Further Research Is Needed (FRIN): A Brief Overview

Further Research Is Needed (FRIN): A Brief Overview Kathryn Klingebiel Keywords Occitan studies, Occitan bibliography, AIEO, Association internationale d’études occitanes, FRIN, “further research is needed,” FSIN, “further study is needed,” FWIN, “further work is needed,”, CIRDOC—Institut occitan de cultura, research leads Tenso’s op-ed rubric continues into its third year, inspired by lessons the editors first learned from their respective maîtres, Robert Taylor (Toronto) and Yakov Malkiel (Berkeley) and informed by a growing number of colleagues willing to tackle the question: Where should Occitan studies be headed? If there is any concept central to the op-ed pieces published in Tenso 35 and 36, it must be “interconnectedness.” There is striking agreement among our earliest contributors. Whether addressing troubadour poetry or the entire Occitan literary canon, the lexicon or digital resources, they speak to the importance of connecting future studies with culture and history. William Paden would expand the study of troubadour poetry across time and history, singling out five directions for the future (87). Giuseppe Noto calls attention to the tension between permanence and innovation, particularly in zones of contact, where hybridization and recodification are likely (98). For Fritz Peter Kirsch, the key concept is “interculturality,” as he calls for international cooperation in developing “une conception nonethnocentriste de l’Europe des différences” (“Il est grand temps” 104n1) and a new history of Occitan literature. Rosa Medina Granda champions the interconnectedness of “rhizomes,” that is, ideas that are multiple, interconnecting between heterogeneous nodes of study (110). Bill Burgwinkle argues for a “more global and interconnected view of troubadour production,” with updating of critical editions and more interpretation “in an anti-nationalistic perspective” (164). And Hervé Lieutard celebrates the advances wrought by digital applications in many fields, e.g., in lexicography (particularly lemmatization, graphy, and lexicon), with increasing power to “interconnecter l’ensemble des ressources numériques ou existantes” (173). For an overview of relatively recent Occitan research trends, one need look no further than the Actes of the 2017 AIEO congress in Albi. The focus on connections was evident in the very opening pages of the proceedings of that meeting, in the plenaries by Walter [End Page 117] Meliga and Fritz Peter Kirsch. Meliga notes, for example, that the legend of l’amor de lonh has distorted both textual study and the resulting interpretation of Jaufre Rudel’s poems (27). Kirsch calls for “une ouverture interculturelle” in the study of Occitan literature, with necessary attention to “la pluralité des langues et des cultures” (“Pour une réorientation” 36).1 To take another example, Camps and Couffignal subtitle their succinct overview of digitized Occitan corpora “problèmes et perspectives de travail,” calling for data to be “interopérables, documentées, disponibles en ligne” (650). This attention to inter-connectedness, by any name, is honored among senior scholars. In his review of Jean-Pierre Chambon’s seminal 2015 article aimed at young researchers, Jean-François Courouau paraphrased Chambon: “Le chercheur se doit d’appréhender son objet en tenant compte de l’état de la recherche et des avancées non seulement de sa propre discipline mais aussi des disciplines connexes” (56). Courouau later acknowledged “… la nécessité d’une approche qui se doit, si elle veut servir sa discipline et le champ des études occitanes, d’éviter tout cloisonnement disciplinaire en s’ouvrant au contraire aux apports extérieurs” (57). Rubrics in the annual Tenso bibliographies likewise bear witness to the respect shown to intrinsic interconnections between literature, language, history, and culture. In Wells, we find “Influence. The troubadours outside of medieval Occitania and their reception in later centuries” (206) and “History of Romance studies and Occitan studies” (212); in Parayre, “Modern References to the Middle Ages” (240); in Klingebiel, “Occitan Language in History” (298). The present contribution positions itself at the intersection of bibliography and future desiderata. The AIEO website makes available various efforts to provide Occitan bibliography to the scholarly world (see below), as well as a 1985 publication of desiderata, “Les Tâches de la recherche occitane.” This 28-page [End Page 118] booklet covers lyric, verse texts, and prose (with some omissions), ending with “Les historiens et le fait occitan” — this...

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