Memory and Voice in Jean Froissart’s dits amoureux

Abstract

Jean Froissart’s dits amoureux illustrate the ways in which Froissart plays with the layering and overlapping of textual voices, with memory, and with time, all of which are important in the construction of the text as an artefact and memorial – a significant aspect of Froissart’s relationship with writing. The tensions Froissart sets up between the singular and the universal, and between lived experience and poetic experience, produce poetic texts that play on the notion of “voice”. The “voice” that appears here is implicitly linked with the idea of the “speaking subject”, with the implied connection between author, narrator and protagonist, and with the symbiotic relationship between life and art, reality and fiction. This continuum is, however, complicated by the setting of this voice in poetry. This article explores the resulting tensions, and how they are exploited by Froissart to create his polyvalent texts.