Louise D'Arcens

Dario Fo's Mistero Buffo and the Left-Modernist Reclamation of Medieval Popular Culture

The study of popular culture has long harbored what can be described as a latent medievalist impulse. Among the cluster of competing definitions of the word “popular” over which scholars have wrestled,1 there has been one that has taken a longitudinal approach, perceiving “popular culture” to be the authentic expression and repository of “the people,” il popolo or das Volk, who have been understood as an historical category. According to the practitioners of this approach, the customs and traditions of these “popular classes” have endured across centuries despite not participating in “official culture.” The culture associated with “the people” is deemed popular in the sense that it is produced by them and for their own consumption, expressing their interests and their aesthetics. I am calling this a “medievalist impulse” of popular cultural theory because, as cultural theorists and medievalists have separately argued, its emergence in the nineteenth century is inextricably bound up with the philological, literary, and material recovery of medieval culture. David Hall argues that the perception of an “unofficial” medieval culture had preceded the nineteenth century, but the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were distinctive for their celebratory recovery of the culture of the people, a culture regarded as enduring yet fragile to loss under modernity.2

Nostalgia, melancholy, and the emotional economy of replacement: feeling for la France profonde in the novels of Michel Houellebecq

Abstract Michel Houellebecq’s two most recent novels, The Map and the Territory (2010) and Submission (2015), call attention to the powerful affective pull of the premodern past within late capitalist and multicultural France, portraying the conflicting emotions of loss this past evokes. The Map and the Territory explores the survival, and revival, of traditional arts and crafts in a cultural scene where “la France profonde” has been commodified through the lifestyle and heritage industries, and medievalist nostalgia has been recuperated into a neoliberal economy where the yearning for authenticity is harnessed to the desire to consume. Submission explores the significance of the premodern for a near-future France characterized by the return of religious impulses that have been only superficially suppressed by the Enlightenment and secular republicanism. Here, France’s contact with “la France profonde” via religious tourism, patriotic poetry, and neoreactionary politics revisits its Catholic and patriarchal traditions. Flirting with the ideas of neoreactionary pundits, Houellebecq adopts but also satirizes the Right’s argument that France’s relationship to the premodern past is essentially melancholic.

'Femmes a part': unsociable sociability, women, lifewriting

When Christine de Pizan, in her 1410 Lamentation on the Evils of Civil War, described herself as ‘seulette a part’ (de Pizan, 1984: 84) she expressed a divided sense of identity that has echoed throughout women’s lifewriting right up to the present day. Calling desperately for an end to the warfare that was dividing France, she marshalled all the rhetorical pathos she could to attain her end, portraying herself simultaneously as a loyal member of, and an outsider to, French society. The striking ambiguity of the phrase ‘a part’ captures the uncertain standing she experienced as a widow and a female commentator, alluding to the social marginality her position brought with it, but also, vitally, to the valuable reflective distance it allowed her as a lone woman calling for peace in her fractured society. In this short, three-word self-description, which informs the title of this chapter, Christine captures succinctly the complex, uneasy relationship between the female autobiographical self that is ‘a part’ of communities and institutions, and the self that stands ‘apart’ from them. It is this complex and frequently agonized sense of self — seeking to belong yet yearning for solitude and privacy, or indeed for distinction from the group — that is at the heart of this volume’s exploration of women’s life-writing. This mode of self-representation, in the many guises in which it is taken up in the chapters that follow, is at the heart of what we are calling the unsociable sociability of women’s lifewriting.

'Je, Christine': Christine de Pizan's Autobiographical Topoi

The literary output of Christine de Pizan (1365–c.1429) was prolific, spanning almost four decades and encompassing a range of genres, including courtly verse, epistolary polemic and consolatio, historical biography, verse and prose allegory, political speculum, moral advice and conduct manual. She is most famous in the contemporary era for her defences of women, but recent scholarship has also considered her legacy as an overlooked female political theorist and commentator.