The poetics of incorporation in François Rabelais and late medieval French epic: an anthropological reading

Thesis

Eating, drinking and other forms of incorporation are rife in early modern French author François Rabelais’s fictions. They also feature heavily in several late medieval epics which he mentions in his work (Huon de Bordeaux, Fierabras, Valentin et Orson, and Le Roman de Guillaume). Just as Rabelais’s engagement with these epics is assumed to be purely parodic, the basic bodily functions such as nourishment prominent in both sets of texts are widely regarded as inherently low-brow tropes comically disrupting the higher literary registers with which they are juxtaposed, be it Rabelais’s humanist erudition or the high-flown epic celebration of heroic deeds. However, the tropes of eating and drinking need not be read in opposition to more serious literary themes, but as ways into them. This thesis adopts a broadly cognitive, anthropological approach, which roots imaginative, reflective and abstract thought processes in our concrete, embodied experience of the world. Rabelais and his epic counterparts weave these concrete, everyday bodily experiences into their explorations of cultural and religious community, political ideology, ethics, upbringing and education, and even literary culture itself, in profound reflections on the genuine connections between the life of the body and various products of the cultural imagination. They imagine cultural assimilation as a form of incorporation, higher cognitive development as an extension of food culture, and sharing stories in terms of sharing food. Expanding and politicising the scope of cognitive literary studies from the question of mind-body continuity, these texts’ poetics of incorporation reflect a specifically pre-modern conception of the human as a cultural animal. Read attentively, they prompt us to reimagine the relationship between animal necessity and human fulfilment, or what Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls zoē, our simply living, organic life, and bios, a meaningful, culturally qualified existence, as one of continuous emergence.

Authors: Ley, R

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-vj9j2ryrx
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: Rabelais; food culture; biopolitics; cognitive literary studies; nature and culture; French epic; embodied metaphor; embodied cognition; Agamben
• Subjects: Literature; French