Merlin, un bâtard différent : l’excès fantastique de la prose arthurienne, ou le goût du multiple
At the heart of courtly fiction, medieval marvels rest upon an “art of signification,” to which Francis Dubost devoted his entire body of work in order to uncover its anthropological foundations and narrative strategies. Closely tied to manifestations of the supernatural, the marvelous asserts itsel...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | fra |
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Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée
2025-07-01
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| Series: | Revue des Langues Romanes |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/rlr/6071 |
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| Summary: | At the heart of courtly fiction, medieval marvels rest upon an “art of signification,” to which Francis Dubost devoted his entire body of work in order to uncover its anthropological foundations and narrative strategies. Closely tied to manifestations of the supernatural, the marvelous asserts itself through its strangeness, yet it is accompanied by interpretative frameworks that simultaneously constrain its fantastical reach. This article revisits that paradoxical observation through the lens of prose romances centered around the figure of Merlin. To what extent does this son of the Devil, when he claims to speak the truth, actually tell the truth ? His metamorphic identity, explored across multiple texts, reveals a new poetics of uncertainty—one that could be described as a “fantastic in excess” : not a horror of the void, but a fascination with multiplicity, embodied by the most enigmatic character of the Arthurian world. The study analyzes three narrative devices that produce this fantastic effect on a metatextual level : cyclical discordance, transfugal dissemblance, and shared authority, inscribed at the very core of the fiction. |
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| ISSN: | 0223-3711 2391-114X |