great interest for contemporary linguists since this phenomenon deeply reflects on language acquisition, language use, and sociolinguistic conditions in many different circumstances all over the world. Multilingualism was, however, certainly rather common already, if not especially, in the premodern world. For some time now, research has started to explore this issue through a number of specialized studies. The present volume continues with the investigation of multilingualism through a collection of case studies focusing on important examples in medieval and early modern societies, that is, in linguistic and cultural contact zones, such as England, Spain, the Holy Land, but also the New World. As all contributors confirm, the numerous cases of multilingualism discussed here indicate strongly that the premodern period knew considerably less barriers between people of different social classes, cultural background, and religious orientation. But we also have to acknowledge that already then human communication could fail because of linguistic hurdles which prevented mutual understanding in religious and cultural terms.