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Study Questions for Chretien de Troyes
by Thad Curtz

1. In many ways, Chretien's poetry displays itself as being not only artful, but artificial. You might keep an eye out for tactics in the poems that produce this awareness, keep track of them, and see if you can figure out some good labels for them...

2. What do you make of this deliberate artificiality? How does it make you feel? Can you think of some reasons that a writer might like doing this, or feel compelled to do it? And that his audience might like it or feel that it was appropriate? (It might help some with these questions to try to think of some contemporary works that you think are deliberately and self-consciously artificial, and then think about these questions some in relation to them...)

3. Is there anything that feels deliberately and self-consciously artificial in Beowulf? How about in the Canterbury Tales that we read? How would you compare them with Chretien's work?

4.You may notice that Erec gives two clear and contradictory explanations of his purpose in the poem. Speaking loosely, we might call this an ambivalence. Etymologically, this is like ambidexterous (which means having dexterity with both right and left hands); technically, an ambivalence refers to the simultaneous existence of two contradictory feelings, as when you love and hate someone at the same time, or admire them and despise them. You might keep you eyes open for other contradictory situations in the poems, and try to think about what to make of them...

5. If you have an art history book around or are in the library, you might find it interesting to look at some samples of late Gothic visual art (which is sometimes called "roccoco Gothic" or flamboyant) and to compare it with these poems.