"À la guise de France": La Chanson de Girart de Roussillon as Minor Literature

Abstract

:In their book, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari introduced a new way of reading Kafka by forging a theory of minor literatures. They contended that, because scholars had been reading Kafka wrong all along, it was necessary to reframe his writing by accounting for its political and collective nature and the ways it challenged linguistic and generic boundaries. Using their framework, this article reads the thirteenth-century Chanson de Girart de Roussillon as an example of minor literature in which its hybrid language—and artificial blending of Old Occitan and Old French—is both intentional and transformational.