Courtly and Queer: Deconstruction, Desire, and Medieval French Literature by Charlie Samuelson (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Courtly and Queer: Deconstruction, Desire, and Medieval French Literature by Charlie Samuelson
• Megan Moore

charlie samuelson, Courtly and Queer: Deconstruction, Desire, and Medieval French Literature. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2022. Pp. 240. isbn: 978–0–8142–1498–5. $99.95.

Charlie Samuelson's monograph Courtly and Queer is a tremendous contribution to medieval French studies, to queer studies, and to narratological theory. In just over 200 pages, Samuelson challenges, productively collapses, and reanimates the spaces between courtly romance and the dits, queering assumptions about generic separateness by penetrating interstitial spaces. The explicit project of the book is 1) to 'explor[e] how returning to a particular emphasis on language and poetics can mark not a turn away from careful analysis of medieval sexual politics but another radical way of engaging with—or returning to—them'; and 2) to 'emphasiz[e] an insufficiently articulated but unflagging queerness that is inseparable from poetic indeterminacy and inhabits—and infests—the core of a literary tradition that has generally … been understood as predominantly at the service of patriarchy' (p. 23). The implicit project of the book relates, I think, to Samuelson's initial observations about queerness, which he defines as 'all that resists the notion that courtly literature seeks to present gender and sexuality as coherent and/or normative' (p. 1). [End Page 75]

Samuelson's work puts medieval texts in dialogue with modern theory, sometimes in explicit conversation and sometimes leaving them merely adjacent. Sustained engagement with Judith Butler, Paul de Man, and Lee Edelman not only broadens the ken of theories to which medieval texts can make productive contributions, but also serves as an important reminder that modern theory must reconsider its askew orientation to the premodern. Throughout his study, Samuelson weaves conversation with other medievalists and almost every page offers citations not only of other scholars, but of textual passages, a richness that sometimes becomes a distraction.

After an introduction, there are four chapters which focus sequentially on subjectivity (Chapter One), metalepsis (Chapter Two), insertion (Chapter Three), and irony (Chapter Four). In Chapter One, Samuelson argues that texts by Chrétien de Troyes, Machaut, and Christine de Pizan 'probe the indeterminacy of—and incoherencies in—the notion of the subject' (p. 29). With sophisticated readings and an engaging scholarly voice, Samuelson hits his stride as he pairs Alain de Libera's Archéologie du sujet, Judith Butler's The Psychic Life of Power, and medieval texts to explore how voice and subjectivity entwine in ways that bend generic assumptions and invite scholarly attention to 'what the distinction of first- to third-person pronouns portends' (p. 27). His choice to focus initially on Christine's complicated voice in Le Duc des vrais amants is a forceful introduction to the kinds of work he will do throughout the study. Here, he deploys close readings, critical reception and context, and theoretically innovative moves to render Christine more complex, a more nuanced and difficult narrator, poet, and subject of her own work through a 'je' that is multifaceted, ambiguously gendered and emplaced. Samuelson reads Machaut's subjectivity as similarly multifaceted, rendering the subject as always in production, but always already reflexive (p. 48).

In Chapter Two, 'Medieval Metalepsis,' Samuelson focuses on another kind of intrusion—this time by metalepsis—which he argues invites deconstructive reading (p. 72). In texts as diverse as Partenopeu de Blois, Silence, and La Prison amoureuse, Samuelson returns to the unstable 'je' from Chapter One to focus on how metalepsis upends the singularity of a narrator who constantly interrupts his own tale to bemoan his own unsuccessful love affair, resulting in a text that 'profoundly mobilizes narrative poetics to destabilize binaries fundamental to the workings of patriarchy' (p. 87), a move he sees repeated in the refusal to delineate interior and exterior in Silence. In the final section of the chapter, he turns to Jean Froissart's dit, the Prison amoureuse, and he concludes that 'almost paradoxically, narrative poetics in these verse romances and dits are effectively antinarrative' (p. 109).

Chapter Three, 'On Sameness, Difference, and Textualizing Desire,' engages substantially with the theoretical work of Lee Edelman's Homographesis to claim that 'the technique of lyric insertion...