UC Berkeley

Fullness and Gaps is a study of narrative structure in the five Arthurian romances of the canonical twelfth-century poet Chrétien de Troyes. In the Middle Ages, books were not printed but transmitted by scribes, owners, and oral performers who were not always concerned to leave the text as they found it. As a result, literary works underwent various forms of fragmentation and corruption as they migrated from one person or place to the next. My dissertation shows that the culture of fragmentation in the Middle Ages inspired an interest on Chrétien’s part in the possible aesthetic ramifications of rupture. Interpreting fragmentation as a narrative device rather than a deficiency in the structure of the romances casts new light on the porous relationship between medieval writing and the poetics of textual transmission, while illuminating hitherto overlooked aspects of Chrétien’s engagement with twelfth-century dialectical philosophy and his interventions in debates about gender equality, marriage and sexuality, and chivalric ethics. Yet his investment in such practices as division, omission, and incompletion also betrays a precociously modern compositional strategy that my dissertation compares to the use of silence and absence, or the “blank,” in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, as theorized by Wolfgang Iser.