Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

Activity 14.1
Unit 14 Authorship and intention
Section 3 Attributing meaning

The following text was written, anonymously, in France during the thirteenth century. In form, it is a motet (a musical composition for two, three or four voices, with each voice singing different words). The text - whose author remains unknown - was translated from Old French by Carol Cosman.

I am a young girl

graceful and gay,

not yet fifteen when

my sweet breasts may

begin to swell;

Love should be my contemplation,

I should learn its indication,

But I am put in prison.

God’s curse be on my jailor!

Evil, villainy and sin

did he

to give up a girl like me

to a nunnery;

A wicked deed, by my faith,

the convent life will be my death

My God! for I am far too young.

Beneath my sash I feel the sweet pain.

God’s curse on him who made me a nun.

This activity concentrates on questions about who the author of the text might be (allowing for an informal use of the word ’author’ to describe production of a text in the circumstances that are likely to have existed). You may find evidence as to the writer’s identity in features of the text, in the description given at the beginning of the activity, or in what you know or can guess about historical circumstances of thirteenth-century France and about people of the time and the sorts of opportunities open to them.

1 Give any evidence that you can find (or can construct for yourself) for thinking that the speaker of the text is also the author.

2 Give any evidence that you can find (or construct for yourself) for thinking that the speaker of the text is not the author.

3 Are there aspects of your response to the poem that you believe are affected by the fact that it is (a) anonymous, (b) written for more than one voice, (c) written in the thirteenth century, and (d) a translation by a specific, named translator?

4 Now temporarily assume that the author is not, in any direct way, the speaker. Present any evidence that you can find (or construct) in support of the idea that the author was (a) a woman, or (b) a man.

5 Below are simple descriptions of two hypothetical authors. For each, describe how believing that this was the identity of the author would change how you read the poem (and the effects the poem has on you):

(a) imagined author X = a 25-year-old male

(b) imagined author Y = a 15-year-old female

Pay particular attention to sorts of effect you think may have been intended or anticipated by the author of the text, and sorts of response you are making to the text that could not have been anticipated by the text’s author.

Reading

Burke, S. (ed.) (1995) Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern: A Reader, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Burke, S. (1998 [1992]) The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida, 2nd edn, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Caughie, J. (ed.) (1981) Theories of Authorship: A Reader, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul and the British Film Institute.

Irwin, William (ed.) (2002) The Death and Resurrection of the Author?, Westwood, CT and London: Greenwood Press.

Leitch, Vincent B. (ed.) (2001) The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, New York and London: Norton. See all the essays on authorship, including the essays by Barthes, Eliot, Foucault, and Wimsatt and Beardsley mentioned in this unit.

Newton-de Molina, D. (ed.) (1976) On Literary Intention, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.