Paul Zumthor

Paul Zumthor, CQ (August 5, 1915 – January 11, 1995)[1][2] was a medievalist, literary historian and linguist. He was Swiss-born, from Geneva.

Biography

He studied in Paris with Gustave Cohen, and worked on French etymology with Walther von Wartburg.[3] In studying medieval French poetry, he formulated the concept of mouvance (variability).[4][5] He also emphasised "vocality" in medieval poetry, the place of the human voice.[6]

He held two major professorial positions, at the University of Amsterdam from 1952 and at the Université de Montréal from 1971 to 1980, when he became emeritus. In 1992, he was made a Knight of the National Order of Quebec.

Legacy

Within J. M. Coetzee's novel Elizabeth Costello, Zumthor is quoted at length by a character Emmanuel Egudu. Coetzee writes of Zumthor as "a man from the snowy wastes of Canada, the great scholar of orality Paul Zumthor."[7]

Works

References

  1. ↑ http://www.babelio.com/auteur/Paul-Zumthor/9896
  2. ↑ William H. New (2002). Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada. University of Toronto Press. p. 1235. ISBN 0-8020-0761-9.
  3. ↑ http://www.biografiasyvidas.com/biografia/z/zumthor.htm, in Spanish.
  4. ↑ http://www.answers.com/topic/paul-zumthor
  5. ↑ What is 'mouvance'?; Cynthia J. Brown, "Variance and Late Medieval Mouvance: Reading an Edition of Georges Chastellain's 'Louange à la tresglorieuse Vierge,' in: Translation, Transformation, and Transubstantiation, ed. Carol Poster and Richard Utz (Evanston: IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), pp. 123-75."
  6. ↑ Leslie C. Dunn, Nancy A. Jones, Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture (1994), p. 2.
  7. ↑ J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello: pg. 45 Vintage Books, 2004. Print.

Further reading

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