Basil A. Clark
Professor of English
Appointed to SVSU in 1975
Ph.D. Ohio State University
M.A. University of Maine
A.B. Bowdoin College
PAPERS AND PRESENTATIONS
"The Romance of Alexander: Two Self-Selected Challenges to Its Hero." Annual conference of the Medieval Association of the Midwest, Indiana State University, 19 to 20 October 2007.
In the introduction to her translation of Le Roman d'Alexandre, Laurence Harf-Lancner, speaking of Alexander's invasion of India, recognizes that the Conqueror's story is not only biographical but romantic; while a fictionally embellished story of his life, it assumes the form of a quest, like the romances of Chrétien de Troyes. My paper studies two striking episodes from Alexander's Indian campaign. These episodes tell how Alexander delays his march to descend into the sea, then later to ascend to the sky. I demonstrate that these delays, however fictional, set Alexander apart through his intellectual curiosity from more typical heroes of romance, such as Lancelot in the Arthurian tradition, who resourcefully confront impediments presented to them but to not go out of their way to find adventures to enrich their own experience.
"The Ubiquitous Dwarf in Chivalric Romance." Annual meeting of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts and Letters, Ferris State University, 9 March 2007.
Any reader of chivalric romance will be both struck by how frequently a dwarf appears in these stories and challenged to determine why. J. V. Harward's still not superseded book, The Dwarfs of Arthurian Romance and the Celtic Tradition (1958), explores the provenance of dwarfs in the literature, and Joan Brumlik's article "The Knight, the Lady, and the Dwarf in Chrétien's Erec" [Quandam et Futurus 2 (Summer 1992): 54-72] explores the role of the dwarf in the earliest of Chrétien's romances. Nonetheless, many times the dwarf just seems to be present for no compelling reason. My paper focuses on the several dwarfs in Chrétien's collected works, and argues that much as certain characters are expected in the American western, such as the loyal sidekick and the treacherous native American, the dwarf is woven into the fabric of chivalric romance to validate the structure of the genre.