J Chiméne Bateman (Ph.D. Yale University)
Assistant Professor of French
(312) 996-5076
chimene@uic.edu


Medieval and Renaissance French literature; love lyric from the troubadours to the Pléiade; romance and the origins of the novel; comparative studies between classical antiquity, medieval and early modern culture; rhetoric; gender and feminist theory.

My Ph.D. dissertation, which I am now expanding into a book, reflects two of my primary theoretical interests: first, gender studies, and second, the question of literary address. This research project examines the issue of gender in medieval and early modern literature from a new angle: rather than focusing solely on women writers of the period, or alternatively on female characters in the works of male authors, I investigate the persistent tendency of many writers, both male and female, to invoke a reading public of women. Among the authors I consider are the medieval romance writers Renaut de Beaujeu and Jakemes, the Italian writers Boccaccio and Ariosto, and the French women writers Hélisenne de Crenne and Louise Labé. My analysis of the female addressee is concerned not only with historical women readers, but also with the woman reader as a textual fiction, a pretext allowing the author to construct the particular literary discourse he or she desires. Through close readings of lyric and romance texts, I argue that the notion of writing for a woman opened up a range of creative possibilities for writers: it enabled them to produce literature in the vernacular rather than in Latin, to experiment with radically new literary forms, and to investigate questions relating to ethics, desire and the psyche. My research draws on the insights of contemporary scholars and critics (including Judith Butler, Shoshana Felman, Luce Irigaray, and Emmanuel Levinas) who have worked on the concept of address from literary and rhetorical, philosophical and political perspectives.

Publications

Addresses of Desire: The Female Destinataire in Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Ph.D. dissertation, 2000).

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