Early Modern French Seminar

‘Rabelaisian Interactions’
Kathryn Banks (University of Durham)

Abstract

Rabelais depicts characters in interaction, including within a strange friendship – between the hero Pantagruel and the joker Panurge – which constitutes, to translate André Tournon, the ‘most controversial aspect’ of Rabelais’s fiction. This friendship has often been interpreted as a vehicle for Bakhtinian dialogism, conceived as an interplay of discourses which undermines authoritative meaning and thus invites readers to participate in the construction of meaning. Tournon showed brilliantly how the diverse perspectives offered by the two friends impact readers’ interpretations of Rabelais. However, from this perspective, dialogism seems to explain away the oddity of the friendship central to Rabelais’s fiction. By contrast, I will suggest that the oddity is the point: Rabelais is interested in not only diversity of perspectives but also how characters negotiate this diversity in interaction. Over the course of his works, Rabelais increasingly experiments with interactive sense-making, particularly across difference. Thus, he is interested not only in epistemology but also in what the cognitive sciences call social cognition – social understanding, or how we make meaning together. Social cognition research has been most famously deployed in literary study in the form of the Theory of Mind model, which foregrounds how we interpret others’ behaviour in terms of their beliefs and desires (Zunshine). By contrast, I draw on the most extensive consideration of social cognition from an interactive perspective, the ‘participatory sense-making’ model, which places at the heart of interaction processes fundamental to much fiction, including Rabelais’s: namely, engaging with difference and negotiating competing genres. At the same time, I return to Bakhtin, for whom dialogism was characteristic of all human interaction, and novels mattered because they revealed the nature of human interaction. My aim is to offer new understanding of Rabelais, as well as reflections on reading with the cognitive sciences.

Biography

Kathryn Banks is Professor of French at Durham University. Her research focuses on French renaissance literature and on various cognitive approaches to literature. She is writing a book which brings those two interests together: Rabelaisian Interactions, contracted with Boydell and Brewer. The talk will test material under preparation for the book.

The Early Modern French Seminar is convened by Wes Williams (St Edmund Hall), Rachel Hindmarsh (St Catherine’s College), and Marina Perkins (The Queen’s College)