Linh Nguyen , CLA 2008
A Study in Literary Perspective of Women in 12th Century Literature
Major
French and English
Mentor
Susan Noakes : French & Italian
Brief Bio
I like to read. I am interested in medieval French literature, and classical Chinese literature.
Future Plans
I would love to get into a graduate program for comparative literature: comparing the Western and the Eastern's classic corpus.
Why Research?
I love literature. Finding a job at the university involving literature was hard. I decided to do a UROP as a way to have a job working within my field of study and it's also a mean to prepare me for future research projects.
What Did I Get from Research?
I will gain experience working with a professor and a stable knowledge of how a literary research is conducted. More importantly, how to manage my time and to stay on track with my thesis.
How Did I Start?
I took a class with my mentor last spring, and she had one student who was in UROP. Proffessor Noakes spoke in class about this research opportunity and I got interested from there.
My Advice for Another Student:
For those interested in literary research, keep it very realistic, and really narrow down what you want to understand. Find a professor you like from your classes and then work with them. It can get mind boggling with literary research, since the more in depth you get the more ideas you come up with. SO STAY ON TRACK. Do not be intimidated by the many science students at the UROP meetings. I was the only literary person at the meeting, but I was not discouraged by the many science students.
Research Summary
I proposed a study of the differences between modern and medieval readers in literary perspectives toward female figures in Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s novel Le Roman de Troie. I will be using Jean-Francois Lyotard’s idea of the differend and Hans Robert Jauss’s idea of the horizon-of-expectation to explore the hypothesis that the differences in the horizon-of-expectation of modern and medieval addressees lead to a different interpretation of the text in regards to the role of the female. Benoît de Sainte-Maure dedicated this text to Aliénor d’Aquitaine, and it was likely that she commissioned it. It is thus quite legitimate to ask how the women characters in the text might be related to Aliénor d’Aquitaine. Benoît (the addressor) might be offering a critique of his queen through his delineation of female characters. Today modern readers of this text would rarely concern themselves with the possibility that Aliénor d’Aquitaine might have played a strong role in the birth of the wide range of compelling female characters in Le Roman de Troie. To modern readers these female characters have long lost their connection to their possible model, Aliénor d’Aquitaine. Why do modern readers neglect this contextual element? And how does that neglect influence the modern reading of the text and its perceived value? Such powerful and dynamic female characters did not just magically come to being over night in the mind of a male writer in the patriarchal society of medieval France. I hope to be able to show how the female characters in this romance, especially because of its connection to Aliénor, can reveal something of the discourse, or culture-wide conversation, about the nature and power of women in High Medieval France.