The comedy of paradox: Mythic and medieval tricksters in narrative.
Item
-
Title
-
The comedy of paradox: Mythic and medieval tricksters in narrative.
-
Identifier
-
AAI9108135
-
identifier
-
9108135
-
Creator
-
Kraus, Jo Anne.
-
Contributor
-
Adviser: Frederick Goldin
-
Date
-
1990
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
Literature, Medieval | Literature, Comparative | Folklore
-
Abstract
-
A comparative study of four trickster narratives, one Native American and three medieval, this dissertation explores the ambivalent comic reality the trickster represents in the Middle Ages when ecclesiastical doctrine eschewed ambiguity, insisting on moral categories for human reality. In this pursuit, it treats the trickster figure as a literary construct, analyzing the tales told about him to reveal the essentially comic role of the trickster's paradoxical nature.;The introduction reviews theoretical literature of various disciplines to establish a working definition of the trickster figure as a symbol of paradox whose act of trickery itself weds instinctual appetite with imagination. The following chapter on the Winnebago trickster, Wakdjunkaga, examines the way paradox is inherent in the form and content of this mythic narrative cycle, suggesting a pattern conveying the comic acceptance of contradiction as a socio-religious necessity.;Though not the hero of a narrative cycle, the Loki of Old Norse mythology, like Wakdjunkaga, exhibits a self-serving energy that drives the narrative. Poised between order and chaos, Loki is the catalyst for action in many stories, with a mythic role as Fate's agent, the one whose life force shatters the static eternity of Asgard, pushing the stories on to their cataclysmic end, Ragnarok.;Renart the fox of twelfth-century France and the late-medieval German Eulenspiegel are both popular rather than strictly mythic tricksters, but both their authors use the trickster to address paradox, to promote through comedy an acceptance of the gloriously absurd, cyclical, ambivalent material reality of the world as a corrective to the fixed, idealistic, linear reality of Western Christianity. Limiting literary analysis of Renart primarily to Branch II/Va of Le Roman de Renart, this study explores in detail Pierre de Saint-Cloud's ironic double vision that reveals through the narrative the random reality of self-interest beneath the idealistic courtly pattern, and the fertile chaos from which the essential struggle for order is derived. In the cycle of the fictional buffoon Till Eulenspiegel, the trickster's insistance on establishing his own contrary reality takes precedence over everything else he does. His tricks jolt others, forcing them to break through operational assumptions, to view life as reflected in his absurdly logical mirror.;The conclusion emphasizes the comedy inherent in the trickster's vitality, in the cyclical narrative form, and in the incongruity of paradox which finally embraces all of life.
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
-
degree
-
Ph.D.
