Sophie Marnette

Sophie Marnette’s research offers a linguistic and philological approach of literary issues such as the origins and evolution of medieval literary genres, the expression of narrative voice and point of view, the relationship between history and fiction, etc. Her first book Narrateur et points de vue dans la littérature française médiévale : Une approche linguistique (Peter Lang, 1998) focuses on storytelling in the French Middle Ages and her second book Speech and Thought in French: Concepts and Strategies (John Benjamins, 2005) studies reported discourse in medieval literary texts as well as in contemporary oral narratives, press and literature. Her current research project is entitled Quoting her: Discourse, Gender, and Genre in Medieval French Short Narratives and funded through a British Academy research grant. It proposes a fresh interdisciplinary approach (i.e. linguistic, narratological and literary) that takes reported discourse as a meaningful criterion, based on textual evidences, to examine how female characters’ discourse is framed and how it is expressed in medieval French narratives. Using a corpus of lais, fabliaux and fables ranging from the 12th to the 14th c., the analysis aims to assess whether female expression differs between these three literary genres and whether it is related to the specific ideologies that underlie each of them. Sophie Marnette is a founding and executive member of Ci-dit, an international research group on reported discourse. She was also a founding member of the interdisciplinary research network: ‘Voices in Medieval French Narrative (12th C. to 15th C.)’, funded by the British Academy.