Lukas Ovrom

I am a medieval French specialist by training who focuses on Old French poetry and prose of the 12th and 13th centuries, or what might be considered the beginning of French as a literary language during a period where Latin remained the language of education and the church. I am also interested in the history of the book and the ways that the material conditions of textual transmission have affected reading practices over time, generating questions that can only be dealt with through a back-and-forth between the modern editions of medieval works that scholars are now accustomed to working with and the older textual forms--namely, the handwritten copies or manuscripts--on which such editions are based. Whether in my research or my teaching, my approach to medieval literature often involves this type of dialogue. In a similar sense, my work aims to cast light on the long history or prehistory of aesthetic paradigms, genres, and theoretical models that have often been associated with the coming of modernity -- for instance, the novel or, in the case of my first book project, reader response theory. 

My first book project, Chrétien de Troyes and the Blank: Fragmentation and Interpretation, from Erec et Enide to the Conte du Graal, attempts to rethink the works of one of the first great poets in the French tradition, the late 12th-century author Chrétien de Troyes, from the perspective of what Chrétien chose to leave unsaid. My book situates the pregnant silences and conspicuous absences that simultaneously interrupt and structure the plot of his romances in relation to Wolfgang Iser's theory of the "blank" in the modern novel, or the role of various forms of omission in ushering in a new mode of reading founded upon a collaboration between an author who creates blanks and an audience who fills them in. While Iser provides an exciting way of understanding a certain number of key passages in Chrétien's works that until now have irritated or disappointed modern scholars, it lacks an account of the physical/literal and ideological stakes of the blank in Chrétien's case, a lacuna that my analysis in turn tries to remedy through its readings of physical fragmentation in the manuscripts of Chrétien's second romance, the Cligès, and the mystical poetics of the Conte du Graal, the earliest version of the story of the grail and one of Chrétien's most important contributions to European literature of the Middle Ages. 

My article on a related instance of formal indeterminacy in Chrétien's first poem, Erec et Enide, has just appeared in the journal Romania, and I currently am at work on a critical anthology on Chrétien. For more info on my publications and research/teaching interests, please see my CV.