This dissertation aims to make greater sense of Flamenca through close reading, seeing Flamenca as a literary hybrid crossing French and Occitan cultures. It draws on intertextual parallels between Flamenca and a substantial corpus of 12th-13 thc. literature, across both cultures: Occitan lyric poetry, debate poetry, poetics treatises, and verse narrative; and French romance.
Trobar Cor(s) reads Flamenca as a subversive courtly romance about finding true love.
Trobar ("finding") is key to Occitan poetics and erotics. "Finding the true" extends trobar into epistemology and ethics. Subversion expands ideas of medieval creativity into derivative ingenuity; in a positive critical sense, opening the text and enriching meaning in semantic destabilization.
Trobar's object is the cor ("heart") or cors ("body, course"), also alluding to the cort ("court"). Flamenca explores trobar in various searches for love, questioning sincerity and investigating true love. One option is amor cortesa ("courtly love"). I reopen the "courtly love debate" in the context of a second, related idea and amorous ideal: amor coral, a love to do with the heart and parity. I cross trobar clus ("closed finding") with amor cortesa, to produce new ideas of "closed love" and "courtly poetry," leading to an erotic and poetic "lyric entrapment" of amorous imprisonment and compositional problems, and to new understanding of trobar.
Flamenca recounts a love-triangle, whose focalization shifts amongst three protagonists. To make sense of events, the reader must bear all three points of view in mind. The dissertation's three central chapters present readings from the perspectives of each protagonist, in multiple, "choose your own adventure" reading. Each chapter follows a protagonist's pursuit of love, enactment of an intertextually allusive "lyric narrative," and attempts to escape lyric entrapment.
Multiple narrative voices parallel multiple focalizations. Both multiplicities are necessary to good reading, which must afford them equivalent status, take them into account (parity), and balance them (mesura, akin to Aristotelian ethical measure) to make sense of the narrative and interpret it fairly. Flamenca deploys what I call "arch-players" to experiment with entwined ideas of authorship and authority, play with distinctions between narrative roles, and expand that of the audience.