This dissertation examines a medieval genre that combines narration, in prose or verse, with inserted lyrical poems. Although well known in France, this “mixed genre,” whether as a prosimetrum or its all verse variation, has received very little scholarly attention in English, even though it was a very popular literary form in medieval England. Chaucer, for example, organizes his Troilus and Criseyde with a series of inserted lyrical set pieces designed to emphasize both the passions of love and its inevitable undoing. Medieval lyrics, however, have been described as playful exercises in rhetorical conventions, whose seemingly repetitive repertoire of conceits and figures point more to the rules of composition than to our Romantic conception of the poem as self-expression. And yet, within the mixed genre, narrative frames surround these conventional poems, grounding them in concrete incidents, and so create a “contextual subjectivity” for the singer, a fiction of the self that emanates from the song. In revisiting the problem of the medieval “lyric I,” so often called impersonal and conventional, I argue that the mixed genre introduces a new concept of song as a locus of subjectivity within a framed performance. I am interested in the form’s capacity to suggest, or even stage, the impression of a singular, emotional subject in a variety of works: Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, the Tristan en prose, John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, Charles of Orleans’ two books, one in French and the other English, and Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

This project explores why gestures of generosity, so prevalent in Irish and South African writing from 1980 to 2002, repeatedly fail to generate cross-cultural understanding and social cohesion. It uses gift exchanges, particularly monetary gifts and acts of hospitality, as vehicles for better understanding how post-colonial communities recognize and respond to difference, and how this often limits the possibilities of more inclusive communities. The overall impetus of “Generosity and Belonging” is to examine how dominant models of community in contemporary Ireland and South Africa construct the privilege of inclusion through the exclusion of ethnic, racial, gendered, and national Others. While these communities operate by exclusion, they present a facade of inclusivity; as such this project focuses on models of belonging that take on the form of exceptionalism, or the belief that a particular national community is distinct and extraordinary from others. While the emphasis is on national community this project uses friendship, specifically Derrida’s examination of the hegemonic Western model of friendship explored in The Politics of Friendship, as a concrete point of entry. The microcosm of friendship illustrates how individuals respond to each other’s differences, and illuminates how otherness is then understood at the macrocosmic level of community. Ultimately “Generosity and Belonging” is invested in exploring how representations of generosity in Irish and South African texts not only reveal the limits of community, but push against them in order to imagine more capacious forms of belonging. The case examples investigated in this project are ethnic difference in James Joyce’s early twentieth-century Ireland (Joyce’s Ulysses); racial difference in Apartheid South Africa (J.M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron, Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People, and photos by David Goldblatt and Rosalind Solomon); gender difference in the Irish Republic during the Troubles (Edna O’Brien’s House of Splendid Isolation and Pat Murphy’s Maeve); and finally, racial, class, and national difference in neoliberal, globalized South Africa (K. Sello Duiker’s Thirteen Cents and Gordimer’s The Pickup).

Much of what occurs in medieval romance is described as happening “by chance.” Accordingly, the well-known trope of Fortune governs the experience and structure of romance as its characters grapple with contingency, the unpredictable, and the marvels, quests, and adventures that define the romance genre’s attempts to articulate the experience of uncertainty. In the Middle Ages, however, the vocabulary for talking about indeterminacy was essentially limited to chance and fortune. Only in the 1600s did early modern mathematicians and philosophers such as Blaise Pascal and Thomas Bayes begin to articulate the mathematics of probability, refining the notion of “chance” to include the category of risk. For centuries this notion of calculable risk was thought to be virtually synonymous with uncertainty, and romance scholars continued to talk about any instance of “chance” within romance as general uncertainty. Recently, however, economists studying principles of innovation have defined uncertainty as one of many conditions of indeterminacy. What it means to face risk is not the same thing as facing absolute uncertainty, and different decision-making processes are needed to navigate these forms of indeterminacy. In my dissertation, “Expanding Fortune’s Reach: Trusting Uncertainty in Romance,” I show that while medieval romance poets were not working with the modern definitions of risk and probability, they wrote their romances as if they were. Drawing from both early modern and modern principles of statistics, mathematics, and economics, I show not only how romance poets intuited nuances in the forms of indeterminacy, such as risk and uncertainty, that would emerge centuries later, but also how the romance genre itself theorizes uncertainty. By arguing that medieval poets already intuited the nuanced distinctions between risk and uncertainty, my work challenges commonly held periodization schemes. This implies that artists and poets are often steps ahead of formal philosophical or scientific articulation. The experience of uncertainty is and has been so fundamental to human experience in the world, that, as we see in these romances, poets could model it through literature before it was formalized in mathematics. My research both furthers our understanding of the romance genre in particular as it explores decision-making in the context of uncertainty and allows us to understand the challenges of acting in the face of uncertainty writ large. While the experience of uncertainty is a widely studied aspect of literature, considering uncertainty as one of many forms of indeterminacy allows us to explore the general experience of uncertainty with more clarity as we contemplate what it means to find the “right” path when there is no path to see.

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