Milestone Achieved

I turned in the House of Fame chapter on Tuesday, right on time. Let's hope it's right on argument, as well. After that, I'm going to take a little breathing room before I start in on Pearl, and I'm thinking I'll spend it on . . . well, I don't know about you, but when I'm doing research, I tend to pick up books—stuff people reference, books that sound good, even ones that were on the same shelf as the one I actually wanted. I tend to hang on to them on the off chance that they'll be useful. I tend to put sticky notes in the front that say "Introduction; Ch 2; Ch 7?; also maybe pp 221-245?" and so on, and then forget about them until I start the next batch of research. I'm thinking of looking through them to see if they're as useful as I'd thought.

I'm also teaching WLIT right now, which makes trying to write kind of "amusing," since the class, as they so often do, comes right in the middle of my peak alertness, i.e. the moment when the early morning metabolism is still up, and the coffee is kicking in. Still, it will be fun: I'm doing six epics in six weeks. Not only will I get to teach the Lombardo Aeneid for the first time, but I'm also teaching Beowulf again after a year's hiatus, and the "Sorhab and Rostam" section of the Shahname for the first time ever. Here's hoping it goes well.

"I know what I am, and what I may be if I choose . . ."

Two stories about House of Fame and my dissertation.

First of all, my transformation into a medievalist continues apace. I was reading the House the other day and reread the part where the narrator describes Josephus as "Him of secte Saturnyne" (1432). At this point, I briefly thought "Why Saturnine?" only to answer my own question with "Saturn is before Jove as Jews are before Christians." I then realized that by that logic, Jews are also gloomy, cold, and full of lead. I'm not saying I have all the symbolism down, but my basic ability to follow medieval symbolic logic is sound, so huzzah there.

Second, I am nearly done with my chapter on House of Fame; it lacks only an introduction and some poking and prodding before I feel safe to call it a draft. I've been spending a lot of time in the library, as it's easier to be free of distractions (like the internet), but it's been harder to get into lately because maintenance has been doing some surprise repairs to the front steps. Or at least I thought it was maintenance, until I walked out of the building yesterday and saw this:

That's right: Fama Construction Services. Our steps are being repaired by Lady Fame herself. I hope she doesn't replace them with ice; those names would melt even faster in our Southern heat.

Back from Inner Space

So, here I am, back again. It's been a long and busy semester, as the cliché goes. I passed my Oral Comprehensive Exam on the 15^th of April, which is nice, as I am now ABD. For that exam, I wrote and defended what amounts to the rough draft of my dissertation's theory chapter, in which I explained what I meant by "medieval utopian function" by going through some general/Marxist utopian theory (Marx/Engels, Karl Mannheim, Joseph Gabel, Ernst Bloch, Lyman Tower Sargent, and Fredric Jameson) and a few of the more medieval-oriented discussions (Michael Uebel, Hilario Franco, Karma Lochrie) that did not focus specifically on the genre of utopias. Having identified the two uses to which general theorists put utopia—ideology and culture critique—I noted that the trend in medieval uses of utopian theory has been some ideology critique, primarily by finding spaces of hope (Lochrie) or social difference (Uebel). From both major sources (general/Marxist and medieval) I derived the following definition of the medieval utopian function:

A form of social dreaming before the modern period that critiques some contemporary ideological “truth,” such as a point of church doctrine, the nature of fame, or the order of society. Part of that dream includes some solution to the problem, a solution that may take any form from basic wish-fulfillment to planned and dialectically open-ended society. The solution may or may not have been effective in the dreamer’s own time, but it can inspire hope and social critique in our own age.

This is, of course, still pretty vague, but until I've done more readings in the the texts, it will have to do. Speaking of, right now, I intend to work with the following texts: House of Fame, Pearl, Winner and Waster, Piers Plowman, Regiment of Princes, and Vox Clamantis. I have some ideas about all of them, and I may float some of those ideas here as the year rolls by.

Oh—also, I received an award from my department: the Blair Rouse Fellowship, which is given for "Superior Academic Achievement by a PhD Candidate in English." It came with honor, and with money, and I'm thankful to my department for both.

Meanwhile, I have been assured that there will be no jobs whatsoever in the coming year, and that I have picked the worst possible time to try to begin a career in academia. I have yet to be sure if that's true, but it is a cause for concern. We'll see.

The following essay first appeared in my dissertation committee's inboxes in November 2008. It is a response to the rather open prompt of "write about boundaries in four medieval works." The footnotes are now properly linked back to where you were in the text. Enjoy, if you want; discuss, if you like.

Negotiating Time’s Boundaries: Identity, History, and Utopia in Four Medieval Works

Modern Westerners are by and large accustomed to think of time as a fixed process, flowing in one direction only, out of the past into the future. We experience this process as “the present,” a sense of “right now” against which the past is “behind” us and the future “before.” For the Middle Ages, one may broadly say that the same was true, with some reservations: the future is known—heaven or hell, and, after the apocalypse, New Jerusalem or hell—and the past is important first and foremost in light of that future. Both “sides” of the present, then, form boundaries around that present: the past has a purpose and should not be tampered with; the future will arrive in its time and should not be hurried along. While few works—outside Bede’s The Reckoning of Time and other philosophical treatises—deal directly with the nature of time, we may still see the boundary of history dealt with in particular moments in a variety of texts.¹ Four medieval works that contain temporal boundaries are Beowulf, The Book (or Travels) of John Mandeville, Pearl, and Malory’s Le Morte Darthur. The former two are concerned primarily with past and the latter two with the future. In Beowulf and Pearl, we see boundaries successfully guarded by those in power; in Mandeville and Malory, we see the boundaries transgressed by those with power. We can thus say that the boundary of time is thus also tied up with the boundaries of social identity and religion. In every instance, negotiating these boundaries allows us to see a utopian function emerge when the boundaries of time give way to a nascent, limitless hope.²

We begin with Anglo-Saxon literature, where the past is frequently depicted as mysterious, and that enigmatic nature is expressed in terms of sheer size. The remains, for example, of a settlement encountered in the poem “The Ruin” are called enta geworc, the “work of giants,” a judgment that simultaneously praises the majesty of the past while making it impossibly un-human and wondrous. If such wonders existed in the past, by the logic of that poem, they could not have been built by men. Something similar is at work in the past in the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf (~9^th-11^th c. CE). When Beowulf attempts to trespass on history, he is prevented from doing so by Hrothgar, who prefers a simpler memory of the past because it is easier to control.

The gigantic past appears in Beowulf in the sword-hilt with which Beowulf returns from his fight with Grendel’s mother. The hilt itself is all that remains; the rest, Beowulf tells Hrothgar, was burned away in the blood of the fiend (1666-1668). As Beowulf gives the hilt to Hrothgar, the narrator calls the artifact enta ærgeworc, the “ancient work of giants” (1679). Unlike those in “The Ruin,” however, these giants seem initially less than metaphoric:

Hrothgar maðelode--       hylt sceawode,
ealde lafe,       on ðæm wæs or written
fyrngewinnes,       syðþan flod ofsloh,
gifen geotende       giganta cyn,
frecne geferdon;       þæt wæs endelean
þurh wæteres wylm       Waldend sealed.
Swa wæs on ðæm scennum       sciran goldes
þurh runstafas       rihte gemearcod,
gesteed on gesæd,       hwam þæt sweord geworht,
irena cyst       ærest wære
wreoþenhilt ond wyrinfah. (1687-1698).

Hrothgar spoke; he examined the hilt, that relic of old times. It was engraved all over and showed how war first came into the world and the flood destroyed the tribe of giants. They suffered a terrible severance from the Lord; the Almighty made the waters rise, drowned them in the deluge for retribution. In pure gold inlay on the sword-guards there were rune-markings correctly incised, stating an recording for whom the sword had been first made and ornamented with its scrollworked hilt. (Heaney 1687-1698).

This hilt records the slaying of the giants (giganta) yet itself is enta ærgeworc. If we believe along with the poet that the flood killed the kin of giants (flod ofsloh . . . giganta cyn), then there must have been a second race of giants, entas, who created the memorial to the passing of the first.³ In neither case is this the work of humans, but rather something larger than human. Theorist Susan Stewart identifies the gigantic as “infinity, exteriority, the public, and the overly natural,” in opposition to the miniature as “closure, interiority, the domestic, and the overly cultural” (70). The gigantic points to humanity’s insignificance; it is our first experience of nature, of place (71). Giants moreover “are not the gods; they do not inhabit a transcendent space; they inhabit the earth, and it is their movement through the sensual world which gives shape and form to that world, if not meaning” (73-74). Perhaps unsurprisingly, the gigantic for Stewart is also the realm of the sublime, as opposed to the miniature’s “orderly and cultivated nature of the picturesque” (75). Whatever the contemporary audience of Beowulf may have believed, the gigantic has more power in Anglo-Saxon poetry as a metaphor. Some of those figures, like the giganta cyn wiped out by the flood, are an older but failed nature, but the natural, the sublime giant, remains, filling us with wonder and dread. Such “natural giants” leave their wondrous remains, reminding the men who find them that the spaces we inhabit have a past, however mysterious or unknown.

Whatever the status of the entas who record the death of the gigantas, their relic remains in the text as a souvenir of a time and place, left behind after the battle with the Grendel-kin in the monster-mere. Stewart explains that the souvenir “distinguish experiences. We do not need or desire souvenirs of events that are repeatable. Rather, we need and desire souvenirs of events that are reportable, events whose materiality has escaped us, events that thereby exist only through the invention of a narrative” (135). On the one hand, this is precisely the function the sword-hilt has in Beowulf. It elicits the report of Beowulf’s fight with Grendel’s mother, and becomes the object that Beowulf proposes as the way the fight may be remembered. The engraving is also explicitly not about the fight Beowulf means it to commemorate; instead, relation to that battle must be allegorical, the destruction of Grendel-kind linked to the destruction of the giganta cyn, carried out by a Beowulf who must himself play this narrative’s vengeful God.⁴Any meaning, therefore, that the sword may have had for its original owner would now be lost, overwritten by Beowulf’s meaning.

In the creation of a souvenir, Beowulf undoes the past, denies that the hilt has any meaning beyond the one he gives it. Yet his attempt to propose the hilt as a souvenir of his deeds is denied by Hrothgar, whose advice to Beowulf that a good king spreads the wealth around (1748-1750) ends instead with praise for the bloody head of Grendel (1780). This trophy, and presumably also Grendel’s severed arm that already hangs on the roof (982-984), are the real signifiers of victory over Grendel-kind because they are unambiguously about slaying Grendel. Hrothgar prevents the hilt from being a souvenir because it is too unstable. It bears its own story, one that threatens to undo or at least complicate the story of the Beowulf-Grendelkin fight. Hrothgar preserves his people’s history, and his move makes that history unambiguous. In so doing, he rejects the “right” history, i.e. the Biblical history that the Beowulf-poet constantly wishes his story had possessed. Hrothgar’s decision to ignore the hilt is wise speech (wisa spræc, 1698) because it preserves, however temporarily, Danish identity, as well as the boundary between pagan history (the history of the moment) and Christian history (the history of the universe).

The boundary of the past has a different purpose in the mid 14^th-century work known as The Book (or Travels)of John Mandeville. This text seems at first as unlike Beowulf as one could find and still be in the Middle Ages: it is not an epic but a travelogue, it is explicitly and fervently Christian, and its narrator is far from being “eager for fame,” writing instead to lead pilgrims to Jerusalem and all the holy sites before and beyond it. What Mandeville and Beowulf do share is a sense of being haunted by the past. However, where the “true” past is rejected in Beowulf as being destabilizing for pagan society, it is embraced in Mandeville precisely for its destabilizing ability. Mandeville’s concern for Jerusalem and its environs borders on the obsessive, in part from a deep devotion but also because of the presence of the Other so irritating to Mandeville. In his prologue, the narrator grows increasingly rapturous about the Incarnation, which leads immediately for Mandeville to the land in which the Incarnation occurred: “Right ought men to love and worship and drede and serve such a lorde [Jesus] and worship and prayse such a holy londe that brought forth suche frute thorough the whych every man is saved” (2). Touched by the presence of the divine, Jerusalem becomes a place where devotion is the clearest, where the divine presence was felt once and may be again at last by those who truly belong there. “This is the londe hight to us in heritage,” Mandeville continues, “for the whiche every goode crysten man that may and hath wherof shulde strength hym for to conquer our right heritage and chase oute the ylke trowand” (2), which is to say the those infidels who presently occupy Jerusalem.⁵For Mandeville, “knowing the way to Jerusalem” can serve many purposes—curiosity, devotion, conquest—yet there is no reason all purposes may not be satisfied by going there.

Once he has arrived—after a very long journey involving numerous odd places and a meeting with the Sultan of Babylon—Mandeville finds himself in a city occupied by Saracens, strange people who seem to “trowe so nere oure feyth they are lyghtly converted whanne men preche the name of Iesu cryst,” but alas “understand not the letter gostly,” and thus remain in error (41-42).⁶ As tolerant as Mandeville seems toward Saracens, he is nevertheless eager to convert them—and this is precisely what he does when he arrives at Temple Mount.

When he approaches Temple Mount, or “temple domini” (22), Mandeville sees many things at once, including the Temple of Solomon, the destruction of the temple by the Roman general Titus, and the failed reconstruction under Julian the Apostate (22-23). What he does not see, however, are the Muslim buildings that would actually have been there, the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque, the absence of which is very telling for Mandeville’s point. When he gets to the top of the hill—which he alone of all non-Muslims may do because he bears the seal of the Sultan of Babylon (22)—he continues to see only the past: the Holy of Holies, and two “hutches” or niches; the first contains a stone from which apparently will run water, although it does not at present, while the second contains “a roche that men called somtyme Moriach but after it was called Belet or the hutche of god wythe the rylikes of Iewes” (24). All the relics of the Jews, from the Ark of the Covenant to Moses’ staff to the Aaronic vestments and breastplate, were once there, although Mandeville is not clear if they are there now or remain in Rome where Titus took them. Belet itself, or perhaps the rock within it, has a history as long as the tree of Jesse: it was the rock where Jacob slept, David prayed, Mary learned her psalms, Jesus was circumcised, and John the Baptist’s birth was announced (24-25). All these things Mandeville remembers as he stands in that place, yet few if any of those things were actually present on Temple Mount in Mandeville’s time. Mandeville rewrites the past onto the present: he converts the temple back into its holier form, in his mind if not in actual fact. Memory becomes a transgressive act, one that lets him cross the boundary of Saracen possession of the Holy Land and re-map it for Christian history.

Mandeville’s act is thus the one that the Beowulf poet wishes his pagans had taken, that is, of accepting their place in sacred history. Of course, both these notions of “past” are marked by Christian history intruding onto pagan boundaries, but this may not be as problematic as it first seems to modern readers. On the one hand, this move is to be expected, because Christianity is the supreme medieval ideological apparatus, and its truth is the Truth that always wins in medieval literature. On the other hand, it should be stressed that while ideological content is important, the process of crossing historical boundaries is more important, because it is where we might find the utopian function. Memory of the past in Mandeville can undo the present, acting as what Jeffrey Cohen calls a “temporal short circuit” that can allow the reader to see the past “erupt with the intensity of an unanticipated future” (7). What Mandeville anticipates from the past that he “sees” at Temple Mount is a Christian future uninterrupted by Saracen presence; what the Beowulf-poet anticipates—and what Hrothgar rejects—is that same Christian future, which within the poet’s logic could have saved so many Danes.

Anticipating the future and desiring it, however, are two very different things. As the past is a boundary which may be guarded to preserve identity or destroyed to create it, the future is a boundary that also marks community. In Pearl, a later 14^th-century English alliterative poem, the narrator, or dreamer, has a vision of a lost pearl that is both the precious stone and his recently deceased daughter. In his dream, he wanders among the woods until he arrives at a “crystal clyffe ful relusaunt . . . at þe fote þerof þer set a faunt, / a mayden of menske [grace], ful debonare” (159, 161-2), whom he recognizes as his daughter. Seeking to rejoin her, he proposes then to cross the stream that seprates them, but she rebuffs him, telling him that to cross this stream “þy corse in clot mot calder keve” (your course in colder clod must sink, 320)—no one may cross the stream while living. This stream is more than a boundary between the living and the dead; it is also a boundary between the uncertain present of life and the certain future of the life beyond.

The dreamer desires to enter heaven in order to rejoin his daughter, an attitude that the daughter in turn spends much of the poem attempting to remedy. The problem lies in the dreamer’s personal desire for reunion, not his desire for heaven itself. While either longing could be future-oriented, only one is a valid path to that future. Indeed, the dreamer’s personalized longing is problematic, which is why the daughter implores him to replace his doel-dystress (336) and þole (suffering, 344) with blysse (396) and mekenesse (406) if he should meet with her on the other side of the river. This didactic medicine exists not only to eventually erase the boundary but also to preserve its sanctity and meaning; if the living could pass into heaven without dying, what point would there be to life at all? The import of the daughter’s long dialogue with her father is that life must be lived, and lived well, in order to bring the future about.

The father, however, does not understand how his daughter, who was so young when she died (483), could have become a queen in heaven (473-474), a “payment” that seems unfair to him. She, after all, only lived for two years, and “cowþez [knew how to] neuer God nauþer plese ne pray, / Ne neuer nawþer Pater ne Crede” (484-485), so what might she have done to “fast forward” into her future glory? The daughter rebukes him, saying that while “in Godez ryche [kingdom] . . . is vch mon payed inliche [alike], / wheþer lyttel oþer much be hys rewarde” (601, 603-4), God takes all in their season (“of tyme of зere þe terme waz tyзt, / to labor vyne watz dere þe date,” 502-503). One cannot enter the future Jerusalem unless one is motelez (mote-less, i.e. spotless), which is a state only certifiably attained after one is dead (965-972)—and only through careful devotion while one is alive.⁷

This is not a lesson the dreamer learns easily, if at all. Faced in the end with a vision of paradise that matches the Revelation of John down to the appearance of the Lamb of God, the dreamer’s desire for that future overcomes him. Yet what matters most to him is not some anagogic return, but the all-too-human concern to see and touch his daughter again:

Þen saз I þer my lyttel quene . . .
Lorde, much of mirþe watz þat ho [she] made
Among her ferez [fellows] þat watz so quyt [white]!
Þat syзt me gart [began] to þink to wade
For luf-longing in gret delyt. (1147, 1149-1152).

The dreamer fails to learn blysse and mekenesse (or his proper place) and the boundary is enforced by God himself: “out of that caste I was bycalt: / hit watz not at my Princez paye” (1163-4). Here, as in Beowulf, the boundaries are guarded by the authority in order to preserve identity. Hrothgar stabilizes Danish history; the Prince/Lamb stabilizes heaven. Transgressions of these boundaries fail because the transgressors share a sense of wonder and desire that distracts them from the danger of their proposals. Beowulf is amazed by his ornate hilt, while the dreamer is amazed by the lapidary images of heavenly Jerusalem. Desire clouds judgment and leads to ill-thought-out plans to circumvent the boundaries of history.

We learn from Pearl, then, that, the process of “doing it right,” i.e. transgressing boundaries in such a way that they can bring about “good” futures, is that we need a plan. We see good planning enacted through Merlin in Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, a mid-15^th-century English prose romance. The figure of Merlin exists only for a short time in Malory, but he accomplishes much before he senses his impending doom (76) of being sealed under a rock (77). Indeed, his imprisonment highlights Merlin’s boundaries, for as a “dreme-reder” (12) he is bound by the future he has seen. Knowing what is best about that future, Merlin does all he can to ensure the correct future occurs through the creation of Arthur and the foundation of the Grail Quest.

The creation of Arthur is a fairly well-known story, in part thanks to the popularity of Malory in the modern age. Uther Pendragon, “seke for anger and for love of fayre Igrane,” duchess of Cornwall, is “done remedy” by Merlin on the condition that Uther “be sworne unto me to fulfille my desyre” (4, my emphasis). Thus, from the start, Merlin’s desire guides and controls Uther’s desire. Although both emotions are characterized by the word “desire,” it is clear that the meaning of the word in each case is different. Uther’s desire is his lust for Igrane, while Merlin’s desire is his bidding or will be done. Whatever happens next must be under Merlin’s control, and everything that Merlin does ensures that Arthur’s kingship will bind his community together. Once born, Arthur must be fostered in secret, and Merlin insists he receive the baby “uncristened,” presumably to avoid the paper trail that christening creates. Arthur’s secret fosterage, meanwhile, allows his later appearance to take on dimensions of wonder; to the people of his realm, he is an unknown boy whose ability to pass a mysterious challenge marks him as destined to lead, making his subsequent leadership all that more possible. It is Merlin who secures Uther’s word that Arthur will be king after him, and who convenes people to see the Sword in the Stone and Arthur’s achieving of it (8). After he has done all this, and Arthur has become king through his miraculous pulling of the sword, Malory announces that “within fewe yeres after, Arthur wan [won] alle the Northe, Scotland, and alle that were under their obeissaunce, also Walys. A part of it helde aynest Arthur, but he overcam hem al, as he dyd the remenaunt, thurgh the noble prowesse of hymself and his knyghtes of the Round Table” (10-11). Arthur’s existence and the strength of his kingdom are all stage-managed by Merlin, and come about not only through his “desire,” but also through a careful plan to carry that desire out. Merlin needs a unified England for one chief purpose, namely the achieving of the Holy Grail.

Merlin ensures that the Grail Quest will begin in a way that seems rather odd for a man who can appear and disappear at will: he arrives too late to stop Balyn from taking a cursed sword from a damsel, beheading the Lady of the Lake, and fleeing in exile from Arthur’s court (38-41). Merlin puts in an appearance only after this has occurred, and only then reveals that the lady with the sword was “the falsist demesell that lyveth,” and that Balyn “shall be destroyed thorow the swerde; for the which woll be grete damage” (42). But this late arrival is not accidental: Balyn has left the court and begun his adventure in time to slay in combat the knight Launceor of Ireland, causing in turn the suicide of Launceor’s paramour Columba (43). This act, Merlin reveals, is crucial, “because of the dethe of that lady thou [Balyn] shalt stryke a stroke most dolerous that ever man stroke, excepte the stroke of oure Lorde Iesu Cryste” (45). Balyn, then, is the source of the Dolorous Stroke, the wound from which King Pellam suffers for many years until Galahad achieves the Grail and heals him. Even by his absence, Merlin deliberately controls events. Knowing that the Grail must be achieved because of the great power it represents for all humanity, he creates the conditions necessary for its achievement, not only immediately, through Balyn’s mistake, but also generally, Arthur’s court being the kind that attracts the knights best capable of discovering and using the Grail. Unlike the Pearl poet, whose desire to cross boundaries is his undoing, Merlin creates boundaries in the present that ensure the future will occur as he desires.⁸

We learn through these works that boundaries in medieval texts are quite often meant to be transgressed. Every temporal boundary that exists, whether in the past or future, represents and ideological barrier: Hrothgar preserves Danish identity by ignoring Christian history; a Saracen future can be undone by uncovering a Christian past;⁹ the Lamb preserves the future space of heaven by limiting those who would try to get in early. The exception to this would seem to be Merlin, who is less the negotiator of cultural boundaries and more a “bounder,” so to speak, someone who creates that historical process, or perhaps stands for that process itself. In every case, however, the transgressive moment is the moment of what Ernst Bloch would call anticipatory illumination, that spark of consciousness that “drives world-figures, world-landscapes, without them being destroyed, to their entelechic limit” (II: 810). Alongside this runs docta spes (educated hope), which Bloch identifies as “the unfinished forward dream . . . a methodical organ for the New, an objective aggregate state of what is coming up” (I: 157, emphasis in original). The process of overstepping these boundaries, as well as the mere fact that we are told it may be possible to do so, is what is important for these texts. As Bloch reminds us from the start, “preceding societies and even many myths in them . . . may also provide a philosophy which has surmounted the bourgeois barrier of knowledge with possibly progressive inherited material, even though . . . this material particularly requires elucidation, critical aquisiton, functional change” (1: 9). The boundaries we saw in Beowulf, Mandeville, and Pearl are obstacles put in place to protect those in power; in every instance, here including Malory, overcoming those obstacles leads (or at least would lead, in Beowulf and Pearl) to moments that remind us of our own potential for transgression and the progressive hope that arises from doing so.

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Notes

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1 For an interesting and more philosophically nuanced meditation on the nature of time in the Middle Ages, see Jeffrey Cohen’s chapter “Time’s Machines” in Medieval Identity Machines, pp 1-34.

2 I deny the rumor this essay was paid for by the Obama campaign.

3 Here, perhaps, a distinction has been made between the native, traditional concept (ent) and the clearly Greek-derived term (gigant): the latter the giants of Genesis 6:4 (gigantes autem erant super terram in diebus illis), the former perhaps metaphorical or a known monstrous other. This is borne up somewhat by the fact that another mention of “gigantas” occurs in Beowulf at ln. 113, in the context of those races cursed by Abel’s murder. Moreover, Clark-Hall’s entry for gigant notes that it is found only in Beowulf and the Bickling Homilies (155), implying that this is a word with Christian overtones. Gigant, then, is the word for that race of Biblical human/divine hybrids; ent would seem to cover every other “gigantic” form that has existed in the earth since those days.

4 As Andy Orchard argues in Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf-Manuscript, this identification of Beowulf with God would be a bit problematic, since it is clear that he shares far more characteristics with the monsters he kills than with the divine.

5 Although “ylke trowand” would seem to mean something like “true believers,” or at least “same-believers,” it exists in apposition with a later statement that good Christians should “chalenge the heritage that oure fader left us and do it [Jerusalem] oute of straunge mens handis” (2). Perhaps Mandeville is thinking “ylke” to mean “those who still believe the same,” i.e. the Jews, of whom he is even less of a fan than he is Saracens.

6 This is not the place to fully explain the discourse of “Saracen” in the Middle Ages; suffice it to say that “Saracen” in Mandeville seems to mean “Muslim” in a far less hostile way than the word is often used. In this essay, I use “Saracen” where Mandeville participates in that discourse, and “Muslim” to refer to the actual Islamic people existing in the Middle Ages.

7 Compare this notion with the alliterative homily Cleanness, likely also by this poet, which makes this point largely through a discussion of Sodom and Gomorrah.

8 I recognize that the Merlin argument is a little compressed and slightly tangential to the overall point of the essay. At some point, probably not in the dissertation, I fully intend to flesh this argument out into a little article about the unstable nature of the Arthurian community in Malory.

9 One might even say that Mandeville uncovers a Jewish past, although he would likely deny this, given his exceptional anti-Semitism.

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Works Cited

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Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope. 3 vols. 1959. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, Paul Knight, trans. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1986.

Clark-Hall, J. R. A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. 1960. 4^th ed. Medieval Academy Reprints for Teaching 14. Toronto: U of Toronto Press, 2004.

Finch, Casey. The Complete Works of the Pearl Poet. Berkeley: U of California Press, 1993.

Heaney, Seamus. Beowulf: A Verse Translation. New York: W. W. Norton, 2002.

Klaeber, Frederick. Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg. 1922. 3^rd ed. Lexington, Mass: D. C. Heath and Co., 1950.

Kohanski, Tamarah, ed. The Book of John Mandeville: An Edition of the Pynson Text with Commentary on the Defective Version. Tempe: Arizona: Medieval and Renaissance Studies Press, 2001.

Malory, Thomas. Works. 2^nd ed. Eugène Vinaver, ed. London: Oxford UP, 1971.

Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham, N. C.: Duke UP, 1984.

And Back Again

Hello all. I'm recovered sufficiently from the Written Comps (which I was told I'd passed, finally, about a month after I'd finished them) and from the holidays (which I may have passed), and the work staring me in the face has gotten large enough that I can ignore it by blogging. So, I'm back.

I haven't quite decided if I'll post the essays I wrote for comps. I think I might, just to show off what I did, and to see if it garners any response. One of them, "Negotiating Time's Boundaries: Identity, History, and Utopia in Four Medieval Works" might be all right, but the second, which features a bit of lit review and a foray into Chaucer's House of Fame, is a little more rough than I'd like, and I'm not sure how proud of it I am.

Right now, I'm working on both my prospectus and my Oral Comps paper; I've been encouraged to think of the former as the introduction to my dissertation, and the latter as my "theory chapter." I actually had been thinking of the introduction as the theory chapter, but this is probably for the better. The thing is, the more I sketch out the theory chapter, the less I'm certain how the dissertation will go. The theory should be integrated into the rest of the readings—otherwise, why have theory at all—but because I don't know quite how the theory chapter's going to turn out, or what claims I'll be making at the end of it, I'm not certain I know quite what comes after it anymore. I'll probably post the theory chapter, or bits of it, up here for your perusal; with any luck, I might get feedback.

So, yes, aside from that . . . I've also been questioning whether I want to put myself through the MLA this year. I should be done with the dissertation by the Spring of 2010, which is nice, but I'm worried about a number of other job-related things, including:

• not being sure where to get the money to go to Philadelphia (unless there's a chance of presenting a paper at MLA, in which case I could get a travel grant from the University)
• the scarcity of jobs available at the moment, and the explosion of candidates competing for those jobs
• competing with a number of scholars, many of whom have a larger reputation, more publications, and more experience than I
• not having the money for campus visits, should I get any

All in all, a grim prospect. So, I'm also thinking about applying for lectureships. I'm aware that there's going to be a lot of competition for those as well, but I'm also thinking that the lectureships might be a way to spend a few years working on publishing things and saving up money, so that by 2012 or so I might be a more viable candidate.

I don't know, though. We'll see.

Teaching is going all right; I have a Monday-Wednesday-Friday and a Tuesday-Thursday schedule, so I'm up here every day. Trying to figure out how to balance that and my own work is going to be a bit more challenging this semester. I do have two sections of Honors World Lit I, which means smaller classes and potentially smarter students. So far they've proved themselves keen on debate—at least, one section has. The other section's a bit lethargic, but that may just be me; my metabolism seems to crash around 1:30 PM, and class goes until 1:50. We jump into Gilgamesh this week, after a few days of discussing theory.

So, there we are. I'm back.

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.

-----
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.

Hiatus 2: Electric Boogaloo

Wow. I never thought a con post would end up producing more discussion than, say, anything I've said in the past year or so; I guess that shows what I know. That said, I'm going to officially put this blog on hiatus—not because of the comment stream, but because I've got written comps in 28 days (which means I need to go in hospital right now and wake up on the day of comps to discover that I'm Cillian Murphy). After comps I've got some encyclopedia entries to finish (nothing fancy; MKB is doing an encyclopedia of Graphic Novels and I said I'd help), and a lot of reading to do, and a theory chapter to begin.

I'll be back, oh, sometime around late November/early December, just in time for the annual complaint about my students' inability to grasp the simplest paper instructions. See you all then.

"St. Erkenwald is so hot right now": A SEMA Report

Well, I'm back from SEMA, and I had a pretty good time. There was a little mix-up about registration, which turned out to have been on the University end and not the conference end, and as a result, CEH and I get to have a nice chat with C-- A-- tomorrow or Tuesday about accounting for my presence at the conference. My paper went well, I think, although there was a bit of a debate with sharp-minded older gentleman who caught me out (rightly) in a bit of bad logic, which will be fixed in later versions of the paper; he also suggested another "economic debate" poem, which I'm hoping will turn out to be something really worth contrasting with W&W—i.e. it's too French, too late, too socioeconormative (who says late poststructuralist neologisms are dead?), etc.

Jeffrey's plenary was interesting, though I'll admit I didn't take that many notes; it was mostly cool just to see and hear him speak. He didn't sound quite like I'd imagined him when reading his work, but his voice does fit now: steady and quiet, yet persistent, and delighting in the wonder of discovering with you the awesomeness of the past.

Steven Kruger's plenary was more directly useful to me, though, because he talked about St. Erkenwald, a poem I'd been meditating on since I'd heard an interesting paper investigating its concerns with fame (and House of Fame) the day before. Steven also discussed different forms of conversion, and ways of reading "majoritarian" conversion (i.e. moving from a more secular to a more religious life within one's own faith community) as both like and unlike "minoritarian" conversion (e.g. of the Jews/Muslims/Mongols/Pagans/Heretics).

One curious thread uniting both these plenaries came not from their content but from Eileen's introduction of them. She described the work (and by implication, the lives) of both men as being "obsessed" with things: bodies (Jeffrey), queerness (Steven), time (both). Her use of "obsess," though, worries me, in part because obsession recalls to me compulsion as well, and with it the figure of not only, say, an Amadeus, but also a crazed, hoarding, untrustworthy person. Are we academics so far gone into our specialist cubbyholes that we can unselfconscioiusly refer to the work that we do as obsessing us, possessing us, causing us to give up our reason? I wholly doubt Eileen meant this, implying rather that both men find their own "red threads" that are persistent and fulfilling to discover, and perhaps, ironically, I have myself obsessed about obsession. Even so, it seemed slightly unheimlich at the time.

Other sessions were equally good: the session on Multimodal Teaching; the session in which CEH showed herself once more to be a fine scholar, and in which Lorraine Stock gave a cool paper on the afterlife of Geoffrey's Gomagog; the Chaucer panel in which I was forced to reconsider aesthetics, Sir Thopas, the role of Petrus Alfonsi in Chaucer, and my previous estimation of Carl Franks' work with Thomas Aquinas. Although I didn't get to hang out as much as I would have liked, it was nice to see people again, and to finally meet not only Steven Kruger and Jeffrey Cohen, but fellow blogger Karma, who actually made my afternoon by introducing herself to me.

I also got a mini walking tour of the surrounding area from St. Louis local and fellow SEMA-ite Lloyd (whose last name escapes me). I took lots of architecture pictures, many of which came out well and will soon be in their own album on my Facebook account.

For now, I'm tired, I have groceries to buy, books to read, papers to grade, and television to watch, probably in that order though no guarantees are made. For added fun, I'm coordinating the scoring of the Advanced Comp Exemption Exam this week, which means picking up the 400+ exams from the other end of campus, as well as spending three nights at campus until eight.

Nunc etiam, o amici

In other news, I've set the weekend of the 8th of November (i.e. noon on Friday the 7th to noon on Monday the 10th) to do my written comps. That should be enough time to finish that booklist. I've also finished:

• The Owl and the Nightingale
• Fredric Jameson. The Political Unconscious.
  
• Patricia Clare Ingham. “Making All Things New: Past, Progress, and the Promise of Utopia.”
• Karma Lochrie. “Sheer Wonder: Dreaming Utopia in the Middle Ages.”
• Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Medieval Identity Machines.
• Hilário Franco. “La construction d’une utopie: l’Empire de Prêtre Jean.”

And will read

• Daniel Birkholz. “Mapping Medieval Utopia: Exercises in Restraint.”
• William Burgwinkle. “Utopia and Its Uses: Twelfth-Century Romance and History.”
• John Ganim. Medievalism and Orientalism.

this week, and probably reread the Canterbury Tales next week. Žižek's In Defense of Lost Causes is still on my desk, as are a number of other books (Getting Medieval, Dreaming in the Middle Ages, Chaucerian Polity, usw) which I will eventually get around to reading.

Bloch's getting better, actually, now that I'm out of the "Here's why Freud and Jung are wrong in great and circular detail" section. Rereading Jameson's Political Unconscious was great, really, in part because he said a lot of things I'd forgotten he'd said in that book, and in part because his section on ideology and utopia (Chapter Six) had a lot of useful things that will make it into the diss.

From The Didactic Edge

So we're almost a month into the semester here at UAF, and this time around I'm teaching Honors World Literature to 1650. Ideally, this means I get a batch of students who are "smarter" than regular students; whether it actually means that I'm not sure. I will say that discussions have been better than usual, as have papers. I'll get to the latter in a minute, but first, here's what I'm doing this term.

I've decided that, in addition to the university-defined goals of this course (reading, understanding, and writing about literature), my students will also discuss the utopian content of world literature. To that end, we started off with two theoretical essays--Lyman Tower Sargent's "The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited" and Ernst Bloch's "The Wishful Landscape Perspective in Aesthetics"--which established not only some of the generic utopian conventions, but also that what I'm looking for is not the utopian form so much as the utopian spirit, Bloch's "Not-Yet-Conscious" or "Anticipatory Illumination." They seemed to take to this pretty well, I think, and our recent discussions of Gilgamesh, Plato, Aristotle, Sappho, and Callimachus have borne this out, not in the least because the theory has allowed them to approach the material they know (Gilgamesh, the Apology of Socrates) as fresh.

I've also included a writing component instead of quizzes this term. The writing assignment is due every three weeks, and students are asked to write 2-3 pages over one of the works we've discussed over that three-week period. I've also provided them with three ways that they can respond to that literature:

1. Explain the utopian function in the work you have chosen. Identify the structural and/or narrative features of the text evoke hope, and propose ways we can use that hope content today.
2. Take two non-consecutive passages of a larger work (or two shorter poems by the same author) and discuss what these passages have in common and why that common theme is important to our understanding of the work as a whole.
3. Other than the approach I took in class, what critical perspective might also be useful for the work you’ve chosen (historical, feminist, postcolonial, etc.—see the “Critical Perspectives” handout on Blackboard)? Explain why this approach will be useful and provide a brief example of that reading.
   

Astute readers may recognize option two as a variant of Dr. Virago's "Crux Buster," which I tried to good effect last Spring in the English Lit Survey course.

I got their first response papers on Thursday, and have graded 14 of them (about 34% of the total [NB: I love my spreadsheet gradebook, because it lets me engage my bourgeois love for facts and figures!]) so far. A number of them responded to Gilgamesh, and of those, what they've said has ranged from expected mediocrity (vague thesis statements, insufficient evidence, etc.) to moments of blinding clarity. I've had well-written considerations of the value of Gilgamesh as a utopian figure, as well as a meditation on the Apology of Socrates that led into civic engagement and global unity. They haven't all been perfect, either—some of them have had trouble with the theory component—but it's a work in progress on both sides of the pedagogical divide.

So that's my teaching semester so far. I'm looking forward to the rest of it, honestly, and I'm hoping that the exercise will not only help my students become better (dialectically engaged, philosophically complex, socially aware) human beings, but--in the best academic tradition--will help me get a further handle on what I mean by utopianism.

Update on Reading List

The score is still Jacob 2, List 3 in the first half.

As of this moment, I have read (or re-read) the following:

• Caedmon’s Hymn
• Bede’s Story of Caedmons’ Hymn
• The Battle of Maldon
• Genesis A and B
• Dream of the Rood
• Guthlac A
• The Phoenix
• The Wanderer
• The Seafarer
• The Wife’s Lament
• Deor
• The Gifts of Men
• The Fortunes of Men
• Cotton Vitellius A.xv (Nowell Codex only):
• Wonders of the East
• The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle
• Beowulf
• The Three Dead Kings
• Winner and Waster
• Pearl
• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
• Troilus & Criseyde
• House of Fame
• King Horn
• Sir Orfeo
• Several Lyrics and Ballads
• Vincent Geoghegan. Utopianism and Marxism.
• Louis Marin. Utopics: the Semiological Play of Textual Spaces.
• Tom Moylan. Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia.
• Lyman Tower Sargent. “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited.”
• Sheila Delany. Chaucer’s House of Fame: The Poetics of Skeptical Fideism.
• Jacques Le Goff. Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages.

I have also read some things that are not on my list but probably should have been:

• Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern
• Russell Jacoby, The End of Utopia
  

I am in the midst of reading (or re-reading) the following:

• The Owl and the Nightingale
• Geoffrey of Monmoth, History of the Kings of Britain
• Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur
• Ernst Bloch. The Principle of Hope. (all of it)
• Fredric Jameson. The Political Unconscious.
  
• Patricia Clare Ingham. “Making All Things New: Past, Progress, and the Promise of Utopia.”
• Karma Lochrie. “Sheer Wonder: Dreaming Utopia in the Middle Ages.”

On the other hand, these I still have left to read (or wossname):

• Life of St Christopher
• Judith
• La3amon, Brut
• Mandeville’s Travels
• Bevis of Hampton
• Richard Coer de Lyon
• Piers Plowman
• The York Register of Corpus Christi Drama
• Canterbury Tales
• Fredric Jameson. Archaeologies of the Future.
  
• Susan Stewart. On Longing.
• Phillip Wegner. Imaginary Communities.
• Daniel Birkholz. “Mapping Medieval Utopia: Exercises in Restraint.”
• William Burgwinkle. “Utopia and Its Uses: Twelfth-Century Romance and History.”
• Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Medieval Identity Machines.
• Hilário Franco. “La construction d’une utopie: l’Empire de Prêtre Jean.”
• John Ganim. Medievalism and Orientalism.
• Michael Uebel. Ecstatic Transformation.
  

Of them all, the following may show up in my dissertation:

• Ernst Bloch's stuff
• The House of Fame
• Winner and Waster
• Pearl?
• Louis Marin?
• Delany
• The four articles from JMEMS
• Both Jamesons
• Cohen
• Ganim
• Uebel

None of the Old English stuff, or the early middle English stuff, or the Malory is going to make it in, because I'm limiting myself to the 14th century in England. This isn't to say I haven't had good ideas about that stuff—actually, I've started a wiki file just for Future Projects—but I do want to get done with the dissertation before I die.

To add to that, I've just received through ILL Slavoj Žižek's In Defense of Lost Causes, which is so interesting that everything else may get put on hold.

Another Book for the List

I woke up this morning to Jeffrey Cohen's post on the end of Carolyn Dinshaw's Getting Medieval, and realized that what she says is kind of what I wanted to say in my dissertation (who needs coffee now?). I should preface this by saying that, as the title indicates, I have not yet read Dinshaw's book, and so this post is a reaction to Jeffery's post more than it is to Getting Medieval. The discovery that Dinshaw is demanding what I want to demand should not have been as surprising as it was; after all, medieval studies is a field in which the past constantly shocks the modern world. But nine years on, Dinshaw's call to use "the ideas of the past, creating relations with the past, touching in this way our efforts to build selves and communities now and into the future" (206) seems from this end of the field like a project only barely begun. Perhaps it has led to to some very useful research and thought, but the full potential of this reading remains, well, potential.

And that's the problem. Literature, and the humanities as a whole, are not just a tool for academics to mumble on about things that should be done—communities, politics, lives expressed in the subjunctive. I know that neither Dinshaw nor anyone at In The Middle believes this, but I do think that is how the academic community tends to see the humanities: it is a field that does nothing but talk about potentials and becomings while having little to no effect on potentiality or actual change. If Althusser (my old standby) is still right, and the academy continues to exist in a position of power the ideological state apparatus, then we have a responsibility to do more than just "acknowledge" our status and "include" marginalized people within the apparatus. We have a responsibility to change how people think, in a way all people can understand, in a way that touches them directly. We may not be able to touch the past, but we can touch the present, and do more than "touch."

Based on what I've read at ITM this week, I would say that Dinshaw's message is an excellent start, but it needs revisiting (or visiting, in my case). I think—I hope—that a careful synthesis with utopian theory and a Marxist hermeneutics will help us discover not only how we can build those "selves and communities," but also why and to what end those selves and communities exist: to change the future, to make it a place without hunger, without exploitation, with, as we used to say (and believe when we said it), "liberty and justice for all."


NB: I like that ending, but I think the "synthesis with utopian theory and a Marxist hermeneutics" might need explaining. I believe this will be useful—despite all the problems that a late-Enlightenment rationalist philosophy has—because I believe that the only way to effect real material change is to believe in a real material world. I think the bridge between that and the ideological/ideal world is utopian theory, and thus I am in solidarity with Ernst Bloch's docta spes: hope, yes, but an educated hope, one that returns to the ground to show how what it saw in the sky can be used on the ground.

Edit: On rereading Jeffrey's post, I think the power of the adjective queer finally hit me: it's a gender-flavored version of the same politics I've been aiming for all along. If we queer the middle ages (borrowing Glenn Burger and Steven F Kruger's phrasing), we make it unheimlich enough that it becomes a critical position in discourse. In other words, queering makes the medieval (or any field) different in a way that lets us argue for (and even argue our way into) real change.

All this has made me more certain that my final chapter is going to be programmatic (without being dogmatic): after moving through numerous medieval texts, I'm going to talk about what those texts show us, and the possibilities they open up for us. To use an example some of you might hear me deliver at SEMA in a few weeks, the potential of Winner and Waster is that it shows a way that one class can "win" a major victory purely through language, leading to a restructuring of society in which everyone, from the king to the Winners, the Wasters, and even the poor, can be better off than they were before. It's not a perfect victory, but it's a good idea, and one we can build from and perhaps even try again.

Dissertation Interlude: The End of Utopia.

I've been reading outside my comps list this week, because I finished two things on it and thought I deserved a break. I'm not sure Russell Jacoby's The End of Utopia constitutes a "break," since it is about utopianism, specifically the lack of it in late-20^th-century liberal discourse. Jacoby is righteously angry at the slow transition from utopianism to acquiescence: we (meaning primarily American intellectuals and/or academics) no longer take the time to imagine the truly different, and the energy we used to devote to that imagining has been given over to surface-level differences. In his second chapter, Jacoby takes on multiculturalism, which he sees as problematic because it replaces thought on economic and social alternatives with a nebulously defined sense of "culture":

If the economic skeleton of culture were put on the table, patter about diversity might cease; it would be clear that the diverse cultures rest on the same infrastructures . . . . The economic structure of society—call it advanced industrial society or capitalism or the market economy—stands as the invariant; few can imagine a different economic project . . . . The future looks like the present with more options. Multiculturalism spells the demise of utopia. (39-40)

One should note, however, that Jacoby is not against the idea of diversity, that is, of hearing more voices from the historically oppressed. His concern is that these historically oppressed groups, once existing on the margins of society, used to represent groups that could actually challenge the status quo. Now, however, such groups seek inclusion in the hierarchy, becoming "Women's Studies" or "African-American Studies" programs that seek to promote their "culture" while losing their status as ideological enclaves able to question the dominant ideology.

Louis Althusser writes that Ideological State Apparatuses (the tools through which ideology upholds and creates the state) are not only the "stake, but also the site of class struggle, and often of bitter forms of class struggle," in part because the ruling class cannot completely control ideological discourse, allowing the exploited classes "to find means and occasions to express itself there [in ISAs], either by the utilization of their contradictions, or by conquering combat positions in them in struggle" (147). I would say that Jacoby's concern is that multiculturalism is too much of the latter and very little of the former: once the positions within dominant ideology have been established (Women's studies, gender studies, Latin American studies, etc.), those who occupy those positions are more concerned with showing that we are all the same, deep down.

I'm not entirely sure I agree with his argument, though I find parts of it very convincing. After all, it seems that we do offer up a "choice" between identities that changes our basic relationship to economic society very little—I can be "masculine" or "feminine"; "white," "black," "brown," or "red"; "German," "English," "!Xhosan," "Maya," or "Cantonese"; and still participate in consumer society. However, there is a difference in the way that each of these identities participates in consumer society, although Jacoby is right that such differences are fading as Globalization proceeds.

Because we (again, Jacoby seems to mean "American" when he says "we") all really participate in the same basic economic culture—late capitalism—we end up seeking some form of individuation, some bulwark of difference against the large, totalizing force of consumer culture. As Jacoby puts it, "it is the rootless, not the rooted, who fetishize their roots" (48). The problem, then, is that we stop at the surface-level: if we just put on a different hat or a new sarong, it will all be fine. Again, it is good to have multiple voices in the great social conversation, but those voices need to be saying something other than "we belong to the dominant ideology;" they need to be saying "we will change that ideology." Although Jacoby does not suggest (or has not yet suggested) this, we need to look deeper, and remember that the experience of being e.g. a woman in consumer society is different than being a man in said society, and that that difference can critique not only male consumerism but the notion of consumerism itself. We academics are, to turn to Althusser once more, the higher orders of the ideological apparatus; if we cannot engage that apparatus dialectically, if we cannot put our hands to the machine while we are this close to it, when will we? Part of our job as educators should be to open up even further those spaces in discourse where critiques of that discourse can be made; is this not what we mean by "getting our students to think?"

This is why the European (and in my case, English) middle ages are important to us. They are one of the many places in present-day discourse that represent alternatives. Something to take away from Jacoby is the need to be careful about the "utopianism" one creates: is it providing actual alternatives, or is it just a new hat for the same old social body? I don't want to create the scholarly equivalent of a capitalist at a Renfair. As much as I fetishize the middle ages—and I know I do, with my classics-driven education and my deliberately Anglo-Saxon clerical shorthand, and so on—it does not help to see the Middle Ages as the root of modernity. Instead, we should look at it as a dialectical position with the notion of modernity. As John Ganim and others have argued, the medieval (along with the orient) exists as the primo Western Other, the space in which the modern West can define what it is not. The medieval can provide the seeds for real alternative social orders, not just the wan hope of the pluralism Jacoby describes (pardon the pun on wanhope/despair), but a springboard into new ideas. I do not yet know what those ideas will be (that is part of the dissertating process, after all), but I do know that "the medieval," as a dialectical partner for "the modern," can produce those ideas.

The essential thing is to keep grounded: how does the reading I (or you, or anyone) provide speak to the conditions "on the ground" in the world? This ties, of course, with those notions of presentism that I ran across first in Eileen Joy's post (see here, and here for my response): our work should always exist as if it were important, because it may yet be.

Works Cited
Althusser, Louis. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)." Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Tr. Ben Brewester. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971. 127-183.
Jacoby, Russell. The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy. New York: Basic Books, 1999.

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.

The Wossname of Small Things

A few things:
1) I am no further on my reading list than I was last week. Teaching every day is beginning to seem less and less like a good idea. (What administrator thought years ago that two six-week summer sessions was better than one 12-week summer session?)

2) On that note, however, I am giving a midterm today, and one that has garnered me the first compliment I ever received from a student about an exam—he said it was a good exam and very challenging. Nice.

3) Sadly, my friend and office companion JCP will not be returning for a PhD in the fall, because, as he put it, he does not feel up to the task of producing the kind of scholarship that is required of professional scholars, not even given world enough and time. Along with being severely missed, this leads to two admittedly very selfish problems:
a) He brought a computer to the office for general use, and I have appropriated it; I now hope he leaves the computer.
b) The desk directly across from me is empty, and there's a good chance they'll fill it with someone I don't like. (Maybe ALS could be convinced to move?)
Also, it means that, unless he returns to school, I will always be The Doctor and he The Master, which means that one day this will happen:



4) Based on the Speculum review, I have begun to read A. C. Spearing's Textual Subjectivity.

5) Based on the fact that her introduction convinced me that the "defective" branch is a valid object of study, I have ordered Kohanski's edition of The Book of John Mandeville.

6) Based on nothing at all, here is this, which still amuses me:

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.

Checking In

So, I have a dissertation reading list now, and it's ginormous. I've got some Old English stuff, some Middle English stuff, and some critical stuff, and no, you can't see the list, because . . . well, see previous.

I have, however, finished the Old English stuff, with the exception of the Nowell Codex, which I have a) agreed to read all of, and b) won't read until I can read all of it, which is to say, until I have a copy of Andy Orchard's Pride and Prodigies. I've been keeping a Wiki of my notes (via the increasingly awesome and life-giving TiddlyWiki) on the theory that having organized notes will make the written comps a whole lot nicer.

So yeah, finished the OE stuff, and in addition to seeing exactly what Jeffrey Cohen found so cool about Guthlac, I've been fascinated by the chronological order that the Phoenix seems to keep. Seriously--what kind of bird keeps time? I was also curious about the way that Deor seems to configure himself not as a person but as a series of lived memories: when saying "þas oferrode, þisses swa mæg," he not only takes refuge in the suffering of others, he makes his (comparatively minor) suffering the equal of theirs, while at the same time putting himself on the level of his mythological and social ancestors.

Also, I got an abstract off to SEMA in time for them to extend the deadline—but hell, it's off now, so cool. As far as Kazoo is concerned, I am under the impression that next year's conference program will come out soon, and that I will apply directly to the panel that I think might take me. Then, in what seems to be conference tradition, I will wait until the plane ride up to actually write the inevitably postmodern, buzzword-filled paper, because apparently Kazoo is about the drinking and dancing.

(That was a joke, folks—but I have been keeping up with the Charlotte Allen issue.)

Meanwhile, I keep forgetting this, but I do live and work in a town that is annually invaded by Wal*Mart shareholders, who today seem to have decided to hold their little Nuremburg rallies outside my office. This is why God (or a reasonable facsimile) made mp3 players.

Unknown Kadath . . . known?

We interrupt your medieval minds for pure madness. So, in the middle of rereading both Lovecraft and the Theses on Feuerbach, I ran across this story from what I'm sure is a reputable news source, "Laura Lee's Conversation for Exploration":

http://www.lauralee.com/news/kadath.htm

Yes, that's right: the government doesn't want you to see the latest pictures from an Antarctic expedition. Also, Hitler's brain (wearing a jaunty straw hat) directs UFOs from the center of the earth to destroy major US landmarks at the behest of Barack Obama . . . pass it on.

You may now resume medievaling.

Little Things

I finished a draft of my Medievalism/Nostalgia/The Supernatural/Green Arrow paper on Wednesday, and it's sat on my desk since. Today, I re-read it, and while it's still rough, it's not as bad as I thought it would be or as those solidii would indicate. Now, of course, it's time to print it off, let it sit on my desk until next Wednesday, and see if it's improved any.

Meanwhile, one of my students, in the course of being counseled on her (lack of having a) paper topic, let slip that apparently several of my students find me intimidating. Now, I'm no small guy (I'm not a man-mountain, either, but I digress), and I have a beard and a brain (a bearded brain? . . . see how my mind works? If I weren't a medievalist I'd have been a Gothicist). Still, intimidating? Sheesh.

Anyway, WAQ returned my conference draft with comments, and suggested (and this is a direct quotatation) that I "put more bodies in" so it would jive with SEMA this year. So I will, though I don't see where I'm going to get them—perhaps the barber's?

All Up On Appleton House

Yeah, that was a lame title, but it does introduce the fact that I spent most of today working on a lecture about Marvell's famous country-house poem. It's a great lecture, too: it introduces the Civil War, it talks about Marvell himself, the genre of country-house poems, and then goes on for about six pages of textual readings. I approach "Upon Appleton House" as a kind of psychogeography, and while I know that's mostly about urban places, I'd like to think it applies to any land/mindscape. I take into account the ideological function of the prioress' speech and Wm. Fairfax's retort, along with the excessively martial fields (not a pun) that force Marvell into the sweet, self-deconstructing woods that are also his patron's daughter. It's a weird poem, to be sure, and I'm going to have fun with it.

Surprisingly, this has left me a little braindead, which is frustrating, because I still have to:

• Write the final for my world literature course;
• Heavily revise (or not) my Don Quixote lectures;
• Type out and subsequently revise my Son-Jara lectures;
• Write the last section of the "close reading" part of the Green Arrow paper; and
• Figure out what's salvageable from that same paper so that I can write a better one.

That's going to end up being what happens this week, if I'm lucky.