Marking the Beginning of the Semester with a Medieval Roll Call

Just out of curiosity, and also to scare up commenting by readers not in the habit (for a reader in the habit, see image to the left (borrowed from here)): what medieval courses are you teaching (or taking) this academic term? If it's a generically titled course ("Medieval English Literature"), let us know some of its contents.

Me? I'm doing my first Canterbury Tales course, using the Fisher and Allen recommended by Rob Barrett in this post. Thanks Rob. I'm also trying out Andrew Galloway's Medieval Literature and Culture.

How about you?

Within the Middle: Claustrophilia (again): Quotes of the Day

In a comment on Jeffrey's post on Christopher Tilley's The Materiality of Stone, I complained about the anthropocentrism of Tilly's phenomenology:

To a degree, phenomenology stirs up "embeddedness in context" by reminding us of how the context--the self, that is--always changes through contact, how contact is always dispersing and reforming the self (which means we need another concept for self, a new language). But what are the final limits of that dispersal? I'm tempted to believe that the transformative encounter with the other through our senses is one tethered to our sensory limitations. Even if the "us" is shifted...there's a limit, and because of that limit, the disclosed phenomenon is always, ultimately, translated into an us that is, yes, always shifting, but shifting like an amoeba: within limits, and through assimilation.

And losing sight of that limit, and assimilation, means losing sight of power.

I don't know if I want to let go entirely of that awareness of the limit and with it, power (by which I mean coercive power), but I'm feeling a bit ecstatic right now, because I've just finished reading Cary Howie's extraordinary Claustrophilia: The Erotics of Enclosure in the Middle Ages. The book's made a few appearances on the blog so far (for example, here's Jeffrey admiring Howie's sparkle). Since I read this book because of Jeffrey's (and, if I remember correctly, Eileen's) recommendations, and since they've presumably read it, I want to declare a mini-itmbc4dsoma on Claustrophilia. What did you two (or three, [EDITED for sense!] if Holly Crocker, who is mentioned in the acknowledgments, wants to say anything), or other readers of Howie, get out of it? What did it to do you? Or, to ask a question more in line with Howie's argument, what happened between you?

Before sharing some of my favorite moments, however, I should say, or confess?, that I was more than halfway through the book before I began to understand it. There's a lesson in that. I've started to think that certain scholarly books should come with warning stickers, something akin to the clown-painted boards that refuse anyone under a certain height their chance to throw up on the Zipper or the Cyclone or what have you. Perhaps Žižek should come with a sticker directing us not to tarry with the negative until we've read a certain amount of Hegel, select portions of Marx, and, of course, Lacan, and probably much else (and a warning NOT to review certain films). With Howie, I would have appreciated a sticker proscribing me entry until I had immersed myself in phenomenology and especially, at least for the first 30 or 40 pages, Heidegger. I've only just begun to get "unconcealment" (which means that the multiple times I've tried to read Agamben's The Open have probably been for nothing), and not getting this concept meant a lot of frustration early on. I would have appreciated, as well, a warning that anyone unaware of queer theory's promotion of the slippage of metonymy, with its preservation and intermingling of objects, over the predictable equivalence of metaphor, with its mere substitution of objects, needed to skip ahead, briefly, to pages 81, 96, 121, or 93, where Howie explains "I would argue that metonymy offers a relationship of contiguity (indeed, contiguity as enclosure), which does not swallow part into whole, but, rather, preserves each of its terms in the surface upon which they touch. Metonymy is thus the trope of borders, tact, and the very spaciousness of desire." Had I had these warnings, which I, perhaps, uniquely need, the noise of my notes would have been less frequently frantic, more often ecstatic, generally less full of difficult muddles. If you will indulge me in my embarrassment, or welcome this abandonment of the illusion of self-possession so typical to the profession, what follows are minimally edited samples from my more frustrated encounters:

"Does hagiography mark, does it write [why does he double up marking with writing? aren't the two essentially equivalent, at least in poststructuralism?], the holy as that which resists the ethical, before whose ambivalence despair and understanding are equivalent?" (21). What is the distinction here? What is "the ethical" here, and what does it look like? (for an assault on ethics, see here)
--
This section has to do with the fetishistic temptation in the work of art as characterized by Heidegger (paradigmatically with a Greek Temple). But even after a few months away, I still have very little idea what it is he's doing. When he says that "unconcealment closes," I suppose this means that things resolve into being (not that nothingness is a void), which means they become bounded, and then adds "but it does not close in or close out; it marks a line, a material edge" (30), I suppose this means that, phenomenologically speaking, we come into contact with that unconcealed stuff and are with it. It's still there, not wholly appropriated, but we are with it all the same: hence it has a line but is not, because of this line, closed OFF (which is perhaps the word he wanted to use) to us. That said, there's still so much that's opaque in this; as if he doesn't want to give it up to truth, as if he WANTS to prevent the illusion of full disclosure, and thus his opaque style models the work of art as characterized by Heidegger.
--
"Marina's technique, together with its dead genital sign, echoes Jehan's writing in exile; these lives, in addition to Marie's dervish-like turning, could be said to constitute an account of experience in the barest sense, by which I mean a compromised inasmuch as mediated, that is, enclosed, traversal of the senses, especially vision. Such a traversal constitutes vision even as it moves toward it: in this way, to ape Jean-Luc Nancy, it spaces vision out" (64). What the fuck? I get mediation as enclosure, since to be mediated is to be carried within something, enclosed by (someone else's sense), but I don't get how traversal is MOVING TOWARD vision, and how this can be separate from CONSTITUTING vision??

Thank goodness that I stuck with it. My (eventual) joy in Howie is not just for his bawdiness (e.g., "Romuald, in Damian's vita, is as cantankerous as Damian himself: he wanders the Italian hills building hermitages, visiting monasteries, and routinely beating the shit out of wayward monks" (74); "If the altar of God is also an asshole..." (77)), nor only for the fluidity of his joyful anachronistic slippage between Jacopone da Todi, Marie de France, Dante, Thom Gunn, Mark Doty, and Fred Schneider.

It's for, and chiefly for, Howie's attention to being, yes, in the middle, and how it offers me a less depressingly closed-off ontology and epistemology than those to which I've lashed myself for so long (whether he offers me anything new for understanding coercive power is a question I suspend for a while). Unconcealed being does not give itself over entirely; keeping something in reserve, or always being more excessive that it appears, it cannot be assimilated entirely; nor do we, in giving ourselves over to texts, to eros, to contact with each other, even to God, become assimilated entirely (even in digestion, I wonder?). As Howie argues, in enclosure, we--and they--are in, not absorbed in each other, embraced, not disappeared: in this moment, we are with-in (a tempting hyphenated mutant for which I claim responsibility, and that I like to imagine Howie erased in an earlier draft).

He wonders, "Is there room, within our thought as comparatists and claustrophiles but also within thought more generally, for a relationship of contiguity or juxtaposition that would not be reducible to either an antagonism, on the one hand, or simple collapse, on the other?" (149) He wonders, "Within an economy of metonymy and anaphora, of dragging and differential repetition, might it be possible to speak of a comparative critical practice, or even a comparative mode of being-in-the-world, where being beside something or someone is not, first and foremost, a question of hierarchical, quantifiable ordering but, rather, a question of how bodies, and bodies of literature, that are allegedly outside but close to me also, again and again, get under my skin and go to my head?" (150). On Purgatorio 26:28-33

For through the middle of the burning road
There came a people face to face with these,
Which held me in suspense with gazing at them.

There see I hastening upon either side
Each of the shades, and kissing one another
Without a pause, content with brief salute.
ché per lo mezzo del cammino acceso
venne gente col viso incontro a questa,
la qual mi fece a rimirar sospeso.

Lì veggio d’ogne parte farsi presta
ciascun’ ombra e basciarsi una con una
sanza restar, contente a brieve festa.

he writes, "Dante is written into the space between homo- and hetero-, a space that grows smaller as the two ranks draw close, and that maps onto the time--of suspense or belated presence--in which Dante sees and sings. The outcome of this drawing close is not, however, an assimilation, not a unity. It is, rather, a touch: the sensible affirmation of proximity within distance. More specifically, it is a kiss" (111).

He speaks as well of our contact with authors, here about one who died just years before Howie discovered his writing:

It goes without saying that I arrived too late for Bo Huston, but thankfully just late enough for the books that bear his touch, which carry him metonymically beyond and into himself. I remember thinking what a shame it was that I had arrived in San Francisco in 1997, merely four years after his passing. But his enclosures persist, and metonymically inflame...When the author is dead, this [metonymical presence] is a small consolation, but it is all we have: a trace neither utterly removed from its putative source nor synecdochically making this source wholly present (as in the medieval cult of relics), but metonymically dragging someone, something, momentarily close. (121)

This is all I have to say for now, all except my asking, my exclaiming, isn't this lovely? Heartbreaking? Don't you want to read the book?

Festive Friday: Medievalist Pet Names

I attended graduate school with an aspiring medievalist who dubbed her terrier Ecgtheow (nickname: The Edge). My first non-childhood pet was a beagle we adopted from a shelter. He'd been discovered dumpster diving behind a Howard Johnson's, and was christened Roscoe by his rescuers. Although we were tempted to name him after the location of the shelter (that would be Peabody), my spouse and I decided upon Duncan Roscoe Gromit.

Our current dog, a dachshund-beagle mix with the ponderous title Scooby Oolong Cohen, has no medieval affiliations ... unless, say, Duke William of Normandy had an Uncle Scooby who has not yet surfaced in the archival records (if he does, we know that a friend named Shaggy will be discovered soon after. Both were probably incarcerated for shenanigans involving illicit substances like, um, hemlock or belladonna or something). My son has a spiny-tailed lizard named Spike, also not medieval, not even in a Mock Medieval way. Blue Tail is still deceased. The most recent addition to our menagerie: a tadpole on the brink of metamorphosis. Since s/he belongs to both children, they have been kerfuffling over what to call the little thing. At this point the small amphibian will likely be bear the enormous name of Feänor Santa Worm. Can you guess who is responsible for each segment?

I hope Eileen won't mind if I reveal that she named her new dog Mr. Sparkles. What about you, readers? Have you given your animal companions medieval-leaning names?

(image credits: here and here)

Les Simpsons de Bayeux

Last Sunday's episode of the Simpsons opened with an epic battle involving a stolen couch, conveyed via an updated version of the Bayeux Tapestry -- let's call it the Springfield Rug. Just like the events of 1066, here we witnessed savagery, invasion, gore, and cartoonish fun involving people with yellowish skin. Follow this link for some images. I am proud to say that my son recognized what was being parodied ... though I should also admit that we have an authentic reproduction of a segment of the tapestry hanging by the TV in our family room.

(I'd been searching since Sunday for the images, and finally got them via a link from Dr Nokes)

Quote of the Day: Mock Medieval

From Marcus Bull, Thinking Medieval: An Introduction to the Study of the Middle Ages:

What lies under the surface of Mock [the pseudo-medieval speech beloved of films and Medieval Times dinner theatre and Renaissance Fairs], the thing that makes it sound all right even though only a moment's reflection exposes its ludicrous conceit, is the unspoken sense that medieval people were very odd and they knew it. Mock has the effect of casting medieval men and women as the dimly self-aware spokespersons of a sense of difference and detachment that in reality, of course, only exists in our modern perception of them, not in their contemporary awareness. They probably could not quite put their finger on it, so Mock implies, but they somehow sensed that they were primitive, crude, or whatever stereotype one wants to apply, and that better times, progress, lay somewhere in the future. Mock, in other words, makes medieval people sound like actors in their own costume drama. (138)

Why post such a quote, other than its inherent interest and fun use of the word Mock? Well, I'm halfway through a book that argues medieval people were in fact perfectly capable of grasping the ridiculousness of their own performance of the self:

For example, at what point if ever might it have occurred to twelfth-century French courtiers that a room decked out in rugs, silks and other finery might look less like an affirmation of the prestige of that milieu than evidence of medieval vernacular cultures as aquisitive, shoulder-chipped wannabes in relation to the wealth and sophistication of of their Byzantine and Islamic neighbours? The question that then arises is how self-conscious that appropriation was, how alive or occluded the strangeness internal to the senses of self they constructed were as well as how evolved was the reflection on how troubling or useful different sources of strangeness could be. (15)

That quote is from this book by James R. Simpson. More anon.

Kerfuffle Wading: On Liberal Fascism's sadly missing chapter

I probably shouldn't wade into the kerfuffle with Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism (well treated at Sadly No, here and here. EDIT More seriously, see here), but here I go with a medievalist intervention, deferring responsibility for doing what I should not do by saying, with Dietrich, that I can't help it.

I quote the following from a recent interview between Goldberg and Theodore Beale

Beale: You know, Guerri says the reason the Fascist regime was less dramatic than the German and Soviet regimes was because Italians were weak Catholics. So when they replaced their religion with the secular religion, they became weak Fascists as well.

Goldberg: I think that's right. Michael Ledeen has many detractors when it comes to contemporary politics, but he was a very serious scholar of Italian Fascism in his previous career. One of the things that first got me interested in this topic was over ten years ago when Ledeen gave a talk at AEI. It was very interesting and at the end, a buddy of mine turned to me and said: “I think what he is saying is that Nazism was really bad because they had the Black Forest and terrible weather, and Italian Fascism wasn't that bad because the Italians are a bunch of nice people.” That's a really grotesque way to put it, and yet there's a certain truth there. These sorts of isms are going to bring out the character of a people. No idea so sets fire to the minds of men that it erases their culture, their background, or their fundamental psychological understanding of the world. Certainly not on a mass scale.

Beale: It's very Eddie Izzard: “We are all Fascists now.... ciao!”

Goldberg: There's a story that Ledeen tells about a restaurant. One of the things that Mussolini did in this very Jamesian way was to declare all of these domestic policy wars, these moral equivalents of war. There was the Battle of the Grains and the Battle of the Births, and one of them was the Battle of the Flies, because there was so much disease going around Italy back then. Anyhow, this guy goes into a restaurant and sees there's flies all over the place, so he asks what's going on with the war against them. The waiter says “well, the flies won.” That's a very Italian perspective. One of the things I learned while writing the book is that there's this glib association of fascism with anti-semitism, and while one can't say that the Italians were completely blameless in that regard, at the end of the day, anti-semitism was just completely contrary to Italian history and culture. Italy was polyglot, multi-ethnic and Catholic, so whatever anti-semitism was there was theological, not biological; the Catholic Church's position was that Jews could be saved, not that they should be eradicated like vermin. I wanted to do an entire chapter on this but it was just too far afield. The heroism and decency of thousands upon thousands of Italians when it came to the Jews is one of the incredibly untold stories of that era. Anti-semitism and Italian Fascism are just not kindred phenomena.

There's too much to deal with here. For instance: Italy, being a Catholic country (or people? I suppose in this case one means the other, except for the "multi-ethnic" part), did not practice a virulently antisemitic fascism because of Catholicism's policy on Jews (rooted in Augustine's commentary on Psalms 58:12); Italians did not become serious fascists because they were weak Catholics. So, did Catholicism guide them in its strength or its weakness? Or both?

As for polyglot, multi-ethnic, Catholic countries and their tolerance towards Jews...well, there's medieval London, which would fit the criteria, were it not for the pogrom during Richard I's coronation, and/or twentieth-century France, except for its complicity in the Holocaust. Even with his conceptual mistakes, Goldberg can still wonder why antisemitism didn't take root as intensely in Italy as it did in Northern Europe. He might have started his wondering by reading Gavin Langmuir's “L’absence d’accusation de meurtre ritual à l’ouest du Rhône” (in Juifs et judaisme de Languedoc. Cahiers de Fanjeaux 12. Toulouse, 1977, 235-49) and perhaps he would wondered whether to be convinced by the several possibilities Langmuir offers (perhaps, to cite my notes, the earlier development of credit and commerce in Southern Europe made Jews less distinct, or religious belief played a different role in these societies that were more Romanized, or there's some kind an inverse relationship between clerical activity and popular hostility, or perhaps heretics were the real bogeymen in S. Europe).

I do wish, however, that Goldberg had written the chapter he claims was "too far afield." Perhaps he would have ran across some information of use on medieval Italian Jews and how they helped form the Italian national character (more on that below). He could have started with Ariel Toaff's Love, Work, and Death: Jewish Life in Medieval Umbria (Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1996). He might have discovered the racism used against Pope Anacletus II (discussed in Mary Stroll's The Jewish Pope: Ideology and Politics in the Papal Schism of 1130, 1987), and perhaps have found something similar to his own racist noise against Obama.

Had he done his research (not really his habit), he would have discovered in any number of sources that in fact it generally was better to be Jewish in Rome than in Cologne, Rouen, London, or York, that is, so long as one wasn't being compelled to race during Carnival and be stoned by Christians (see Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetry 53). Or so long as one wasn't an old man rolled down a hill in a spiked barrel (I found reference to this tradition in Claudine Fabre-Vassas The Singular Beast: Jews, Christians, and the Pig, Carol Volk trans., Columbia UP, 162, and, in my effort to confirm it just now, in the online Medici Archive Project:

The "palio degli ebrei" or "race of the Jews" in the Corso had a long and peculiar history of its own predating the Counter Reformation by several centuries. At one point, Christian "jockeys" in the race rode Jews instead of horses. Another festive "game" of the season was to roll a Jew in a nailed barrel down the Testaccio Hill. By the mid-sixteenth century, there are accounts of the Pope personally watching "races of barbarians, buffaloes, donkeys and Jews," from the balcony of Palazzo Venezia (where four centuries later Mussolini made his most famous public appearances.) By the 1580s, the Jews are known to have run the race naked; later, they evidently began to assume elaborate costumes, thereby reversing the originally humiliating intention of the event. In 1668, Pope Clement IX Rospigliosi abolished the "palio degli ebrei", substituting an annual tax of 300 scudi for the festive decoration of the street and a stylized ceremony of homage to the Pope on the Capitoline Hill.

(for the transmutation of the old Jew to pig, see here)). Goldberg might also have run across information on the expulsion of Jews from various parts of Italy in the Middle Ages and afterwards: Sicily (depending on my notes) in either 1492 or 1493 and Naples in 1541, and the forced conversions in Southern Italy in 1290. Perhaps he would have found something on the Jewish ghetto of Venice (and how Napoleon ended it). This is all pretty lugubrious stuff (especially when one needs a murderous tyrant to break down the gates), but all to the point on the so-called national character of Italians.

Or "Italians." I put the nation in the quotation marks in hope of responses to my invitation. Let my readers and co-bloggers, if they have anything handy, provide something less woeful about Italian Jews, something that might point us towards a discovering of intermingling, interdependent Jewish and Christian culture in Italy, medieval or otherwise, perhaps something like this, perhaps something less hostile even. And perhaps if we can come up with some thought on that we can help, at least in our fantasies, to lead Goldberg away from the poisonous invocation of "biology."

In the Middle Receives Cliopatria Award for Best Group Blog

The Cliopatria Awards for 2007 have been announced, and In the Middle is very pleased to have won Best Group Blog. Here is the award citation:

The Cliopatria Awards 2007

Best Group Blog: In the Middle

In the Middle is a medievalist blog, written by J. J. Cohen, Mary Kate Hurley, Eileen Joy, and Karl Steel. We were impressed by the blog's interdisciplinary approach, its consistently intelligent prose, its effective blend of wit and genuine scholarship, and its ability to follow the medieval wherever it might lead—from popular culture to high theory. In recent months, posts have ranged from Beowulf at the movies to the significance of animals in the middle ages. As one committee member remarked, this is, in many ways, a "model group blog."

Our gratitude to everyone who made this honor possible: our students, our teachers, our beloved readers, our families and friends and pets and hangers on ... and we especially thank the judges: Ancarett, Timothy Burke, Miriam Elizabeth Burstein, Rebecca Goetz, Paul Harvey, Sharon Howard, Elizabeth Klaczynski, Adam Roberts, and John Carter Wood. Merci mille fois Cliopatria!

Daniel T. Kline to guest post at ITM

We are honored to have Daniel Kline of the University of Alaska joining us for a short series on a recent tragedy in Anchorage. The shooting took the life of a student in Dan's graduate seminar on the binding of Isaac. Many readers will know Dan already from his fantastic book on Medieval Literature for Children. He also authored this essay, one of the most beautiful I have ever read.

Look for Dan's first guest post on Monday, January 14.

Welcome Inside Higher Ed Readers

Thanks, Scott Jaschik, for featuring Karl's recent letter to US News in your article ABC Thinks You’re Rich; ‘U.S. News’ Says Your Job Is Cushy.

I now have to run off and sweep up the large denomination bills that have been toppling from my pocket. My kids need some spending money for the day. Oh wait, to retain the cushiness of my job I think I'll call some graduate students and have them perform the labor. It's six in the morning, they'll be up...

Welcome History Carnival #60 readers

Thanks, Victorian Peeper, for including this post.

Today's Letter of Complaint: The Profession

US News and World report published a list of the best professions for 2008, ranging from clergy to hairstylist to fundraiser (!) to, yes, professor. Go ahead and read the short treatments of the job, here and here. You done? Does it sound right to you? Not to (irrepressible) me. I wrote a letter to Mr. Marty Nemko, which you can read below the fold.

Dear Marty Nemko:

I'm writing regarding your "executive summary" of being a professor. A professor at a 4-year institution probably teaches three courses a semester; he or she may well teach 4 courses. Let's say it's usually 10 1/2 hours in the classroom every week, assuming 85-minute courses meeting twice a week. Then there's another 3 hours of sitting in my office--okay, it's me I'm describing (I'm a new assistant professor at Brooklyn College in the English Department)--so, sure, that's 13 1/2 hours. Once a month, there's a couple of hours of departmental meetings. Then there are various smaller committees and meetings to which I owe my service, which gives me another, let's say, hour a week on average.

Not bad, right? And summers are off?

Except you left out two things: preparation time and grading. It takes me on average three hours to prepare for each class (some classes it's 6 hours, some it's only a half hour, if that). So that's another 18 hours a week. Then, being an English professor, I may have 2- or 3-page papers from each of my students to grade. There are between 20 and 30 students in each of my classes. This small deluge doesn't happen every week, but it happens often enough. At the end of the semester, I get around 800 pages to grade, bang, as I get research papers from all of my students. Some of them are good writers, so the grading's easy. Most of them need, well, to be educated, which means writing about 600 words of comments on each to help ensure that they don't make the same mistakes again. Any of them could be cheating, so I have to check that. There are also finals to grade, and believe me, I don't have a grad assistant. At Christmas, when I wasn't with family, I was grading.

So you see where your hours are off? On top of that: I'm returning page proofs today on a 25-page article I wrote, I have 3,000 words due in February on a topic I know very little about, I have two more articles, plus two conference papers, coming up in the next 8 months, and then there's the dissertation I have to get published as a book in the next seven years. Every so often I write a grant application, because it looks good if I can bring in some money. So: let's call it 50-60 hours a week, because that's what it's been for me, and that's what it's seemed to be for every professor I know in the humanities. Important professors do more: they deliver keynote addresses, serve as outside advisors for tenure cases, edit journals, write many, many letters of recommendation, and often chair their departments.

Finally: the pay range is way off. Some of the jobs I applied for paid $40k. This was in Idaho, sure, but still. My starting pay is in the low 50s, and this when I started getting my first master's in 1997 and finished my PhD ten years later (average time to completion for a literature PhD is around 9 years). When I hit associate professor, I may hit the 70s and 80s. When I finally hit full professor, maybe 12 years from now, I'll be making whatever counts as the 90s. One day maybe I'll crack six figures (the ceiling is about 120K in the CUNY system).

That said, I love my job. I get to hang out with really smart people--my colleagues and students included--I get to work on stuff that's interesting to me (it's not a job at the DMV, that's for sure), the dinner parties are never dull, mostly I set my own hours, I get rewarded for being smart, and, eventually, I will have excellent job security in a field concerned with something more than the bottom line, a field that values me *as a person.* That's important.

All best,
Karl Steel
ksteel@brooklyn.cuny.edu

(PS: on political leanings: the people who complain are mainly non academics. David Horowitz, chiefly, and so far as I know they're unable to provide any substantial facts about the relationship between politics and hiring. And certain departments--law, economics, some sciences--do trend conservative, you know.)

Festive Friday: Your Worst Gift Ever

Dr. Nokes recently posted pictures of a medieval-themed childhood birthday present that brought back some memories for me -- mainly, simmering resentment with a patina of vengefulness. After all, isn't that what Fisher Price toys are all about?

As I related in the comments at Unlocked Wordhoard, I had always wanted that big plastic castle, with its trap door and dungeon and working drawbridge. Yet it was my brother who received its pseudo-medieval finery. When I explained my deep hurt to my parents, I was rewarded on my own birthday with the most disappointing present I'd ever received: the Fisher Price House. What a misreading of my desires! This dinky domicile didn't come with a dragon or a queen or a portcullis. It did, however, feature a bed, a stove, a table and a tiny garage. What was I supposed to do with that thing, pretend I was a cast member of the Brady Bunch?

Eventually I did learn that the Fisher Price House made a great set for the staging of natural disasters. Its little plastic cocoon of domestic bliss was under siege by earthquakes, hurricanes, and (most fatally) a mudslide. After the latter, the Parental Authorities declared the house would remain an outdoor toy. I predict that future archaeologists will someday disinter it from the Cohen backyard and declare it a miniature temple with small, peg-like idols for convenient worship.

So what about you? What was the worst gift you ever received? (And please don't say "A copy of Medieval Identity Machines.")

(photo credit: no, that cute tyke isn't me. Cameras hadn't been culturally constructed yet when I was a kid. I found the picture -- with the very house in question -- here).

Some thoughts on Chaucer, history and Englishness

I'm currently in the midst of composing an essay about "British Chaucer" for a Festschrift. In preparation I'd been reworking my way through the materials that eventually became the essay "Postcolonialism," in the volume Chaucer: An Oxford Guide, ed. Steven Ellis. For your edification and/or amusement, I offer a section that was cut when that essay grew far too lengthy for the guide. It formed part of a larger rumination on the embedment of the study of Chaucer within an educational system that owes much to colonial encounter.

----------------------
It is sobering to keep in mind that university education in the United States and in England has been historically tied to the production of an enfranchised group of men whose knowledge of a shared tradition enabled them to (1) recognize their own and (2) exclude from the circles of power those too poor to have access to the educational system and those whose cultures differed from what had become canonized as the best of the best. It allowed these men to imagine that they were the culmination of a long and singular history stretching from ancient Greece and Rome through medieval Europe, all the way to contemporary Britain and America. Chaucer was usually included in this tradition as a precocious figure for Anglo modernity, a universal man who happened to live in the fourteenth century but who described the soul of the nineteenth and twentieth. Never mind that this tradition's seamless unity, its purified genealogy, were never more than a passionately held fantasy. The elite it formed went out into the world, seized land that was not theirs, and eradicated cultures that (they had been told, and believed) were self-evidently barbaric compared to their own.

Knowledge, in other words, is never disinterested. When an uprising in Jamaica was violently quashed by its British governor in 1865, Goldwin Smith, professor of history at Oxford, condemned his compatriot's actions. Under vehement attack by the governor's supporters, Smith resigned his post and was replaced by William Stubbs. The historian Kathleen Biddick notes the "monastic-like silence" on contemporary issues maintained by the new Regius Professor of History throughout his career:

This silence continues to leave unspoken the conditions of his appointment in the midst of a traumatic debate over British colonial race relations conjoined with the colonial transformation of the British university. The silence still lingers. (The Shock of Medievalism p. 9)

Stubbs retreated into the past, teaching no subject beyond the seventeenth century and refusing to publish in anything but scholarly journals of limited and specialized circulation (Shock of Medievalism p. 8). Biddick wonders if this professional stance of turning away from the world is not a way of being complicit with past violence and injustice. In her estimation, contemporary medieval studies still bears the guilt of this silence, for it has not yet adequately acknowledged how the field has been historically shaped. Biddick implies that the dead – the scholars who bequeathed the very shape of our disciplines to we moderns attending universities -- must be called to account for their war crimes, even when these were sins of omission. She also leads us to wonder if a disinterested study of medieval authors like Chaucer would ultimately be possible, let alone desirable. [It is also important to admit that not every founding father can be found quite so condemnable as Stubbs, nor does a postcolonial mode necessitate moralistic or negative critique. For every Sir Frederic Madden, who produced the first edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and thereby legitimated its specialized study – and who also fulminated against the "deadly poison of Democracy" – there was a Frederick J. Furnivall, a liberal agnostic socialist whose passion was that Middle English be available to all readers, and who did more than any other scholar to construct a canon of texts. (See especially David Matthews, The Making of Middle English, pp. 113-61).]

An examination of the dispiriting history of how the contemporary disciplines formed extends to exploring how the era we call the Middles Ages was itself constructed. No one who lived during this period, least of all Chaucer, would have conceived of themselves as living in some middle time, a mere prelude to Renaissance and modernity. Chaucer knew well that "in forme of speche is chaunge / Withinne a thousand yeer," that words once familiar could become "straunge" (Troilus and Criseyde II.22-24), but to his mind he wrote in English (or englissh, as he spelled it), not Middle English. That distinction was not made until Henry Sweet periodized the language into Old, Middle and Modern English in 1874, an act of separation that underscored the discontinuities between an undeveloped past and a confidently complete present.

John Ganim has demonstrated how the medieval period was imagined at this time as an analogue to England's new possessions overseas. In order to justify the absorption of India into the empire, for example, its people had to be figured as locked in a primitive mode of living. Acculturating the subcontinent to English modernity meant the loss of indigenous languages, customs, religions, but all these could be taken from the colonized under the banner of progress, as a healthful movement from "Old" and "Middle" into "Modern." The Indian village was therefore imagined as similar to life in Anglo-Saxon England: "Where the English were in the Middle Ages, so was India in the nineteenth century" (John Ganim, "Native Studies" p. 127). Implication: interject India with a greater dose of English modernity, and it will soon enough catch up. This otherness of the Middle Ages – and the medievalness of places like India – was emphasized not only in scholarly and popular writings of the time, but through pedagogical public exhibits like the Worlds Fair, where "authentic" medieval villages could be recreated next to "authentic" villages from the colonies as if the two were versions of the same universal human journey.

In reaction to this transformation of the Middle Ages into an underdeveloped country, medievalists eventually claimed a modernity for their era of study, describing a Middle Ages full of enlightened philosophical inquiry and reassuringly contemporary values. In their defensiveness over what therefore counts as medieval, these scholars were careful to minimize the presence of the irrational and the impure. As a direct result, an exploration of the relations between courtly Arthurian romance and the supposedly unrefined Celtic world by R. S. Loomis scandalized traditionalists, while the possibility of a deep connection between courtly love and Arabic literature likewise provoked outrage when it was proposed (Ganim, "Native Studies" 131). This impossibly contemporary and Eurocentric Middle Ages had no place for the non-Christian, the non-scientific, the strange. Chaucer escaped some of this debate over the possible primitiveness of the Middle Ages because he was considered not a great poet of the fourteenth century but "a great English poet who happened to live in the Middle Ages" (David Matthews, The Making of Middle English, p. 30), and the effect of his reputed timelessness was to allow a convenient escape from history. The fact that he monsterized Jews and Muslims, that his vision of Britain (or perhaps more accurately, his complete lack of interest in attempting to envision Britain) means that he has created a world almost empty of Welsh, Scottish, and Irish content, did not disturb scholars for whom timelessness and universality were synonyms for a contemporary kind of exclusive Englishness.

Something Else

I had meant to post on Quick Study back in September, when a good piece appeared called Desiring Machine. Where did the autumn go? Related to this recent post at ITM, here is a short quote from Quick Study on blogs versus other publishing fora. Scott McLemee observes during the course of his letter to a harsh critic:

A blog is something else. I am not paid to blog. A blog is someplace to let off steam, or jot down a stray thought, or make a recommendation or indulge in a remark or rant. Should a topic interest me enough to write about it in an essay for a magazine or newspaper, then doing so is certainly an option. It involves more time and attention than these blog posts do. But even that is not the decisive distinction. The main thing about the blog is that it's a casual format, and utterly subject to my discretion, not to say whim.

A blog is indeed something else, and that else is what attracted me to the form. I suspect that I've begun to lose sight of else during the two years ITM has breathed air. My new year's blog resolution is to embrace blogdom's casual format better, to embrace the else, and therefore to experiment more with ITM.

And, since we're talking New Year, my colleague Margaret Soltan offers a New Year's Eve rumination over at University Diaries. She takes as her point of departure some lines from Philip Larkin's "Aubade" and offers:

Life is about fighting your way clear to an independent identity and to as much purity of soul as you can sustain under the weight of wrong beginnings and shitty middles.

May In the Middle never become "Shitty Middles." All hail the purity of soul that beckons from the else.

Felix sit annus novus

In the Middle wishes all of its readers a very happy 2008.

Thanks for reading us, conversing with us, challenging us, transforming us. We look forward to spending the year ahead with you. Check out the list of past favorites below, and please let us know if there is anything you would like to see more or less of in the future. This blog is a living organism, and you, dear readers, are its raison d'être.