Kathleen Coyne Kelly

Monumentality and the Gaze in Jean Cocteau's L'Éternel retour (1943)

One can identify a queer monumentality and a queer gaze in L’Éternel retour, a film based on the Tristan and Iseult legend and made under the aegis of the Vichy Government. By placing Patrice (a modern Tristan played by Jean Marais) so firmly in our desiring gaze, Cocteau offers us a study in fascist homoeroticism.

Gender and Difference in the Middle Ages edited by Sharon Farmer and Carol Braun Pasternack (review)

Durham sources are revealing: while she refers to a wide variety of Arthurian texts, she quotes only from Tennysons Idylls ofthe King, D.D. R. Owenss Everyman Library translation of Chrétien de Troyess Perceval, Pauline Matarassos translation of The Quest ofthe Holy Grail, R.M. Lumianskys edition of Malory and Eugene Vinavers KingArthur andHis Knights: Selected Tales by Sir Thomas Malory (not the complete Vinaver or P.J.C. Field editions). Her secondary Arthurian sources are important but none is more recent than R.S. Loomis. In short, the Arthurian research is typical of a pre-Internet undergraduate English class. All this is not to say that Durham does not have wisdom to impart, even about Arthurian characters and themes, or that her insights and diagrams do not develop a certain intrinsic fascination. Its just that she is less interested in King Arthur and the Grail for their own sakes than for the Utopian project of today. In this, however, her book is like many others that have reshaped and revivified the legend through time, making the legend a continuing reference point for understanding the experience of growing up human in an imperfect world.