Coherence in thirteenth century 'Cuaderna Via' poetry: The "Libro de Alexandre" and the "Libro de Apolonio".

Abstract

Since the late nineteenth century, the basic character and fundamental constituents of "cuaderna via" poetry have been a matter of discussion, controversy and polemic. Some of the earliest, most heated, and most enduring of discussions has centered on the definition of "cuaderna via" itself: what it is and what sets it apart from other narrative poetry of its period. This work is an attempt to contribute to the question of the distinctiveness of the "cuaderna via" as a narrative poetic form by examining one of its formal properties: the semantic cohesion principles by which it operates at the clausal, episodic, and inter-episodic levels. The study is restricted in several ways: it is confined to the thirteenth century; it examines only two of the extant poems; and only one episode from each poem is examined in detail. These limitations have been made necessary by the very close analysis, on a clause-by-clause basis, made necessary by the application of the theories of van Dijk and Halliday and Hasan. The first and third chapters offer a broader view of how the episodes hang together in the text as a whole. The second and fourth chapters closely examine a brief episode (the first exchange of letters in the Libro de Alexandre and the riddle episode in the Libro de Apolonio). In the fifth chapter, the Castejon episode from the Poema de Mio Cid is analyzed using the same method as for the "cuaderna via" poems in order to illustrate how the latter differ in cohesion principles from another contemporary narrative form. Despite the limited and provisional nature of this study, the evidence would seem to indicate that increased semantic subordination was both a goal and an accomplishment of the thirteenth-century "cuaderna via" poets, and a possible characteristic of their style. The examination of cohesion practices may add to the tools now available for definition of the genre.