| Summary: | I take as the subject of my thesis poems attributed to the troubadours, Marcabru, Arnaut Daniel and Raimbaut d’Aurenga. However, rather than study the texts as they are (re-) presented by the modern editions, I return to their attestations within the manuscripts which have participated in their transmission. For whilst the edition generally prints a single text, suggestive of an authorial original, the manuscripts transmit multiple, interrelated versions. Focusing on the manuscript variations (<i>variance</i>) in terms of a sedimentation of text with corresponding text, I instead construct a simultaneity of manuscript readings as caught in moments of incessant permutation and difference. Not only are our notions of the author, the original and the unique thus denied, but the written remnants of the language defy our expectations of coherence, consistency and the discrete. The implicit contrast between the manuscript text as plurality and excess and its reduction to single within the edition, at once sets up a dynamic of ‘outside’, or ‘other’, in relation to traditional notions of textuality. Yet it is from within the space of the manuscript pages themselves, through the varying interplay of grapheme and gap, that I would begin to suggest a ‘beyond’: a representation of the unrepresentable. As source of discomfort an subject to repression, a materiality which cannot be adequately circumscribed, it is the body which eludes the structures of language. My work is thus informed by its conceptualisation in modern theory, whereby Kristeva’s reworking of psychoanalytic theory produces an expression of the bodily abject. Moving away from Kristeva, however, from a poetics of fracture and glimpses of bodily feminine (Marcabru), from a bodily landscape of abjection (Arnaut Daniel), with the last chapter, on Raimbaut d’Aurenga, the body is at once evoked through significations of skin, and erased. An in its displacement as border and exteriority, we are left with an interlacing of gaps. As I thus draw together minute philological argument with theorisations of the body, my work may be seen as an implicit answer to <i>écriture féminine</i> with its ‘writing on the body’. In place of its overturning of syntactic structures in a celebration of the bodily, however, mine is a writing of a disrupted and disruptive layering of graphies: and a suggestion of a bodying beyond.
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