François Villon | Criticism

This literature criticism consists of approximately 22 pages of analysis & critique of François Villon.

François Villon | Criticism

This literature criticism consists of approximately 22 pages of analysis & critique of François Villon.
This section contains 5,689 words
(approx. 19 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Critical Essay by Rouben C. Cholakian

SOURCE: “The (Un)naming Process in Villon's Grand Testament,” in The French Review, Vol. 66, No. 2, 1992, pp. 216-28.

In this essay, Cholakian discusses Villon's widespread use of names in his Testament, suggesting that they serve to disempower those who are named and empower the narrator. The intense self-referentiality of the poem, he argues, further emphasizes Villon's use of naming as a means of asserting selfhood against dominating Others.

Many scholars have delved into the university, police, and municipal archives of fifteenth-century Paris to identify the names appearing in Villon's pseudo-testament.1 My own interest in the Grand Testament's onomastic mysteries, however, is inspired by the psycho-literary principle that every text is invariably a fiction and even an auto-portrait.2 I wish to explore the naming process and the ways in which it reveals the narrator's attitudes toward his imagined testamentary universe.3

While critics like Thuasne (III, 588), Regalado (65), Fox (31), Siciliano (517), and...

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This section contains 5,689 words
(approx. 19 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Critical Essay by Rouben C. Cholakian
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