아서 왕 로맨스와 궁정식 사랑의 역설 = Arthurian Romance and the Paradoxes of Courtly Love

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Medieval courtly love in its authentic Arthurian form is governed by what we may call the aesthetics of paradoxes, which neutralizes the subversive potential of the apparently anti-feudal, anti-patriarchal alliance between the knight and the lady. Chretien de Troyes`s Le chevalier an lion serves as a perfect example. Love is supposed to empower the lady (Laudine), but it ultimately disempowers her. The same is true with the knight (Yvain), who turns into an expendable commodity, stuck in the ever-excruciating cycle of professional errantry. Strategically positioned between the two lovers is the second knight (Gauvain), who performs the paradoxical role of competing at once with the lady for the knight and with the knight for the lady. This trigonometry of love characterizes the late twelfth- and early thirteenth-century Arthurian romances, including Chretien`s best works and the Lancelot-Grail Cycle. A hallmark distinguishing these romans courtois per se from other medieval romances and later Arthurian texts is that neither the lady nor the knight emerges as an agent of her/his own emotion and behavior. True agency or center lies elsewhere-outside the text in the real, historical court, where the patron-prince needs to mobilize both the knightly class and chivalric ideology for his political enterprises, and where the courtier-author serves as a spokesperson of this prince. It is thus not just femininity that is constructed and manipulated in the literature of courtly love; the domesticated, self-disenfranchising masculinity of the knight-lover, too, is an ideological construction.