Eliduc (10/1)

Marie tells us that the “lai is name/ Guildeluec and Gualadun” because “it happened to the women” (21-25). Do you think the rest of the lai and the ending in particular correlates with this? How do you think agency is distributed between the three main characters or do they even have agency?

Random Fondness for Oranges (9/30)

Serres’ critic of Descartes is that he “desires to build a closed system, to think or to build without error or interruption,” but this is impossible because to be in the world is “to be dependent, to be an intermediary, a go-between, to be one thing among many, inhabiting a system in cascade” (49-50). How does this relate to Yates’ description of the prison escape of 1597? How is the escape and Peyton’s investigation of it “a system in cascade”?

Chevrefoil

Why does Marie leave the story so open ended when she has told us that the love of Tristan and the queen “brought them much suffering and caused them to die the same day” (9-10)? Does this relate to her focus on Tristan’s hazel-wood message?

Agency

“If we do not know just how it is that human agency operates, how can we be so sure that the processes through which nonhumans make their mark are qualitatively different?” (34)

Do you agree that we do not really understand human agency, does it matter if we do not, and why should this pertain to nonhumans?