The Erotodidactic Discourse of Ovid and Andreas Capellanus [thesis]

Ovid's Ars amatoria and Remedia amoris, and Andreas Capellanus' twelfth century work, De Amore, provide unique examples of literary treatments of love: the love handbook. This dissertation is an attempt to establish the generic distinctiveness of this literary phenomenon, and thus to circumscribe a particular discursive mode which is crucial, in my view, for the understanding of the emergence of a conception of a self which is formed and realited reflectively and expressively with the help of a dialogic technique. I approach the problem of the erotodidactic genre, by De Amore construe their potential reading experience. Chapter one examines the author-reader relationship on which the love subject of love leads to the love teacher's "inferiority complex." Chapter two offers a model of rhetoric ("engaged rhetoric") through which we may understand the particularity educational agenda of the love-handbook. It argues that although the erotodidactic works of Ovid and Andreas Capellanus did not function in the same way that other technical handbooks of the period did, the practical claims of these texts should be taken seriously. This can he done by an examination of the new meaning which the erotodidactic genre reads into the imperative "know thyself": the development of a psychological form of self-awareness. Chapter four ties this psychological structure to the specific literary experience engendered by the erotodidactic text, i.e., a form of reading that explicitly depends on the projection of the reader's personal experience. In chapter five, I show that this literary experience has traditionally been rendered inferior, tied to a degraded level of textuality, to an "audience of indocti" and, in particular, to a feminine reading. In conclusion, I consider how the conventional distinction between feminine and masculine forms of textuality is operative in the self-understanding of the erotodidactic author.