“In the far distance”: Memories of the Medieval and Ghosts in Modern Poetry (Jack Spicer, Cole Swensen)

Nathalie Koble

doi:10.18352/relief.892

“In the far distance”: Memories of the Medieval and Ghosts in Modern Poetry (Jack Spicer, Cole Swensen)

Author(s)

Nathalie Koble

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18352/relief.892

Keywords:

modern poetry, ghosts, medieval literature

Abstract

This essay proposes a comparative reading of medieval texts and the modern poetry of Jack Spicer and Cole Swensen. It explores the places of destabilization in these literary works, to grasp the stakes of the medieval resurgence that is taking place there. To summarize, we can say that the Middle Ages are used here to fight three tyrannies that are usually seen as constitutive of the subject in classic views inherited by modernity: that of time; that of the subject; and finally the primeval importance of meaning.

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Author Biography

Nathalie Koble

Nathalie Koble teaches medieval French language and literature at the Ecole normale supérieure in Paris. She is the author or editor of Les Prophéties de Merlin en prose: le roman arthurien en éclats (2009), Genèse et jeunesse du royaume arthurien (2008), Les dessous de la Table ronde (2005), Lais bretons: Marie de France et ses contemporains (2011, with Mireille Séguy), and Passé présent, mémoire du Moyen Age dans les fictions contemporaines (2009, with Mireille Séguy), and Mémoire du Moyen Age dans la poésie contemporaine, Paris, Hermann, 2013.

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Published

2014-09-29

Issue

Vol. 8 No. 1 (2014): Speaking of the Medieval Today: French and Francophone Medievalisms

Section

Articles - thematic dossier

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

All articles published in RELIEF appear in Open Access under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0). Under this licence, authors retain ownership of the copyright of their article, but they allow its unrestricted use, provided it is properly cited.

How to Cite

Koble, N. (2014) “‘In the far distance’: Memories of the Medieval and Ghosts in Modern Poetry (Jack Spicer, Cole Swensen)”, RELIEF - REVUE ÉLECTRONIQUE DE LITTÉRATURE FRANÇAISE, 8(1), pp. 152–170. doi:10.18352/relief.892.