Bestiaire en marge

Abstract

This paper proposes a new reading of Le Chevalier au Lion by Chrétien de Troyes inspired by the zoopoetics, a hermeneutical approach theorized by Anne Simon within the framework the animal turn in literary studies and human and social sciences. Centered on the meeting of the knight Yvain and a lion, this roman thematizes human animality and gives the human-animal relationship a narrative configuration. We argue that this configuration is a matter of metonymic contiguity (or continuity) rather than of metaphoric techniques typical of the symbolic thought, and that metonymic figuration favours a dynamic of liminalities, passages and exchanges. Le Chevalier au Lion is a text particularly fit for a zoopoetic approach as zoopoetics looks, in literary texts from the past, for ways of representing animals that challenge the analogic tradition of anthropomorphism. In short, the paper aims at shedding light on the modernity of Chrétien’s humanism.

Keywords

• Human
• Animal
• Zoopoetics
• Symbolic thought
• Liminalities