Your Poem of the Day

by J J Cohen

It's even untimely. Congratulations, Dan.

Messianic Time and the Timely, or, Mandeville and the Jews (Again)

by J J Cohen

Tomorrow the GW MEMSI seminar on Messianic Time and the Untimely convenes. I offer the following in reaction to the three rich papers by Kathy Biddick, Julia Lupton, and Gil Harris ... and as a way of continuing some conversations we've had here at ITM as well.

The untimely is the antidote to the contextualizing bent of historicism, the guarantor that while something may be of its time, it can also carry within a polychronicity that wrenches it out of any meaning system built upon mere synchrony. In its temporal explosiveness messianic time is intimately related to the untimely, since it can activate the past within the present to perturb the arrival of any predetermined future (and by that phrase I mean any future that is either an infinite projection of the present into time to come, or any desired culmination of present events according to which the present moment is one step on a progress ladder that must result in and be given meaning by that coming time). Biddick's paper is the strongest argument that messianic time is not as untimely as it makes itself out to be, pointing out that Islam is inexcluded from (evacuated from, but through that same gesture installed within) both medieval typology and Walter Benjamin's thesis. This vanishing act is a concern of Harris as well ... and perhaps has to do with the fact that a point of overlaps between Christianity and Judaism is in the person/event of the Messiah.

I've written a bit on this blog about the 13th C travel narrative known as the Book of John Mandeville and its depiction of Jews: how a component of Mandeville's imagined Englishness might be his antisemitism; how the book itself perhaps contains the mechanism to critique that lapse in tolerance. As part of my Leeds keynote on Christian-Jewish neighboring, I looked closely at a Messianic passage from Mandeville that has earned endless critical scorn. Here is an excerpt from that talk:
----------------------------
John Mandeville, a travel writer so cosmopolitan that he renders comprehensible even the promiscuous nudist communist cannibals of Lamory, nonetheless has nothing good to say about Jews. The Book’s repeated narration of the Passion makes clear that the Jews are guilty of deicide. In relating a story about a tree in Borneo that bears poison, Mandeville states that a Jew once confessed to him that his people had attempted to eradicate all Christendom with that toxin. He describes the ten lost tribes of the Jews, Gog and Magog, enclosed within the Caspian mountains by Alexander the Great. In this remote prison they await a self-prophesied liberation during the reign of the Antichrist. Cut off from the stream of change that is time, the immured peoples speak only Hebrew. Jews living among Christians therefore teach that language to their children so that when their brethren escape captivity they will be able to communicate:

It is said that they will issue forth in the time of the Antichrist and commit a great massacre of the Christians. And therefore all the Jews who live in all lands always learn to speak Hebrew in the hope that when those of the mountains of Caspie issue forth, the other Jews will know how to talk to them [and lead them into Christendom in order to destroy Christians] … and Christians will yet be in as much and more subjection to them as they have been in subjection to the Christians.

A people without a homeland, the Jews plot to divest all Christians of dominion.

Despite supposedly writing from a post-Expulsion England, the Mandeville-author consistently and innovatively demonizes Jews. Stephen Greenblatt describes this “ungenerous” attitude as the “most significant exception to the tolerance that is impressively articulated elsewhere” (Marvelous Possessions). Iain Higgins writes that the Book’s conspiracy theories might seem future-focused, but they are formulated “to incite ill-feeling against Jews in the present … a hostility verging on paranoia” (Writing East). Benjamin Braude describes Mandeville’s narration of the enclosed Jews and their future triumph under Antichrist as “a blood-curdling passage … a warrant for genocide" (“Mandeville’s Jews among Others").

I wonder, though, if there isn’t more to the story than that … and I wonder if we might even find in Mandeville’s tale of the enclosed Jews not only a paranoid fantasy of how different a proximate Other might be, but an example of Christian attentiveness to the discontented desires of those neighboring them. When at the end the of world the ten lost tribes of the Jews escape their distant and rocky enclosure pour crestiente destruire, to destroy Christendom, we can glimpse no friendship in this stark vision, no coinhabitance or commingling … or can we?

Yes. In this apocalyptic imagining of Christian dominion’s termination we can hear not just an anti-Jewish fantasy of an imperiled Christian world, but an actual Jewish fantasy of such an end – a vision of the future that suggests that Jewish voices from the Middle Ages resonated not just with scholarly wisdom and tearful commemoration of tragedy, but with anger at the smallness of the spaces in which they often found themselves consigned. Israel Yuval, in a remarkable work of revisionary scholarship (Two Nations in Your Womb), has mapped the ways in which Jewish residence among Christians shaped Jewish religious practice. Like Daniel Boyarin, Elliott Horowitz, Ivan Marcus, and David Biale, Yuval’s work stresses that despite the inherited assumption that Jews and Christians inhabited different worlds, both faiths were profoundly changed by living together. Both remained not frozen in time but mutable, open, alive.

Urban adjacency might lead to neighborliness, as we saw in Matthew Paris (a Christian crosses a Jewish threshold to play with friends of another faith) -- or it might not, as when that same threshold is declared by a man like John of Lexington to be the demarcation of another world, one where modernity ends and an ever-repeating past begins. Yuval provides the angry response that could come from that other side of the door once Jewish space has been violently trespassed, once the occupants of a Jewish house are allowed to voice something other than “a Christian fantasy,” as in Copin’s self-condemnation through ventriloquism. This voice might appraise the present in ways very different from its Christian framing, and might speak a passionate desire for a future utterly different from Christian “modern times.”

A prayerbook of English provenance composed no later than 1190 contains this fragment of the Alenu le-shabeah:

[Christians] bow to vanity and emptiness and pray to a god who cannot save – man, ash, blood, bile, stinking flesh, maggot, defiled men and women, adulterers and adulteresses, dying in their iniquity and rotting in their wickedness, worn out dust, rot of maggot [and worm] – and pray to a god who cannot save.

Remember the young Jew of Oxford, the mocker of Saint Frideswide, who killed himself while speaking unrecorded blasphemies? Could these lines offer us a glimpse of what he might have said? Anger at one’s neighbor held no Christian monopoly. Sometimes this Jewish ire took the form of an aggressive fantasy of vengeance in which the King Messiah finally arrived. In a role borrowed from Christian crusading polemic, this Messiah would smite the enemies of Israel and drive them from the land. Keeping in mind that the “Jewish Messiah is the Christian Antichrist” (Yuval 289), the story narrated by the Mandeville-author suddenly becomes a little more complicated.

The prophesied liberation of the enclosed Jews and their termination of Christian world dominion contains something of an extant Jewish vision of revenge, a vision apparently taken into Jewish eschatology from Christian materials. Yuval has persuasively argued that the liberating and vengeance-wielding King Messiah was dreamt by medieval Jews as they overheard their Christian neighbors speak in their polemic of Crusader kings and the reclamation of the Holy Land. Christians in turn overheard Jewish neighbors talk of a Messiah who would deliver them from exile, and dreamed an Antecrist. This Messiah/Antichrist is therefore at once Christian and Jewish – or better yet between Christian and Jew.

In his tale of the future liberation of Jews locked in distant exile, the Mandeville-author may be narrating a paranoid and antisemitic story. Yet he is also recounting angry Jewish words – or words that blend Christian and Jew into a hybrid discourse, an interspace where the relations between the one and the other might be intractably complex, but the anger at subjection and violence to which this vision gives voice is impossible not to hear.

---------------

This medieval Christian Jewish antichrist Messiah is a figure of anger, vengeance, blood. The explosiveness of Messianic time is everywhere evident in him ... and like all explosions triggered by those too ardent for a reconfigured present, this violence has its innocent victims, its neighbors who were simply carrying on with their lives. In its specific language (of Crusade, of worldly kingdom) this Messianic time is time-bound, just as Benjamin's figure of the automaton Turk might be in part contemporary Orientalism, in part a meditation on (as a commentor suggested) Charlie Chaplin.

But I don't think Messianic desires need end in anger, vengeance, blood. Rather, I'd point out that what we witness taking shape in the space between Christian and Jew in Mandeville is something more than hostility. It is also the unfolding of a hope so simple, so essential, so common that I would call it untimely: the hope that the present become more capacious, that the future not repeat the constrictive orthodoxies of the day. It is towards that as yet unknown future, the future in which the Messiah never arrives, that the complexities of Christian-Jewish-Muslim neighboring propels us, even now.

Humanities, DC, GW

by J J Cohen

Some readers of ITM might find this post I did at the GW English blog interesting, since it touches upon getting attention for humanities research.

Fun piece on Robin Hood ...

by J J Cohen

... and Robin Hood Studies, and a big Robin Hood conference coming in October at the University of Rochester, in the Rochester Review.

My undergraduate advisor (and the person most instrumental to ensuring I became a medievalist) Tom Hahn figures prominently. The article mentions that he has a personal collection of over 2000 Robin Hood items. As someone who has stayed at his home, I can attest to that fact: the guest bedroom had more Robin Hood paraphernalia than you'd imagine all the sweatshops in China could create.

Eight years on

by J J Cohen

Not sure I can say anything more than this or this.

E-Seminar: Messianic Time and the Untimely

by J J Cohen

This post instigates the electronic portion of the seminar on Messianic Time and the Untimely, to be held at the George Washington University on Thursday September 17, 3-5 PM.

The papers may be downloaded here. Any comments made on this blog will form part of the discussion on Sept. 17, and a follow-up post will be published. Eileen Joy may also Twitter the proceedings.

The seminar is sponsored by the GW Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute. Our three presenters are Julia Lupyon, Kathleen Biddick, and Gil Harris. Some information about each of them may be accessed via this post at the GW MEMSI blog.

The comments are open. Please post!

For Northern Lights

by J J Cohen

Thanks, Meli, for the most beautiful e-gift I've very received.

Chaucer is Back

by J J Cohen

Don't miss the latest post, which includes some of King Richard's tweets ("@laborers calme down or els").

An Untimely Knock Knock Joke

by J J Cohen

Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
Paul.
Paul who?
Paul Shakespeare!

If you didn't get that, then you haven't been reading Julia Lupton's paper, and you won't be able to participate in the GW MEMSI / In the Middle e-seminar on Messianic Time and the Untimely.

Discussion begins here on Thursday September 10. Start reading!

Carnivalesque LIII

by J J Cohen

... at Ruff Notes. Don't miss this back to school edition.

New Critical Modes 3: Who Else?

by J J Cohen

First, my gratitude to everyone who contributed to the ongoing discussion about new critical modes here and here (and honestly, to anyone who has ever contributed to one of the many blog posts we do here on the subject, since it is one dear to most of us).

In the ongoing we discussion we heard many possibilities, but not many specific names of those who have created or are now fashioning such modes. A few mentioned so far: Carolyn Dinshaw; the Chaucer blogger; Rick Godden; Nicola Masciandaro; Dan Remein. I know I've done this only implicitly so far, but I'll be explicit: my co-bloggers Eileen Joy, Karl Steel, and Mary Kate Hurley all possess and artist's inclination to create the genre that conveys their argument rather than to cram an argument into generic exoskeletons.

There are many others who could be added. Jenna Mead made a strong argument that David Wallace is engaged in such a project in Premodern Places. Nicholas Howe. Myra Seaman and Holly Crocker, especially (but certainly not exclusively) via postmedieval. Anna Klosowska. Noreen Giffney and Michael O'Rourke. Who else?

CFP: Romance Temporalities

by J J Cohen, on behalf of Amy Burge

This panel should be right up the alley of many ITM readers. [What does 'right up the alley' even mean? Am I being anachronistic in using the idiom for a medieval research project? Should I have said 'right inside the scriptorium'? Anyway ...]

Proposed Sessions by the Medieval Romance Society

45^th International Congress on Medieval Studies, 2010

Romance Temporalities

In recent years, medievalists have increasingly considered the medium of time as a dynamic position from which to analyze the medieval as we explore and question our own temporally determined relationships to the period we study. As evidenced by the publication of criticism such as Robert Rouse’s The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance, this heightened awareness of our temporal distance from our scholarly subjects has also encouraged us to explore the conflations, confusions, uses, and abuses of time and periodization at work in medieval literature itself. We are no longer satisfied with the idea of histories and chronologies—whether purportedly factual or openly fictional—as linear, progressive, or innocent. Medieval romance, in particular, offers today’s readers a rich array of timely challenges, from temporal discontinuities and ahistorical moments to shifting verb tenses. The three proposed sessions of the Medieval Romance Society aim to address questions such as, “How does time function in romance?” “How does our modern understanding of medieval romance infiltrate contemporary literature?” “How do we teach medieval romance today in fun, accessible, and responsible ways?”

The Medieval Romance Society would like to invite papers that explore how we understand medieval romance in our contemporary world, both as critical researchers and as teachers of romance. We value interdisciplinarity and welcome proposals from graduate students as well as established scholars. Though papers should be presented in English, we hope to include papers on romances of multiple medieval languages. One-page abstracts (or 250 word abstracts for the roundtable) should be submitted by September 15 to Amy Burge at ab519@york.ac.uk.

“Once Upon a Time:” Romance Temporalities

Critics have long acknowledged the “once upon a time” trope at work in medieval romance, but we are increasingly uneasy with the innocence and “merely” fantastic or escapist motivations assumed in its deployment. This session invites reconsiderations of what kinds of temporal systems are at work in medieval romance (and why), how romance makes use of revisionary chronologies, how it imagines its pasts and futures.

Temporal Touching Roundtable: Medieval Romance and Popular Culture

Although medieval romance and popular culture are distinct genres, scholars increasingly recognize the productivity of blurring the medieval/modern divide in order to examine the relevance of the medieval to the modern. This roundtable session aims to explore the transmission of medieval romance into modern popular culture and to investigate the benefits of diachronic research to medieval studies.

Time for Romance? Teaching Medieval Romance in a Modern World

How do we, as teachers, mediate the “otherness” of medieval romance in the classroom? On the one hand, we have a responsibility to help students learn about medieval cultures as distinct from our own; on the other hand, we want to help them view medieval literature as accessible and enjoyable as an object of study. This session invites papers by teachers of medieval romance to share their strategies and engage in critical exploration of the challenges of teaching romance, particularly to undergraduates.

Hello, Beautiful: The Inaugural Issue of Glossator Has Arrived!

by EILEEN JOY

Con-sider our commentary a love-driven constellation, a double star (binary or optical?) gravitationally caught within these motions, like the subtle turnings of an ungraspable celestial tress.
--Anna Klosowska and Nicola Masciandaro, "Beyond the Sphere"

Speaking of oceanic and new critical modes, and especially in relation to one of our anonymous commenter's questions to me in the thread to Jeffrey's post on "New Critical Modes, Part II" after I had argued for the widest possible venues for the greatest variety of scholarly modes [and which question I actually think is critically important and worth returning to with renewed earnestness and care], and also returning, as I often do, to the cautions of Jonathan Jarrett that, while I [or we] may want a super-abundance of scholarly modes, styles, etc., there are, in the end, financial constraints and only so many jobs [many conventionally defined] and so on, and here then is the question:

eileen, can you, do you really believe in a world of such infinity, such unlimitedness? it seems to me a world of fantasy, and not necessarily a desirable one. as one of the readers that irina so eloquently describes as needing "generosity" for reasons that i believe are good but that i will keep to myself, this desire for ever-overflowing, ever-proliferating new discourses seems overwhelming.

Oh yes, it is overwhelming, even for me [I don't sleep much--ask my friends], but I can only say again that I do believe in this world, yes, but with the caveat that those of us who desire to enlarge the fields within which we work and play, and to create new modes and styles of scholarship, new ways of doing things and of being together [affectively] in this new work we do [and for me, especially, if we care enough to help create financially sustainable spaces within which more of us can have gainful employment doing the work we simply can't stop ourselves from doing and therefore hopefully avoid the despair of being shut out of a profession that simply doesn't have room, supposedly, for "everything"], then some of us are going to have to commit ourselves to doing more than just our individual scholarship and teaching and also think of "service" to our profession as something that extends beyond our institutions to embrace the future of the field itself. We will create and have created working groups [Babel Working Group], institutes dedicated to cutting-edge cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary scholarly exchange and learning [GW-MEMSI], journals that bring the Middle Ages and modernity into productive contact [postmedieval], journals that combine literary and theoretical writing [Whiskey and Fox], and special journal issues and essay collections that highlight the kind of "new" work we want to do [Fragments Toward a History of Vanishing Humanism], and we must also work within our institutions for innovative curricular reforms that both protect what might be called traditional premodern studies while also expanding the role of what medieval studies can do within a more richly-imagined cross-temporal curriculum, at both the undergraduate and graduate level [I and my colleagues have done this within the English department at S.I.U.E. where we set in motion this semester a brand-new B.A. in English program that actually strengthens the position of medieval and early modern studies while also insisting that periodicity, as well as certain canonical "giants" such as Chaucer, Milton, and Shakespeare, no longer serve as the primary edifices within which certain texts are taught and required].

Let's celebrate, then, too, some of this dedication and vision [and unpaid labor] that has gone into creating new spaces for work in our field that aims to be creative, nomadic, multi-voiced, unconventional, affective, pluralistic, lyric-experimental, and felicitous in its movements across periods, geographies, and genres. Let's celebrate, especially, today, the unveiling of the inaugural issue of the open-access, online journal Glossator: Practice and Theory of the Commentary, the brain- and love-child of Nicola Masciandaro, Karl Steel, and Ryan Dobran:

Glossator: Practice and Theory of the Commentary, vol. 1 (2009)

The editors of Glossator describe the mission of the journal this way:

Glossator publishes original commentaries, editions and translations of commentaries, and essays and articles relating to the theory and history of commentary, glossing, and marginalia (catena, commentum, gemara, glossa, hypomnema, midrash, peser, pingdian, scholia, tafsir, talkhis, tika, vritti, zend, zhangju, et al). The journal aims to encourage the practice of commentary as a creative form of intellectual work and to provide a forum for dialogue and reflection on the past, present, and future of this ancient genre of writing. By aligning itself, not with any particular discipline, but with a particular mode of production, Glossator gives expression to the fact that praxis founds theory.

The first issue is exciting and includes work by some of our favorite people--some medievalists, some not, and some poets, too [and just look at the range of subjects!]:

• BENJAMIN AT THE BARRICADES: THE ARCADES PROJECT AS COMBAT AND INTRIGUE Erik Butler
• RAYMOND ROUSSEL’S SELF HELP NOTES (A COMMENTARY ON BOB PERELMAN’S “CHRONIC MEANINGS”) Alan Ramon Clinton
• THE SOVEREIGN EXCEPTION: NOTES ON SCHMITT’S WORD THAT SOVEREIGN IS HE WHO DECIDES ON THE EXCEPTION Bruno Gulli
• PERIPHERY AND PURPOSE: THE FIFTEENTH-CENTURY RUBRICATION OF THE PILGRIMAGE OF HUMAN LIFE Stephanie A. Viereck Gibbs Kamath
• BEYOND THE SPHERE: A DIALOGIC COMMENTARY ON THE ULTIMATE SONETTO OF DANTE’S VITA NUOVA Anna Klosowska, Nicola Masciandaro
• TINTERN ABBEY, ONCE AGAIN J. H. Prynne
• NEW WORK: A PROSIMETRUM Daniel C. Remein
• PRELUDE TO A READING OF ARISTOTLE’S METAPHYSICS: BETA 1, PARAGRAPH ONE Adam Rosen
• A COMMENTARY ON THERESA HAK KYUNG CHA’S DICTÉE Michael Stone-Richards
  

Directly related to our conversations here about new critical modes, Dan Remein describes his essay this way:

This work consists of new poems and commentary in the tradition of Dante’s prosimetric self-commentary. It aims to explore the shared ground of poetry and commentary, and the potential symbiotic and generative relationships between the two modes. The work proposes the elaboration of at least three particular formal poetic structures—which it names the ‘riddle,’ the ‘missive,’ and the ‘miniature romance’—, cites moments from a broad range of medieval, modern, and contemporary literary history, and attempts to provoke a poetics of both poem and commentary that might help generate a more politically salient concept of literary community.

And here is the abstract for Anna Klosowska and Nicola's essay:

Revolutions: The turning movement through the images of this sonetto involves several eddying, (micro)cosmic motions. We begin already beyond the widest sphere, then penetrate it from this side via love’s weeping in a motion that is virtually re-initiated from the heart in a kind of syntactic time-warp. Then comes the thought-sigh’s arrival before the lady and its getting lost in the epicycles of honor and splendor and gazing. Then his subtle retelling of the gaze caused by a secondary motion of the heart that first moved it. Then the mystical understanding of the pensero’s unintelligible speech through the apophatic anamnesis of the beloved’s name. Finally, a gracious love-boast gently expanding towards those who have understanding of love. Con-sider our commentary a love-driven constellation, a double star (binary or optical?) gravitationally caught within these motions, like the subtle turnings of an ungraspable celestial tress.

Well? What are you waiting for? Start reading! And for god's sake, enjoy yourself.

Messianic Time and the Untimely: Papers Available for Download

by J J Cohen

The GW MEMSI Seminar on Messianic Time and the Untimely

will take place live on Thursday September 17 from 3-5 PM

English Department Seminar Room, GWU

Registration has closed and the seminar is full, but we still want you to participate. Download the three papers and their attachments here.

On Thursday Sept. 10, I will post at In the Middle the start of an e-discussion to which you are most cordially invited to contribute. This conversation will form, we hope, a vital part of the seminar. Comments posted at ITM will become part of the live conversation on Sept. 17. A summary of proceedings will be posted at ITM as well.

Eileen Joy has agreed to live twitter the seminar as it unfolds. Short of installing teleportation devices (for which I submitted the work order last week, but they are unlikely to arrive in time), it's the best way we can bring this event to as many interested participants as possible. The format is experimental; please help us to make it a success.

The paper authors/presenters are:

• Kathleen Biddick, "Dead Neighbor Archives and Messianic Time"
• Julia Lupton, "Paul Shakespeare: Exegetical Exercises"
• Jonathan Gil Harris, ""The Untimely Mammet of Verona"

New Critical Modes Part 2

by J J Cohen

Cary Howie and I recently posted excerpts from our interchanges about a special issue of postmedieval we're co-editing with the awkward, horrible, unpoetic, ghastly, barbaric and probably enduring title of New Critical Modes. The conversation we had and which I would like to continue today carries traces of these posts:

• [Oceanic] Critical Modes

• In My Craft or Sullen Art Exercised in the Still Night: Getting Serious about Pleasure (Again), and Also About Seriousness

• Logophilia and Lucidity

• The Language that Locks Others Out

• Tous les sens

• Inapposite Art

• Stories of Stone (draft)

• The Future of 'The Weight of the Past' / Credo

• Towards a Restless Medieval Studies

Each of these pieces concerns a tangle of related issues: jargon, clarity, communication, innovation, art, criticism, poetry, beauty, love, self-identity, difficulty, welcome, community, boundary.

From John Mandeville to Roger Caillois, I've been blogging over the past year my work-in-progress on stone as a kind of liquid or organism or matter-energy or artist or communication device. These posts have been accessed many times, by lightly commented upon. Compare them to the recent posts on lucidity and jargon, with their vigorous comment threads. To join a conversation about what academic writing can and should sound like is easier, it seems to me, than to reply to an essay in which a stone speaks. The stakes for the former are also higher and more self evident than for the latter. Right?

So I can't help asking: is there something within such a misfit critical mode that locks readers out? Are such modes inhospitable to the kind of convivial and nomadic™ medieval studies In the Middle is supposed to cultivate? Are they unwelcoming, ungracious? Is there a chasm between content and form? (Blog posts are, after all, their own genre).

In his comments to "[Oceanic] Critical Modes" a gifted poet/artist/medievalist named Dan Remein wrote:

I'd like to see critical work appears in language that does not register as in a critical mode, a truly new mode, one we do not yet know how to read ... I want to ask not so much about 'poetic' diction, abstract formulations, the logophilia Jeffrey recently blogged about, but also about the _poetics_ of the work in terms of what effect the language of the writing is having on language--what is the language itself doing and how--who or what does it 'speak' and what discourses does it register in, circulate, repeat, cite, etc. I want to urge you to include some things that are really really new, that break radically with old forms, take up a place in the tradition of work that resists being easily incorporated into or 'redeemed' as recognizable critical prose--prose trying to _do_ something poetically other than communicate scholarly information, prose (or verse!) whose function, rather than to communicate, must be understood to function in terms of its phenomenological capacities (outside of the 'correspondence theory of of truth,' for a philosophical reference point) is say, to name, to call, to break, to push, to open, to crack, to feel, to beckon, to cruise, to turn on or off, to....

Dan also connected some new critical modes to literary modernism -- an insight I'd endorse from personal experience. I realized long ago that a significant portion of the citational unconscious of my writing derives from Eliot, Stevens, Pound, H. D., and Stein -- along with some modernist-mediated Shakespeare and Glas-era Derrida (all of whom are intimately related, I think). Something about these artists' love of tradition in fragments, their ardor for the new, and their logophilia captured my own imagination long ago.

[illustration: rocky shore with invisible storm, Ogunquit, August 2009. By author]

But here is my hesitation. On the one hand, a part of me is drawn to Dan's injunction "not to change our 'methodologies' regarding 'scholarship' or the 'style' of our writing, but to build/construct our pieces of criticism from the perspective of what the language is capable of speaking/doing." Yes! is my first reaction. But another part of me wonders about (1) my actual ability to pull off such experimentation (Dan can accomplish such a task; I'd only be imitating bpNichol or Gertrude Stein, and not very well: so, the failure of my craft is what lurks here); and (2) the receptivity of any audience to such a mode.

Dan further argues that a new critical mode ought to "look different and not apologize for itself," ought to demand much of the reader without providing maps (introductions, conclusions, brackets that keep the experiment bounded and knowable). Again, a part of me is attracted to such vision of the art of medieval studies. But another voice inside me, concocted of ambivalence as I am, blocks me from my desired assent. This isn't the same voice that has prevented me from working with medieval mystics, or medieval labor rights activists -- the part of me that has ensured that the Middle Ages I write about is a weirdly and anachronistically secular one, a world largely without God or god-substitutes. But it is related, since I worry that such an art can seem the vatic guardian of a truth intentionally withheld.

Dan, of course, is urging nothing of the sort: hence his invocation of the "I" as multiple, his emphasis on collaborators. I believe he'd object that the kind of work he is envisioning shuts out only the lazy reader, the one who will not work alongside and through and into the text, the one who will not open to the encounter or collaboration. There are many readers of this sort.

So, what if such a new kind writing, such a new critical mode, existed -- but what if its ocean was so deep that its writer wholly lost sight of sand and shore, of readers and friends? Despite its joy in the new, modernism is underwritten, it seems to me, with despair. So what would happen if an oceanic mode were attempted (sea and stone became equally liquid), but only silence greeted the transubstantiation? Tidal indifference and a disappeared shore: who can write to that solitude?

Worse, what if a writer were to convince himself that he had journeyed deep into newly navigated waters, only to find the ocean that he thought surrounded him was never really all that deep?