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Acknowledgments
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Acknowledgments All that matters is love and work. —Freud Writing a book that conjoins two of the most fundamental areas of human experience has been a daunting challenge and a continuous pleasure. While it is not true that nothing matters beyond love and work, it would be difficult to find two more basic building blocks by which humans construct meaning and purpose for their lives. For an idealist and a romantic, love remains endlessly fascinating in its variety, its drama, its sweetness , and its ability to surprise. Love forms the towers and spires of life’s castle—lifting us up to the heavens as high as we possibly can go. Humans often experience the onset of love as an unexplainable gift, an unmerited grace, the stuff of poetry. Work, on the other hand, forms the prosaic foundation upon which humans build their castles. Labor keeps us rooted to the earth. While it is one means by which we build our dreams, it is rarely poetic. Although work rewards us with a sense of accomplishment when our tasks are well done, the drudgery of work is not often inspirational. Work rhythms are the ticking metronome by which we keep time in our march through life. These two crucial life experiences are so different that at first it seems wrong-headed to look for points of cross-fertilization, yet our poets and writers have been doing so for centuries. It began with the Roman poet Ovid, who, unlike his contemporaries, saw in love not madness but a project to be completed. Ovid declared that the qualities that went into a good worker were also those of a successful lover. Beyond a tender heart, Ovidian lovers needed a good head and a headstrong spirit. The ascending towers and spires of Ovidian love were built with laughter and high spirits on the prosaic foundation of effort and applied technique . Ovid left little to unmerited grace. The world of labor and the ix world of love merged to form a single coherent construct: love’s labor, a concept that caught the attention of later writers and was lovingly developed over the course of the Middle Ages, a literary tradition that forms the focus of this study. This book on the discourse of love’s labor has been a labor of love for a good many years, and I owe debts of gratitude to many good friends and colleagues who have helped me along the way. The germ of the idea came during a graduate seminar on Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde that I took under the late Joseph Milosh many years ago. The idea lay dormant for a number of years, however, until I had the good fortune to attend a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar organized by the late R. E. Kaske. Kaske was interested in my argument that the vice of acedia played an important part in the characterization of Troilus, and he encouraged me to continue my research and even expand it into a book-length study. Over the course of the next decade or so, I published several articles related to my overall project, and the project grew in terms of its scope and methodology. I was not able, however, to spend large amounts of time writing the book until 1998, when I was awarded a semester-long Periodic Professional Leave by the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Although it has taken me several more years to see the book into print, that semester was crucial in helping me turn an underdeveloped insight into a full, scholarly monograph. Indeed, my home institution has continuously provided generous support for the research on this book, including a number of grants and summer research fellowships from the University Committee on Research . In addition, Dean Shelton Hendricks and my department chairperson , Professor Michael Skau, offered me a generous subvention to aid in various last-minute expenses associated with publication of this book. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the Nebraska Humanities Council, which awarded me a summer fellowship to work on a book-related project in the summer of 1990. It would be impossible to remember all of the individuals who offered advice and encouragement while I was writing the book. My discovery of M. M. Bakhtin and his writings on the ideological nature of discourse, critical to the central argument of the book, I owe to a faculty reading group on critical theory in which Susan Naramore Maher and Irvin...