Comps Round One: Over

I have survived written comps, although I have yet to hear back from all of my committee. We do exams in two stages in my local English department: a 72-hour take-home written exam and, later, an oral defense of a 25-page paper and its attendant reading list.[1] I finished the first part of this journey at noon on the 7th of November.

My exam had three possible questions, from which I was to pick two and compose responses of close to 15 pages for each. My questions asked me to 1) trace the theme of boundaries through four of the six accompanying works (Beowulf, Sir Orfeo, Pearl, Mandeville, The York CC Plays, and Le Morte Darthur), but was open-ended as to that theme's ultimate meaning; 2) Use four theorists from the reading list (two medievalists, two non-medievalists) to define "utopia," and then apply that to one or two medieval texts from the list; or 3) Give three Marxist readings of works and explain why they were useful and what harm they might do to the text. Note that these are parapharasings of the questions; if you're confused, I'll try to find what I did with the question sheet and post it here later (or not, if WAQ/MKB/DAJ say otherwise). I did the first two, not because I didn't want to do the third one but because I didn't have time to come up with three Marxist readings off the top of my head.

I may post the responses to these questions here at a later date, once I've heard back from all of my committee, and maybe given them another polishing. Brief summaries follow: Question 1 I answered by exploring Beowulf, Mandeville, Pearl, and Malory, and talked about the ways that each negotiated the boundaries of time; I used Jeffrey's first chapter in MIMs as a starting point for this discussion, and pointed to the Sword Hilt in Beowulf, the Temple Mount complex in Mandeville, the boundary between paradise and earth in Pearl, and . . . Merlin in Malory. I then added a utopian spin to this, which brought in some Bloch.

I answered the second using definitions from Bloch (again), Hilario Franco, Karma Lochrie, and Lyman Tower Sargent, and applied their composite definition (social dreaming with a push forward) to Chaucer's House of Fame, which is useful for a number of things. We'll see.

That done, I largely took the week off—as much as any of us can "take the week off." I spent it reading an abridgment of the 16th-century Chinese novel Water Margin, which is as far outside of my field as I could get without, say, going uncomfortably back into the realm of abstract mathematics and quantum physics.

Coming back this week to critical theory, I started to read Brian Massumi's Parables for the Virtual, which I'd heard about in Wan-Chuan Kao's presentation at SEMA ("The Object Biography of Whiteness: Affective Labor and the Color of Salvation in Pearl"). I understood Wan-Chuan's presentation well enough, but Massumi's book wasn't as clear as I would have liked. It seems to be about bodies, and the various states of being or sensation those bodies may posses, and the possibilities that these various states engender, and I have no problem with that on its own. Maybe it's the comps process, maybe it's my gearing up/focusing in toward the dissertation, but I've realized that there are some avenues of scholarship that I am just not interested in pursuing. I'm not saying there's anything inherently wrong with those works, but I'm not up to the slog right now.

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NOTES:
[1] This is just for the PhD in English Literature requirement. The PhD in Comparative Literature apparently invovlves a wild series of exams and the Auto-da-Fé.

And then this happened . . .

So, as noted at #4 in the last post, I'm reading A. C. Spearing's Textual Subjectivity, because I think it might be useful for The Dissertation, and I need something to do while my students are taking their Awesome Test. And I'm trucking along through the book, reading some intersting things about narrator theory and subjectivity, and then I hit this:

Modern readings of Chaucer in particular tend to focus on psychology and ideology, even when these obscure or explicitly deny the qualities that have made it a pleasure to read his work and have kept it alive over the centuries. One thing that emerges from a study of interpretations of Troilus and Criseyde and The Man of Law's Tale is that many recent scholars do not allow their judgments to be guided by the pleasure-giving power of Chaucer's poetry, and sometimes seem actively to resist and dislike it. I hope the present investigation will not lose touch entirely with the primitive and indispensable goal of pleasure (34).

My response to this is "so what?" While I do not deny that there might be pleasure in reading Troilus and Criseyde or Pearl or even Ancrine Riwle, the pleasure of reading would seem to have a rather limited place in textual criticism. Certainly you need to enjoy the text you're reading in order to endure it long enough to critique it, but pleasure itself is too subjective a response to be useful after that moment. Expressing one's like or dislike for a text then seems secondary to the goal of explaining something about what a text does and how it does that. We are, for the most part, no longer pure formalists, finding joy in the how of a text and never asking why a text might do what it does. Indeed, allowing one's "judgments to be guided by the pleasure-giving power of . . . poetry" might even be problematic: what happens when one finds pain, or discomfort, or that moment of outright unheimlich in the poetry? Do we turn away because it is no longer a source of joy? Rather, these are the moments on which we linger, the moments where we become confused or uncomfortable, the moments that demand the "why" of criticism. In this sense, an aesthetic judgment may be necessary, but it does not seem to be quite the "end all" that Spearing seems to suggest here.

I realize that this may be far from what Spearing was arguing in this passage, and of course I am not done with the book, but this gut-reaction reductio doesn't seem so absurd as it might. In any event, the question remains: why make this textual move here, where it seems so out of place?

I am also aware of the metatexual nature of this musing, in that a moment of textual weirdness in Spearing's work incited me to discourse—thereby demonstrating my point that perhaps we get more discourse out of the odd than out of the pleasurable. Derevaun seraun, as Joyce said, and the end of that is criticism.

Atemporal musings

I suppose I've fallen off everyone's blogroll, since I post so rarely, but I do keep up with what the neighbors are saying. Today, for instance, I read a fascinating post by Eileen Joy over at ITM. Responding to comments on medievalism made by Stephanie Trigg at this year's Leeds conference, Eileen implies that the false medievalism/medieval reality dichotomy leads us to believe that any presentism in our scholarship is medievalism and therefore not rigorous scholarship. This notion, in turn, blinds us to the force that our scholarship can (or at least should) have:

It seemed to me then [at the Leeds session] and now in our present moment when human [and other] rights are under terrible assault in a country--the United States--that calls itself an historical democracy and that supposedly believes in historical due processes of law, and which has no problem calling its enemies "medieval," that medieval studies has a great responsibility, indeed, and one that must never forget its location in the [troubling and troubled] present.

Remembering that schoarship is always-already presentist (or in our particular jargon, a "medievalism") leads her to argue that we can and should act "as if" our scholarship has meaning in a wider world—because it does:

I cannot see that we have any other choice but to proceed "as if" things could be better if only we were to believe they might be emended, recuperated, attended to, saved, ameliorated, healed, touched, moved, affected, changed, etc. by our labors--labors, moreover, rooted in a fierce attention to and regard for others, wherever they might be, past, present, or future.

This engages directly with the project of locating the utopian in medieval studies because, on the one hand, the "utopian medieval" is not a misnomer, despite the "Renaissanciness" of "utopian" (pardon the Colbertism)—something that I have argued here before and in my work on the discourse of the utopian medieval (coming soon to a oral defense near you me). On the other, it is a reminder that ultimately what matters in scholarship is the generation of new ideas, whether those are scientific, pedagogical, literary, historical, sociological, home economical, agricultural, or (for better or worse) mercatorial. Looking for past utopian traces allows us to reexamine our own present, and provides ways for us to imagine outward from the present moment.

If this is a medievalism, then so be it. It's a good medievalism. As Utah Phillips used to say of Amon Hennesy's song "I Will Not Obey,"

I told him, "Singing a song like that will get you into a lot of trouble."
"That's okay," he said. "It's good trouble."

It's good medievalism.