Abstract
In his article "Male Same-Sex Desire in the Romances of de Troyes" Basil A. Clark extends René Girard's theory of mimetic desire to explore a homocentric subtext in Chrétien de Troyes's Erec and Enide, Lancelot or The Knight of the Cart, The Knight with the Lion or Yvain, and The Story of the Grail or Perceval. While male same-sex desire in these narratives is consistently latent, an argument for its presence is made through Girard's hermeneutic, which postulates that someone (the subject) desires someone or something (the object) not only for its own sake but because someone else (the mediator) desires it also, and this third party's desires can expand to include desire for this person himself. In the case of both a male subject and a male mediator, this desire is axiomatically homocentric as in the case of a courtly knight's love suit of a lady: the knight's desire for the lady is intensified by that of the other male and is read as a liminal desire for the other male himself.
Recommended Citation
Clark, Basil A.
"Male Same-Sex Desire in the Romances of de Troyes."
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
15.4
(2013):
<https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.2003>
This text has been double-blind peer reviewed by 2+1 experts in the field.
The above text, published by Purdue University Press ©Purdue University, has been downloaded 1514 times as of 03/26/24.
Included in
American Studies Commons, Comparative Literature Commons, Education Commons, European Languages and Societies Commons, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Other Arts and Humanities Commons, Other Film and Media Studies Commons, Reading and Language Commons, Rhetoric and Composition Commons, Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons, Television Commons, Theatre and Performance Studies Commons