AUTHOR’S SELF-PERCEPTION AND SELF-REPRESENTATION AT THE TURN OF THE XIV – XV CENTURIES: AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL, MEMORY AND GENDER COMPONENTS OF CHRISTINЕ PIZAN’S CREATIVITY

Abstract

The article is devoted to the analysis of the problem of author 's self-perception and self-representation of the period of the developed Middle Ages on the example of Christine Pizan' s work. The authors determine that most of Christina's literary, instructive-propaedeutic, moralizing or historical works contain a significant component of autobiographical information. Christina is forced to prove her authorial suitability and qualifications: she repeatedly explains and justifies the order and organization of her text, its usefulness and her qualification as an author. The article analyzes various methods of structuring Christina's text - organizing a biography not in accordance with the chronology of her subject's life, but, according to her own author's moral and philosophical plan, describing herself in the text as a separate character and as an author, many images of herself and open defense of your text, methods of writing and author's identity. Many of Christina's ideas come from different authors, but their organization, recombination and contextualization lead to a completely new text. To justify this kind of compilation, Christina uses the metaphor of an architect and an embroiderer, who do not quarry stones and do not produce silk and gold threads, which they then work with. This metaphor assigns borrowings from the works of other authors the role of raw material, from which the author's genius creates a work in itself. The role of the author of the treatise, according to Christina, is comparable to the role of the sovereign in the kingdom. A talented author (in her vision, she herself) is a literary, intellectual, female counterpart of the wise king. The article concludes that throughout the text of her work Christina asserts herself not only as a worthy biographer of the wise king, but also, using the metaphor of the writer as an architect, builds the concept of a unique and intimate connection between the two. Christine organizes, builds her work in the same way as Karl builds French statehood.

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