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running head? laurence de looze, Pseudo-Autobiography in the Fourteenth Century: Juan Ruiz, Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Froissart, and Geoffrey Chaucer. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997. Pp. xi, 211. isbn: 8-8130—1507-3. $49.95. At its best, a comparative approach to literary study can yield insights that escape what traditionally national or narrowly linguistic methods are able to provide. The reason is simple. Literary styles, generic conventions, even repertoires ofthemes are eminently exportable and importable, as students ofthe Middle Ages have cause to know well. Could we come to understand the romance or the chanson degeste in any meaningful depth ifwe did not follow the history ofthese forms across a number of linguistic and national boundaries? To ask the question is to answer it. At its worst, however, a comparative approach develops no tertium quidthrough the simultaneous analysis oftexts distant (in time, space, or language) from another, but which are 'comparable' in some discussible fashion. Most often this happens, I believe, when the texts chosen for examination are not significantly linked. The multifarious forms of transtextuality have been thoroughly anatomized by Gérard Genette, who has shown that textual connection assumes many different and intriguing forms. These include transnational, even transgeneric and transhistorical literary features (for example, the trend within European literature subsumed by Erich Auerbachs encompassing definition of 'realism'). On the one hand, then, it makes sense to discuss in a comparative fashion the Chanson deRoUnd, the Rolandslied, and Orfando Furioso or some similar constellation of connected texts. On the other hand, just to seize on an entirely hypothetical example, though Chrétien de Troyes and Henry James both strongly thematize the niceties of aristocratic behavior and the inner sentimental life ofwhich that behavior is an oblique symptom, a comparative approach to, say, Yvain and Washington Square would hold little interest for most of us. This is a long preamble to my tale proper, which is the evaluation ofLaurence de Looze's ambitious comparative study of four major literary figures from the later MiddleAges: Juan Ruiz, Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Froissart, and Geoffrey Chaucer. But these theoretical ruminations are necessary ifwe are to understand the substantial failure of this book. The individual chapters devoted to what he terms 'pseudoautobiography ' in certain works of these writers offer valuable insights on nearly every page. De Looze is a perceptive and sensitive reader, well schooled in the more generally useful concepts of post-structuralism and acquainted with a wide range of medieval and modern texts. The book is written with erudition, enthusiasm, and intelligence. Disappointingly, however, it does not in myview establish the usefulness ofthe modern notion of'pseudo-autobiography' for individual analyses ofthese four authors. Moreover, Professor de Looze offers no convincing reasons why this concept can help us understand a medieval tradition that had previously gone unnoticed and unnamed. Pseudo-autobiography, with its challenging ironies and hermeneutic complexities, connects more to the modern and postmodern tradition ofwhat Barthes terms 'writable' texts than it does to the only superficiallysimilar late medieval practices ofliterary gamesmanship. arthuriana Pseudo-autobiography, de Looze concedes, is not 'a generic category that medieval readers recognized as distinct' (2). That being the case, a large burden must be borne by the critic who argues that the texts he discusses are a part ofa 'genre' he himself identifies and names. Do these texts form a tradition that for whatever reason was simply not recognized as one during the time of their initial production and circulation? Or do they form a tradition devised only by the critic who, impressed by their substantial similarities, argues that a comparative approach illuminates their commonalties and differences? A study like de Looze's should be grounded in a theoretically sophisticated consideration ofthese issues. In his very briefand cursory treatment ofthe 'genre' questions that his approach raises, however, de Looze attempts to sidestep rather than confront these difficulties. Instead, he intimates that because some works have been read as belonging to different genres at different times, that genre is perhaps nothing more than a category ofreading. This point is confusingly made in a rhetorical question that cuts off discussion but does not actually commit de Looze to a highly debatable position on...

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