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Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics

 

Blake Gutt

Blake Gutt

College

King's

Contact 

bag28@cam.ac.uk

Website

https://cambridge.academia.edu/BlakeGutt

Research

The working title of my PhD thesis, supervised by Professor Bill Burgwinkle, is ‘Rhizomes, Parasites, Folds and Trees: Systems of thought in medieval French, Occitan and Catalan literary texts’. My project is an investigation of conceptual networks —systems of organising, understanding and explaining thought and knowledge— and the ways in which they underlie both text and its mise en page across a range of thirteenth- to fifteenth-century French, Occitan and Catalan literary texts and their manuscript witnesses. Each of the three chapters explores a separate corpus of texts, using two of four interrelated network theories: Michel Serres’ notion of the parasite; the ubiquitous organizational tree; Deleuze’s folds; and Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomes. The first chapter engages with parasites and trees; the second with trees and folds; and the third with folds and rhizomes. The backbone of the thesis, however, is Actor-Network Theory, which I employ as a meta-network and heuristic structure to examine the other networks, and to interrogate the omnipresence of networks and systems.

My corpus includes saints’ lives (La Vie de Saint Denis and Li Romanz de Saint Fanuel), encyclopedic texts (Ramon Llull’s Arbre de ciència and Matfre Ermengau’s Breviari d’amor), and a range of texts featuring characters who can be read as transgender (Saint Fanuel; Aucassin et Nicolette; Christine de Pizan’s La Mutacion de Fortune; Yde et Olive and Silence).

I am in receipt of full funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council for my doctoral studies.

Other

I am the co-convenor of the Cambridge Medieval French Research Seminar, and the co-founder and co-organiser of the ‘Approaching the Medieval’ postgraduate reading group (see: https://approachingthemedieval.wordpress.com). My essay entitled ‘An Infestation of Signification: Narrative and Visual Parasitism on the Manuscript Page’ (a version of some material from the first chapter of my thesis) was awarded the 2015 R. Gapper Postgraduate Essay Prize by the Society for French Studies. I was the co-organiser, with Zoi Angeli, of the Cambridge French Graduate Conference 2016, on the subject of "stains" // « les taches »; we are currently editing a volume of conference proceedings.