2 resources and 2 guest posts

by J J Cohen

A brief post to let you know about two useful e-resources for medievalists and two posts soon to arrive:

1. In Parentheses, a collection of sources in translation useful for the undergraduate classroom. You can download everything from Old and Middle English texts to Old Norse flashcards, Arthurian stories, and, um, "Medieval Canadian Stories" (OK, there is one, from 1911) and "Vaguely Decadent Stories." Ross Arthur has put together the site.
2. METRO (Middle English Teaching Resources Online), a "virtual classroom" sponsored by Harvard University. Units focus upon Chaucer, the Gawain poet, Langland, and the Wakefield plays. Each possesses a tripartite division structured through self-testing exercises: linguistic comprehension; stylistic guidance; textual editing. METRO vaguely resembles the DC Metro map, but is missing the branch I live along. If the Red Line is ever added, will it lead to Margery Kempe?

Before Thanksgiving look for two guest posts here at ITM: one by Martin Foys and Asa Simon Mittman on digital humanities; and one by Bonnie Wheeler on scholarly publishing.

Finally, read Eileen's account of the BABEL conference, why don't you?

There is No End Without Beginning: Reflections on BABEL's Inaugural Conference and a Live-able Humanities

[Be sure to check out Jeffrey's post on Martin Foys and Asa Mittman as Digital Medievalist Rock Stars HERE.]

Figure 1. Irina Dumitrescu and Denis Ferhatović [Skyped in from Bilkent, Turkey] at BABEL's inaugural biennial conference in Austin, Texas [photo courtesy of Susannah Hollister]

by EILEEN JOY

There is no end without beginning. How could the end be known as end if it weren’t recounted by someone? --Jean-Francois Lyotard, Soundproof Room

I argue that we can find a certain dignity in what we are doing if we maintain absolute fidelity to the incalculable and unreckonable event of the university to-come, the university without condition.--Michael O'Rourke, "After"

It has taken me almost two weeks to recover from the BABEL Working Group's inaugural biennial conference at the University of Texas at Austin [4-6 November 2010], "After the End: Medieval Studies, the Humanities, and the Post-Catastrophe" [and I can only say now that whatever went on at the closing Saturday night party at Mike Johnson's house after midnight, I do not recall, and please contact my lawyers if I offended you or damaged your personal property, and yes, Heather Love and Ann Cvetkovich wore costume wigs and danced and I made a pact with Neville Hoad to drive to Mexico the following day but daylight brought more sober thoughts, and brakes]. But I did not want too much time to pass before I publicly thanked everyone who helped to make this conference memorable--from our plenary speakers [Paul Bowman, Aranye Fradenburg, Noreen Giffney, Heather Love, Michael O'Rourke, and Zrinka Stahuljak] to my co-organizer Mike Johnson [without whom literally nothing could have happened at all] to all of the session organizers and presenters to all those at the Univ. of Texas, College of Charleston, my own university [Southern Illinois Univ. Edwardsville], and Palgrave Macmillan who contributed monies to underwrite the event, to the faculty at the Univ. of Texas, especially those associated with the Public Feelings project [Ann Cvetkovich, Ann Reynolds, Sam Baker, and Neville Hoad], but also Barbara Harlow, Karen Engle, Daniel Birkholz, Christopher Bradley, and Liz Scala, among other UT faculty, who lent so much support and their vibrant persons to the proceedings--academic and otherwise--and finally, to all of the graduate student volunteers who helped us at the registration table passing out name-tags, programs, post-apocalytpic tchotchkes, and Hell bank-notes [which come in handy after the apocalypse when you need to buy some Jack Daniels to ease the transition]:

One of the disadvantages of being a conference organizer is that you can never just soak up the atmosphere and proceedings the way that others attending can, and so you have a weird or not even close to holistic sense of the conference, and even when I had that rare moment when I could sneak into a session, I found myself endlessly distracted by thoughts like, "will the coffee run out while I sit here? are they having A/V problems in the next room? will there be enough booze at the pool party? will it be too cold to watch The Conqueror outside? will everyone actually show up? is everyone happy? is everything going okay? did I remember to bring the extra Mac adapter/phone charger/laptop/CPU projector/flash drive?" etc. etc. What I do know is that, some worries and anxieties aside, and despite my myopic viewpoint, the occasion felt joyous and festive and the intellectual atmosphere was charged with creative provocation, cross-temporal and cross-disciplinary cadging and leaping, and passionate engagement with ideas, with material objects, and with each other, all in a spirit of, and despite some recent bad news, not defeatism about the future of the humanities, but rather, some boundless optimism about that future.

For me personally, the most rewarding aspect of the conference was seeing how medievalists and non-medievalists from various fields and disciplines [cultural studies, queer studies, early modern studies, new media/digital studies, film studies, clinical psychoanalysis, neuroscience, contemporary poetics, philology, manuscript studies, anthropology, modern literature, English, French, German, performance studies, musicology, Religion, Philosophy, History, Art History, etc.] came together in various sessions to amiably discuss common anxieties and concerns and plans for a not-yet-here but dreamed of humanities, while also productively ruminating together various "catastrophes" and how to proceed in their "aftermath": real [like the wars in Bosnia, Romania under Ceausescu, Idi Amin, the Armenian genocide, the Crusades, the Iraq War, the recent oil spill in the Gulf, the de-funding of certain humanities programs, the loss of one's mind, the diminishing of career options, etc.] and looming/more spectral [like Hell and the supposed ends of human subjectivity, interpretation, meaning, the university, the arts, the book, this world, etc.].

Those who traveled to the conference who work in periods after the Middle Ages seemed genuinely energized and even surprised by what the medievalists are talking about and doing and here and there, new alliances [and even radical "cells"] across periods and disciplines were obviously forming. The plenary talks, if I do say so myself [and I do] were provocative and occasionally moving. I could never do justice to all of them here and all of the territory they covered [the possibly productive relations between cultural studies and management studies at the moment of impending doom for the humanities in the UK--Bowman; the medieval translator-"fixer" in Mediterranean conflicts as posthuman interface and network--Stahuljak; the intractable points of no-thingness and meaninglessness as the very point(s) from which thinking, which is not the same thing as meaning, might productively set out after other "ends"/no-points which are really more beginnings, if even toward more meaninglessness--Giffney; the importance of ludic play, "useless" art, talking/narrative, and not-necessarily-scientized, messy co-affectivities to [pleasurably and meaningfully] living our lives--Fradenburg; the end of literary interpretation as such in favor of more flat, descriptive, sociological analyses in order to challenge the unacknowledged humanism of much literary criticism--Love; and "seek[ing] out a recalibrated futurity for the humanities which recognizes that its future will always have been its end, which, more affirmatively put, is to say that its future will have been always to begin its ending again"--O'Rourke].

What I would like to do here is just linger for a bit on the two talks that opened and closed the conference--Bowman's and O'Rourke's--as they each, respectively, beautifully outlined the dangers/despair and the beautiful ruins/hopes of both the current and post-catastrophic humanities. Riffing off of the story of the tower of Babel in Genesis in his talk, "The Age of the Whirled Target: Post-Babel-ism," Paul first began by suggesting a positive spin on the Biblical story [against the reading of it as indicative of a vengeful, selfish god]: "So, perhaps the confounding of the unitary effort and univocal language was a blessing in disguise -- preventative, or even curative. Perhaps it may already have been catastrophic to have a world of one language and one goal. Perhaps a situation in which everyone speaks only one language is always already catastrophic in some unseen -- or, rather, unheard or inaudible -- way." Paul elaborated further:

So, to me, one question inspired by Babel is: which is the more catastrophic: when we all speak one language and have one target or when we all require translators to even try to commune? The former formulation evokes the ideological dreams and consequences of one kind of vision of imperialism, colonialism and global capitalism (one world, one dream, one market, one vision; or what we might call pre-Babelism). The latter formulation smacks of the everyday reality of everything involving the inter- the cross- and the multi-, from the cultural in general to the academic in particular (post-Babelism being cacophony, distortion, feedback, discord, disunity, disharmony, dysfunction, disjunction, and so on).

Most intriguingly, Bowman advanced that "what seems particularly provocative [about the story of the tower of Babel] is the extent to which, taken as an allegorical narrative, it would seem to suggest that God is on the side of the multiculturalists, the postmodernists, poststructuralists and postcolonialists. For it seems to say: the unitary, unifying effort must fail; the multi must prevail." After laying out, as he has done in several of his published works, all of the ways in which there really is no such thing as a bounded, set-apart-by-itself discipline [and how inter- or multi- or cross-disciplinarity should really be about creating new objects, in which case, let's stop all this worrying over the so-called "integrity" of singular disciplines or whether or not we have a "right" to stray into this or that discipline; hell, sometimes we should stage stealth maneuvers into other disciplines, steal their language, and talk back to them in it], Paul ultimately argued that the subject of, or area of intervention for, cultural studies now might be something we would normally be wary of--management studies:

. . . if the politicization of the arts and humanities has decisively blown the cover of all erstwhile disciplines, revealing their partiality and their bias, in an ethicopolitically inflected deconstruction of all institutions, it reciprocally equally reminds us of the deep investment of the arts and humanities in cultural management. I will not deconstruct this further and separate out or argue for a ‘good’ management versus a ‘bad’ management, or anything like this. I will rather leave the term out there, ringing in your ears, perhaps hanging in the air like a bad smell; and close by insisting on the need for an engagement with the question of management; the connection of culture and management; politicization and management; disciplinarity and management. I do this for several reasons. The first is theoretical: it should be our object because it was always-already our object. Secondly, though: management holds all the cards in the current antagonism that is restructuring the ruins of the university. Despite the rhetoric, it is no longer culture versus science, arts versus science; it is no longer even theory versus practice, or the useful versus the useless (if it ever really was). In the era of management and audit culture, any and every practice and orientation can be spun as performative, as long as it is in some sense lucrative.

Bringing this all back to the tower of Babel, and commenting on all of the devastating cuts to institutions of higher learning in the UK -- already undertaken and soon to come [and on the idea that maybe the humanities could disappear altogether, which we might envision as yet another destruction of the tower -- but were we ever really working on such a tower, Paul provocatively asked--are we even a "we"? do we want to be?], Paul concluded:

What has been lost is not the very fabric or lifeblood of ‘critical thought’ as such. Couching it in these terms is pre-Babelist. What is happening here is the exponential or explosive speeding up of the proletarianization of academic labour. And despite every other criticism that might be made of a thinker like Jacques Rancière, I am with him entirely when it comes to his contention that it is certainly not just philosophers and sociologists who are capable of critical thought. It is also the labourers. Critical or political or lofty thought is not just the preserve of those in the Ivory Tower (just as the plight of the university is not ‘the plight’). Surely the most important point to remember is that the tower of Babel was under construction by labour. It is labourers (managers included) who were and are scattered to the wind, whose language is so confounded, and whose non-unitary whirled targets are so regularly targeted. And that has always bothered me.

In his talk on Saturday morning, "After," Michael O'Rourke traced the prepositions "before" and "after" across a range of Derrida's writings, in order to make a plea for the university as an institution that is always emerging, always to-come, even at its moments of supposed finitude or "end." As with many of his published writings on Derrida, Michael has always managed to show Derrida at his most utopian and possibilistic. So, even at the moment of the end of this life-world, when we get to something like Quentin Meillassoux's "glacial world," a world "in which there is no longer any up or down, centre or periphery, nor anything else that might make it a world designed for humans," Michael explained that,

in both Derrida and Badiou, we find portals into other logics of world: “the grace of living for an idea” in Badiou and “learning to live finally” in Derrida. Badiou, again at the very end of a book, Logics of Worlds explains that, for him, “the infinite of worlds is what saves us from every finite dis-grace. Finitude, the constant harping on of our mortal being, in brief, the fear of death as the only passion -- these are the bitter ingredients of democratic materialism. We overcome all this when we seize hold of the discontinuous variety of worlds and the interlacing of objects under the constantly variable regimes of their appearances. We are open to the infinity of worlds. To live is possible. Therefore, to (re)commence to live is the only thing that matters”.

Michael also reminded us, by way of Derrida, that before we can learn how to teach, we have to learn how to live, and "learning how to live" always "advances into the 'unknown of that which must remain to come.' It is neither before nor after the end. Rather, learning to live, 'remains to be done, it can only happen between life and death'." This requires a certain posture of looking toward the future, and for Michael [as for the humanities, I imagine] that future is best imagined in reading and in practices of reading, and "by a gratitude for opening just that futurity to reading, always elsewhere, in the past, in the before." Because you see, we are always looking up ahead, of necessity, but at the same time, we also see what is before us--that is to say: the past -- that which already happened but which, by a queerly preposterous logic [in the terms of Glenn Burger and Steven Kruger's Queering the Middle Ages], is somehow in front of us still. Therefore the past also always remains productively in advance of our thought on it, and thought itself, as Derrida, instructed, always remains to be thought; there is always a [productive] remainder; the past is therefore always productive, always up ahead of us somehow. Nothing is ever exhausted, from which I also take this wisdom: the humanities cannot be exhausted. There is a LOT more that Michael said, by way of Derrida and others, but I want to move to his conclusion where he suggested, by way of Geoffrey Bennington, that the quasi-transcendental term "dignity" is more integral to Derrida's work than we might think, and we have to think of this "dignity" as less than sovereign and as unconditional and also try to recognize [even while the term might rightfully raise some skepticism] that it has something to do with justice-as-responsibility--to those dead but also living. For Michael, Derrida ultimately

affirm[s] the chance of life [even] as he faces exposure to the unpredictable event: “Even if the future is its provenance, it must be like any provenance, absolutely and irreversibly past. 'Experience' of the past as to come, the one and the other absolutely absolute, beyond all modification of any present whatever. If it is possible and if one must take it seriously, the possibility of the question, which is perhaps no longer a question and which we are calling here justice, must carry beyond present life, life as my life or our life.” The university as a locus of dissensus (as Bill Readings and Hillis Miller have argued for), the humanities without condition, a medieval studies without condition will certainly never be achieved (“it takes place, it seeks its place wherever this unconditionality can take shape”), but we must affirm their possibility here and now, in this moment of fragile institutionality, today. In the end, then, after all I have said, some professions of faith: there can be no deconstruction without dignity, no dignity without deconstruction. And there can be no humanities without dignity, and more importantly, no dignity without the humanities. So, “take your time but be quick about it, because you do not know what awaits you.”

Finally, for me, in the light of Paul's opening and Michael's closing plenaries, and everything inbetween, and the before and the after of it all [in all senses of the terms], I take away from BABEL's inaugural conference a re-affirmation of one of BABEL's primary goals: to work towards a more live-able humanities in the present of our time together. As intellectually stimulating as so many of the individual talks and sessions were, what was most important for me about the conference was its aim to transform what might be called the molecular atmosphere within which "we" [whatever "we" might be, and it certainly isn't a consensus on anything and shouldn't be] work and also play together. And in these temporary zones, that we call conferences, where we briefly come together, however pell mell, and with or without fully formed intentionalities for our work and the impact we might want it to have upon others, the humanities live, they flicker and aspirate, among us.

We certainly don't have to agree, and hopefully we can also push each other out of our comfortable zones and habits of thought in order to provoke in each other what Derrida might say always remains to be thought. Following the thought of Bill Readings, whose posthumous spirit is an important guiding force for my own thinking on the humanities, we can certainly work toward a community “of dissensus that presupposes nothing in common,” and “where thought takes place beside thought, where thinking is a shared process without identity or unity”—this is ultimately “a dissensual process; it belongs to dialogism rather than to dialogue,” and instead of a new interdisciplinary space that would “reunify” the increasingly fragmented disciplines, there would be a “shifting disciplinary structure that holds open the question of whether and how thoughts fit together” (The University in Ruins, 190, 192). But we must also do this work in a spirit of amity, friendship, and creative playfulness, where we are willing to risk together what Lauren Berlant says is "like sex": a "shared disorganization," where we also labor to keep things open, to be unsure together, to give each other the gift of simply paying attention to the possibilistic that our thinking [and singular lives] open to each of us. Or as Berlant herself has put it, what we are starved for right now is not necessarily sex or romantic intimacy, “but the emotional time of being-with, time where it is possible to value floundering around with others whose attention-paying to what’s happening is generous and makes liveness possible as a good, not a threat.” So, the emotional time of floundering around with others: this is one of the primary goals of the BABEL Working Group -- to make this a more palpable, a more live-able state of affairs within the university. So that we can start really living, which is to also say thinking, and together, without the fears and anxieties and gate-keeping and status-crunching and competitive posturing and hyper-professionalization that often stalk our work and time together.

When I was cleaning up my desk after the conference, I stumbled upon one of my older journals and re-read an entry I had made when I was attending the annual meeting of the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies in Philadelphia in November 2008. It was a kind of bullet-point list of adjectives, modes of being, stances, affects, positions, dream-goods, and the like that I hoped at the time would ultimately define BABEL's future work, wherever it might go, and I'll just leave them here as a "to-do" list for the future:

multi-voiced co-scholarhip
co-affective
co-agitational
co-poetic
co-productive
maximization of personal freedom
heterotopic group-houses
misfit safe-houses
risking embarrassment together
being silly
friendship
panglossia
cruising/scholarship-as-attraction
ambi-disciplinary
giving it all away for free [generosity]
self-ironizing
scholarship-as-party
an auteur medieval studies [like "new wave" cinema or the Oulipo collective]
roguish relationalities
"being-together" as a question, never a resting point
natality/making things possible
BIG questions
processural, transparent scholarship
happiness [which is underrated]






But not really.

2012: BABEL goes to Boston!

Digital Medievalist Rock Stars

by J J Cohen

Martin Foys and Asa Mittman in the New York Times, an article on digital humanities featuring a photo of a looming Martin at his dapper best:

Figuring out how to collect, house and connect more than 350 years of scholarship motivated Martin K. Foys, a medievalist at Drew University in Madison, N.J., to create a digital map of the Bayeux Tapestry, a gargantuan 11th-century embroidery displayed in a museum in Bayeux, France, that depicts the Battle of Hastings, when the Normans conquered England. At 224 feet long, about two-thirds the length of a football field, this tapestry is both a work of art and a historical document that mingles text and image. 

“It is almost impossible to study traditionally,” Mr. Foys said. No one person could digest the work’s enormous amount of material, and no single printing could render it accurately, so Mr. Foys created a prize-winning digital version with commentary that scholars could scroll through. Such digital mapping has the potential to transform medieval studies, Mr. Foys said. 

His latest project, which he directs with Shannon Bradshaw, a computer scientist at Drew, and Asa Simon Mittman, an art historian from California State University, Chico, is an online network of medieval maps and texts that scholars can work on simultaneously. Once specific areas of maps are identified and tagged with information, it becomes possible to analyze and compare quantifiable data about images and sources, he explained, adding, “We have a whole new set of tools not dominated by the written word.” 

The online network of maps is distinct from most scholarly endeavors in another respect: It is communal. The traditional model of the solitary humanities professor, toiling away in an archive or spending years composing a philosophical treatise or historical opus is replaced in this project with contributions from a global community of experts. 

“The ease with which a community can collaborate on the production of scholarship is something that is fundamentally changing the way we do our work,” said Mr. Foys, whose 2007 book, “Virtually Anglo-Saxon,” discusses the influence of technology on scholarship. 

Read the whole story here.

On Teaching King Lear

by J J Cohen

[don't even think about reading this until you've conversed about Karl's Middle English syllabus]

Those of you who have friended me on Facebook or who read my twitter stream know that the past two weeks have seen an outpouring of punning complaints about King Lear. Now I'm bringing the grousing to Blogger for full media assault.

And I'd like to share with you my mixed feelings about teaching the play, a drama that has such an emotional hold on me that I lose two weeks of my life whenever it's on my syllabus. Reading the text moves me to tears. I brought the Folger edition along this weekend as my son and I sat in a café with our separate books; he mocked me for my sniffling (meanwhile he was reading an R. A. Salvatore novel, the cretin). The play puts me on edge for as long as I am teaching it, and preoccupies me outside of class until I am finished. My agitation comes, I think, from my not knowing exactly what to do with King Lear: the ending is so sorrowful, so lacking a redemptive impulse that I feel like I am doing a violence to my class to teach it.

I have ninety students in "Myths of Britain," a reconceptualized "Intro English Lit" class that stresses the archipelagic and transnational vectors of medieval and early modern insular literature. My students come from all over the university, and are typically very good: the course inevitably reaffirms my faith in 18-21 year olds and the future they will bring about. King Lear makes perfect sense to study as we near the end of the semester since we read Geoffrey of Monmouth earlier. I do wonder, though, if the darkness of the play isn't potentially destructive to the idealism of their age. And then I wonder why I harbor such parental feelings towards my students in the first place, because I know they get in the way. Let me explain.

I began today's lecture by showing the closing sequence of Grigori Kozinstev’s powerful version of King Lear: the horrific segment in which an arctic howl erupts offscreen, and the camera cuts to Cordelia hanged from a rock by the cold sea. The wordless vocalization from Lear is my entry into speaking about the play's fascination with language failure, with single words repeated so many times that they convey more affect than meaning, from "Lear, Lear, Lear" and "no, no, no" to "never never never never never," the fifth never culminating and decimating, no recovery possible. Even in Russian, the drama communicates directly, viscerally.

As an experiment, I played for my class a song that I had been looping in an endless repeat while composing my introductory Lear lecture last week. White Blank Page had haunted me for reasons that I could not work out until I began to speak about Lear with my students, and then it seemed obvious: the song's deceptively soft beginning, the sudden eruption of storm-like rage, conveyed by sound more than word, its dissolution into a repeated syllable that possesses incantatory and affective force, its lyrics of hurt and misunderstanding and mistakes and love. I asked them to close their eyes or simply look down at the table and listen as attentively as they could. My lecture room has a good sound system, and I could see immediately the impression the song made as it resounded. The students did an admirable job of connecting "White Blank page" to the day's theme, and even back to the song that resounds in the stormy heath of Lear, "The Rain It Raineth Every Day."

After the film and the song I was already feeling spent. We had an hour of class remaining and the end of the play to approach, so I threw myself into it as best I could. We looked carefully at moments of beauty (Cordelia's sunshine in rain, Edgar's poetic vision from the "cliff" top) and movements towards redemption (Edmund's attempt to prevent catastrophe, precipitated by the knowledge that he has been loved; Edgar's providing his father with the play's only good death). We looked at how each of these moments and gestures is either defeated or insufficient, especially in the face of Lear's "Howl, howl, howl" when he enters with the body of hanged Cordelia. We spoke of the play's harrowing end, with its intimations of death and catastrophe, with Edgar's closing statement that the young will have it even worse than their dead elders. I told them that I wasn't going to do my usual, and give some moment of redemption, a vision of beauty or justice or endurance to walk out of the room with and feel they'd been made better for the text we'd conversed about. I didn't have any fulfillment to provide; the play hadn't offered me any words of comfort. Some extraordinary moments aside (Edgar's monosyllable of "Up!" to his blind father, Cordelia's heartbreaking yet easy forgiveness of her father), the play seems hellbent on snatching such moments, such easy morals from us.

And so I ended by confiding that each time I teach the play I swear it will be my last. I asked my class, should I indeed take Lear off the syllabus? Should this be my last class on Lear? I was curious to hear what they would say. I feared they would tell me what I suspected: that I'd hurt them by making them face such darkness, such a void. They reacted viscerally, and with unity: NO. Lear must remain. They told me how the drama hurt but spoke to them, how despite the assumption that college years are the happiest and most free of care in life the play's bleakness resonated with thoughts they had, with tragedies they had faced. No one claimed that they had been made better for the play; it isn't medicine, and it isn't a humanist's bible. But something in the drama's imagining of the worst and then the trapdoors that open and bring us even lower touched them profoundly.

I resisted my impulse to sum up what they together put forth. I asked everyone to leave the room today thinking about what their peers had offered, because I can't say anything better, with more passion, with more truth.

Undergrad Middle English Syllabus: Favorite Texts?

by KARL STEEL

In the spirit of syllabus building: For my Spring undergraduate Middle English course, I'm looking to construct a syllabus that starts with several of Chaucer's short poems and gradually builds up to longer works. Any favorites I should hit along the way? Here I am, soliciting your not-the-Pearl-poet suggestions (although if I do go that route, I'll likely use a complete set with facing-page translations).

Here's some of what I have in mind, apart from "The Former Age," "Gentilesse", and so forth: "The Bird with Four Feathers" (242-line avian, slightly maceronic lament); "St Jerome and the Lion" (short prose excerpt, will be fun because of its vast iconographic tradition); "The Pistil of Swete Susan" (367 lines, legend of Susannah, useful for popular Bible, Christian perception of Jews, and gender); "Why I Can't Be a Nun" (389 lines, good for gender; also a representative dream vision); "King Edward and the Hermit" (521 lines on poaching and nobility). For later in the semester, I'm considering using this edition of Malory Le Morte Darthur for a unit on chivalric narrative. The centerpiece of the class will likely be The Middle English Breton Lays, because I've taught it before and because Jeffrey's teaching it as well this Spring.

To our expert and enthusiastic audience: any suggestions?

(image from Berkeley, University of California, Berkeley, Bancroft Library, BANC MS UCB 107)

So you want to be a college professor? Another approach

by KARL STEEL

If you're making a choice between reading this introductory stuff and watching the video, watch the video. Just watch it.

You've no doubt seen one or more of the cynical/realistic xtranormal videos recently circulated in which a professor vainly tries to shut down a youngster who wants to be a college professor. I've seen one about getting a PhD in English literature (for the video and one take on it, see zunguzungu), others on political science and law, and I understand there's one on history and probably others on any other academic discipline you care to name. Fine. None of our jobs are ideal; not all of our students are ideal; and not all of our students who want to get a PhD have been given or have given themselves adequate preparation (for advice on saying no to students, see Dr Virago).

I confess: I laughed at the English PhD video, and I also thought about how much I'd lucked out by landing a tenure-track position in a major city. "Thank the FSM that's not me," I thought, "but, hoho, some students sure haven't earned their idealism, and, yeah, when I'm grading 50 papers, or filling out paperwork because of a plagiarism case, I don't exactly feel that I'm leading the life of the mind." I also confess that I didn't feel proud of laughing at the video; probably more accurately, I willed myself be ashamed: if the video represented how I felt about my job, I should probably quit, fight harder, or work harder to find people to help me fight to make this job better.

All this is a long-winded way of introducing this video that's come to my attention. Its caption reads: "A well-prepared student and a professor with basic social skills have a detailed but idealistic conversation about the pros and cons of an academic career. A response to a popular video."

Watch it. It's stirring stuff.

Teaching Philosophies, Medieval Edition

by Mary Kate Hurley

One of the many things I’ve had to do this semester as I prepare for and apply to job postings is write a statement of teaching philosophy. I’ve luckily done quite a bit of teaching – at Columbia we have up to three years of University Writing, one year of Teaching Assistantship, and an optional two years in the Core (either Literature Humanities or Contemporary Civilization). I took the Writing track – one year as a TA, five semesters in University Writing, one semester teaching the Introduction to the Major course. All that goes to say: I’ve definitely taught in graduate school. I’ve loved every minute of it.

But as my job market seminar discussed two of our colleagues’ teaching statements, I realized that this is a genre I’m not familiar with, and one for which I feel oddly ill-prepared to write. My first statement of philosophy skewed toward the autobiographical: “I am the student of great teachers, here’s what I learned from them about pedagogy.” But that misses the point of a teaching statement, I think – it displaces the responsibility for a holistic philosophy onto my past, creating out of four separate experiences a patch-work statement of pedagogical beliefs that don’t belong to me so much as they inform my teaching style.

And so, at the suggestion of an adviser, I turned to the medieval to try and find a pedagogical model. But which what statement or character from medieval literature would offer the best model? I found this a paradoxically difficult question to answer...after all, I’ve spent most of my adult life learning about and from the Middle Ages, surely there’s a “teaching pedagogy” in there somewhere!

Beowulf was my initial thought. However, although you can excavate a pedagogy from the poem, I’m not sure that “hack things to death with a sword in order to understand them better” is the best idea for a teaching statement. I over simplify, obviously, but it still just didn’t ring true as a source for me. One could turn to Augustine, I suppose, or perhaps Abelard, but neither one is really my style.

Chaucer, I finally decided, would be my best bet. But which Chaucer to choose? The Clerk seems too obvious – “gladly would he learn and gladly teach,” but that doesn’t really lend itself to a philosophy. It’s just a statement of who I am, and though it has the virtue of being familiar it’s also a little bit clichéd. The quote from Parliament of Fowles, “For life is so short, the craft so long to learn” didn’t seem quite like what I wanted either – again, it’s true, but it’s not a philosophy. There’s a whole section of the Physicians’ Tale on how to raise children (aimed at governesses and parents) but I wasn’t overly fond of it either, and I’ve never been particularly enamored of the Physician’s Tale.

In the end, I finally settled on what I hope was a less obvious but more productive choice for my pedagogical model: The Wife of Bath. A counterintuitive choice, perhaps, but her argument for “Experience” as the best teacher gave me a fruitful starting place to think about how I teach literature – I attempt to give my students the experience of analysis and argument by helping them to participate in the formation of both.

My statement of teaching philosophy’s in the mail already, so my answer’s less interesting to me than everyone else’s – do any readers have a pedagogical model from the Middle Ages that they draw their teaching philosophy from? Or, come to think of it, any go-to quotes on teaching that they turn to when it comes time to form a pedagogical philosophy?

Portland, Oregon ....

by J J Cohen

... is a great place to dine. It's also a great place to hold a conference, and New Chaucer Society will be doing just that in 2012.

There's still time to dream up a panel proposal. And if you are thinking about oceans or ecologies, send it my way.

Ecologies (convener: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, jjcohen@gwu.edu
How do we analyze ways of living and forms of life? Possible topics for sessions include: decentering the human; the lived environment; posthumanism and landscape studies; textuality and the imagining of worlds; nature and ethics; preservation, sudden change, and catastrophe; problems of scale; natural and unnatural disaster. Sessions might contemplate mountains, rivers, forests, rocks, air, glaciers, trees, fire or weather in texts and as actors. This thread will conclude with a session on 'Ecology/Sciences,' examining the intersections of ways of knowing with forms of life.

Oceans (Convener: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, jjcohen@gwu.edu)
What happens when we reconceptualize communities as shared marinal and littoral spaces (the Mediterranean, the Channel, the North Sea, the Irish Sea) rather than as land-based, national or regional demarcations? Possible topics for panels include the sea in medieval texts, shipwrecks, piracy, being lost at sea, transit, human trafficking, merchant narratives, maps and utopias. We also welcome proposals on contemporary oceans as a way of collecting current medieval studies (e.g. Chaucer and the Pacific or Chaucer in Japan). This thread will conclude with a session on 'Neighbor/Oceans,' bringing together different ways of thinking about propinquity and community.

Wolf Child of Hesse: State of the Research

by KARL STEEL

A little more than a month ago, I put up a little post about the Wolf Child of Hesse. I'm talking about this material twice in the next month, first, this Friday at the CUNY Grad Center at 2pm, in the third annual Pearl Kibre Medieval Study Roundtable on New Directions in Medieval Scholarship; then I'll revise madly based on that discussion, and present the research again at Barnard on December 4, at the The Twenty-Second Barnard Medieval and Renaissance Conference: Animals and Humans in the Culture of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, where I'll be the very junior member of a roundtable discussion with Aranye Fradenberg, Sarah Stanbury, and Julian Yates. Here's a piece of what I have currently.

To recap: one of the several anonymous continuations of the Chronicle of St Peter of Erfurt tells the story of a boy snatched away and raised by wolves:

Anno Domini MCCCIIII. Quidam puer in partibus Hassie est deprehensus. Hic, sicut postea cognitum est, et sicut ipse retulit, cum trium esset annorum, a lupis est captus et mirabiliter educatus. Nam, quamcumque predam lupi pro cibo rapuerant, semper meliorem partem sumentes et arbori circumcucientes [nb: "circumiacientes"] ipsi ad vorandum tribuebant. Tempore vero hiemis et frigoris foveam facientes, folia arborum et alias herbas imponentes, puerum superponebant, et se circumponentes, sic eum a frigore defendebant; ipsum eciam manibus et pedibus repere cogebant et secum currere tamdiu, quod ex use eorum velocitatem imitabatur et saltus maximos faciebat. Hic deprehensus lignis circumligatis erectus ire ad humanam similitudinem cogebatur. Idem vero puer sepius dicebat se multo carius cum lupis, si in se esset, quam cum hominibus diligere conversari. Hic puer in curiam Heinrici principis Hassie pro spectaculo est allatus.

1304. A certain boy in the region of Hesse was seized. This boy, as was known afterwards, and just as the boy told it himself, was taken by wolves when he was three years old and raised up wonderously. For, whatever prey the wolves snatched for food, they would take the better part and divide it up for him to eat while they lay around a tree. In the time of winter and cold, they made a small pit, and they put the leaves of trees and other plants in it, and surrounded the boy to protect him from the cold; they also compelled him to creep on hands and feet and to run with them for a long time, from which practice he imitated their speed and was able to make the greatest leaps. When he was seized, he was bound with wood to compel him to go erect in the manner of a human. However, this boy often said that he much preferred to live among wolves than among men. This boy was conveyed to the court of Henry, Prince of Hesse, for a spectacle.

The heterogeneous Erfurt Chronicle includes another such story, that of the child of Wetterau:

Anno Domini MCCCXLIIII. quidam puer a lupis deportatus in Wederavia in una villa nobilium, que dicitur Eczol, qui puer XII annis cum lupis erat in magna silva, que dicitur vulgariter dy Hart. Hic puer isto anno tempore hyemis in nive in vanacione captus [fuerat] a nobilibus ibidem morantibus, et vixit forte ad LXXX annos.

In 1344, a certain boy, taken by wolves in Wetterau in an estate named Eczol, who was with the wolves for twelve years in a great forest called the Hart. This boy was captured during winter in the snow by nobles who were in the area for hunting, and he lived for 80 years.

The Erfurt historiographical material tends not to list marvels; instead, it tends towards records of catastrophic weather, accounts of struggles between nobles or between nobles and the papacy, and depressingly many accounts of pogroms attempted forced conversions (and mass suicides), and ritual murder/Host desecration accusations. It does not often speak of wolves: it has two records of a attack in 1271 in which wolves eschewed sheep and instead devoured 30 men and a legend of the fleeing Nero, dead in the woods of hunger and thirst, whose corpse wolves ate. It's therefore strange to find the wild children stories here rather than in, say, William of Malsmesbury.

The Erfurt wolf children stand out even more in comparison to medieval historiography as a whole. It's a habit of writers on wild children to compile lists (see for example Lucienne Strivay's Enfants Sauvages: Approches Anthropologiques (Paris 2006) and Michael P. Carroll, The Folkloric Origins of Modern 'Animal-Parented Children' Stories" Journal of Folklore Research 21.1 (1984): 63-85). Per these lists, these two children are virtually the only medieval examples. Procopius's history of the Gothic War speaks of an abandoned infant raised by a goat, and several post-medieval works cite medieval sources; but, barring the dubiously medieval work of Procopius, the Erfurt material furnishes the only two actual examples in medieval historiography (perhaps this is why there's basically nothing in wild children in medieval scholarship?). Given the many wild children recorded in Greco-Roman myth and, especially, the many from the seventeenth century on, the medieval rarity is especially odd. This rarity suggests a shift in modern thought concerning children, their humanity, and their dressage/education: I'm content however to leave the archaeological investigations to others.

At least since the tenth edition (1758) of C. Linnaeus's Systema naturae marked Homo sapiens ferus as one of the sub-categories of Homo sapiens, discussions of wild children have concentrated on the absolute limits of the human: what minimal degree of socialization does the human require? And what does this suggest about the (pre)historical point at which humans separated themselves from irrational beasts? Is it possible to conceive the leap from homo infans to rational humanity? The Erfurt material, however, lacks several elements of what would become typical to such stories: we don't have a single female animal, but a heterogeneous pack; the children, not dying soon after their capture (like the Green Children of Woolpit) survive into adulthood; not deprived of language, the Hesse-child speaks of his own experience; they can eat "human" food (again, unlike the Green Children of Woolpit); and their bodies have not quite transformed into animal forms (the eyes of the famous Amala and Kamala, for example, supposedly glowed in the dark). The Erfurt material, particularly the more developed first story, concerns something other than the transformation of prehistoric to historical humanity, colonial encounters, autism, or whatever other fortunes the story has had from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries.

What the medieval material particularly concerns I must begin to determine by Friday. Not least of all it's about the uncertain boundaries of the human (for such discussion, see H. Peter Steeves), even if these boundaries are not conceived of historically. It's also obviously about posture (something I cover at length in my forthcoming book on animals). The Hesse/Wetterau wolf children should also be read with other medieval stories of children snatched by wolves and other animals: my previous post cites exempla by Jacques de Vitry and Caesarius of Heisterbach. I must also cite the romance of William of Palerne and the Wolfdietrich legend (and works it influenced, including the Helgi-Lay and the Irish story of Cormac), and the medieval afterlife of the Romulus and Remus legend (about which I currently know little); maybe I could even dragoon Isumbras into the discussion, or the legend of Saint Eustace, given that he temporarily loses a child to wolves, or legends of hairy saints promulgated at least since shepherds first mistook Benedict for an animal. I'll also have to remember the name of this medieval story about a spurned child that learns to run with deer.

As of this afternoon, I'm struck by the varying uses of the woods, used by the wolves to protect the(ir) child, and by humans to correct. I'm struck by the lupine honor the child receives, which, to give the simplest possible answer, suggests the prelapsarian (or Messianic) state of human dominion over animals in the peaceable kingdom (see David Salter for more on this). I am most struck by the violence of the Hesse-child story. The account's first sentence has child "deprehensus" (seized), by either wolves or humans; he is "captus" (captured) by the wolves, and then "deprehensus" (again?) when he's taken back to live among humans. The wolves "rapuerant" (snatch) prey, and they "cogebant" (compell) him to go on hands and feet, just as he "cogebatur" (is compelled) to walk upright in the likeness of a human. What is this substance that is being worked over first by wolves and then by humans? What, if anything, is being stolen and cherished and trained and gawked at, amid the wolves and the wood and Henry's court?

And what it is that the adult wants when he wishes he were back among the wolves? This is the big question, and the hardest to answer. We'll see what I come up, but, in the meantime, suggestions are enthusiastically encouraged.

(modified image from here, detail of New York, Columbia University, Burke Library at Union Theological Seminary UTS MS 051, f. 143, Eustace standing in the middle of the river with the lion and the wolf on either side, each with one of Eustace's sons in his mouth.)

Medieval Apple Pie, Copyright and Facebook Fans

by J J Cohen

What, you don't think those phrases belong together? It's not an exquisite corpse game, it's technology news.

(Thanks, Tom Prendergast!)

Babel Conference on Twitter

by KARL STEEL

If you're not following the Austin, TX Babel Conference on Twitter, you're missing something wonderful: have a look! Specifically, you've been missing Meg Worley, who's done a superb job of transmitting the event for those of us unable (or unwilling?) to make it. Every medieval conference should be so fortunate!

Bonnie Wheeler Summer Research Fellowship

by J J Cohen

Few have had such a positive impact upon Medieval Studies as Bonnie Wheeler. Her special mission throughout her career has been the cultivation of young scholars, fostering their intellectual growth through mentoring and their professional possibilities through guiding their research. She is and always has been an inspiration, a catalyst for change, and a fairy godmother for those working on nontraditional projects.

I once composed those words about Bonnie Wheeler. They don't say enough. Medieval studies has been changed profoundly for the better by her presence in the discipline.

A new fellowship recognizes this contribution. Below is the announcement for the Bonnie Wheeler Summer Research Fellowship, offered to address an alarming truth in academia: an abiding disparity in tenure and promotion rates between men and women. The fellowship offers two things that institutions often do not: time and money at a critical stage in a scholar's career.

The fellowship has been started with big ambitions: to move from a summer program to one that will support scholars for a half or full year. Please consider contributing to this worthy cause.

----------------
Announcing the Bonnie Wheeler 2011 Summer Research Fellowship. Open to women medievalists below the rank of full professor, this fellowship offers up to $7000 in financial support. Deadline for submissions is January 15, 2011.

The Bonnie Wheeler Fellowship Fund of The Dallas Foundation announces its inaugural Summer Research Fellowship for 2011, designed to support the research of women medievalists below the rank of full professor. The $7,000 award is to be used during the period of June 1 – December 31, 2011. In the future when more funds are available, Wheeler Fellowships will be awarded for full-year and half-year projects, but the Fellowship Committee recognizes the need in the current economic climate for the immediate support of women scholars.

Eligibility
Applicants must be women who hold a Ph.D. in any area of medieval studies and who are full-time faculty in an academic department. Preference will be given to candidates who are “caught in the middle” in the promotion ladder, as described in the MLA report  “Standing Still: The Associate Professor Survey.” Budgets for Fellowship applications should include not only research costs, but also the costs of freeing up applicants’ time--for example, relief from summer teaching, daycare and/or eldercare expenses, and the like.

Mentoring
A special feature of the Fellowship is that it will connect the recipient with a mentor in her scholarly field.

Timetable
Completed applications must be received no later than January 15, 2011. The award will be announced February 28, 2011.

Application Procedure 
Please register at http://bonniewheelerfund.org/ and see the Application Instructions for details. On this site you will also find more information about the Fellowship, its rationale and goals, and contact information.

NEW ISSUE OF POSTMEDIEVAL: CRITICAL EXCHANGES

[be sure to read Jeffrey's note regarding the Liverpool Online Series: Critical Editions of French Texts HERE]

by EILEEN JOY

Myra Seaman and I are very excited to announce that postmedieval, vol. 1.3 [Fall/Winter 2010] has hit the material and virtual presses this morning, just in time for the BABEL Working Group's 1st biennial meeting at the University of Texas in Austin, where Palgrave will be passing out free print copies. We are also very excited to announce that one cluster of essays in this issue, "The State(s) of Early English Studies," is also published in tandem with the newly released issue of The Heroic Age: A Journal of Early Medieval Northwestern Europe.

The issue is devoted to two clusters of essays--the first is a lively round-table discussion between Louise D'Arcens, Clare Monagle, Stephanie Trigg, and Bruce Holsinger over Holsinger's book The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory (Chicago, 2005), which had its genesis in a panel organized by Clare Monagle for the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (held in Hobart, Tasmania, in December 2008). The second essay cluster began as a panel on Old English studies and theory at the Kalamazoo Congress on Medieval Studies in 2008, jointly sponsored by BABEL and the online journal The Heroic Age (and featuring remarks by Kathleen Davis, Kathryn Powell, Jacqueline Stodnick and Renée Trilling, Mary Swan, and Stacy Klein).

As I write in my Introduction to the issue, "The Traherence of the Past":

Originally envisioned as a round-table discussion that would consider and explore how already-established critical theories (such as those associated with psychoanalysis, deconstruction, gender and sexuality studies, new historicism, postcolonial studies and the like) either had, or had not, been taken up, appropriated, applied and re-formulated within Old English studies, the lively discussion itself at Kalamazoo made it clear to all of us that, in some respects, this was either a moot or an exhausted or unproductive question – after all, Gillian Overing declared almost 20 years ago at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association, ‘we are changed by this new work,’ which ‘has, indeed, arrived.’ And essay collections such as Britton Harwood and Gillian Overing's Class and Gender in Early English Literature (1994), Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe's Reading Old English Texts (1997), Allen Frantzen and John Niles's Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity (1997), all now over 10 years old, as well as anthologies such as Eileen Joy and Mary Ramsey's The Postmodern Beowulf (2007), have all devoted more than ample room to the demonstration of the value of productive convergences between postmodern theory, Old English literature, and Anglo-Saxon culture and history, and they have also cleared new theoretical grounds in early English studies. This is not even to begin to mention the singular contributions of the scholars included in this essay cluster, which are various and many.

We decided that a better tack for the cluster of essays to be developed after the session at the Kalamazoo Congress would be, not to mull the place and uses of theory only within early English studies, but rather to consider what the position of contemporary Old English and Anglo-Saxon studies might productively be in relation to the histories and ongoing development of theory (critical, cultural, historical, social, political, aesthetic, ethical and so on), and to all of the ‘turns’ involved therein and to literary-historical studies more generally. What, further, might be important new directions in contemporary intellectual discourses (academic, public and otherwise) for which the study of early English culture and history might be critically important and indispensable? What subjects remain neglected or under-developed in early English studies and what, further, are some of the more promising ‘new’ directions in early English studies today? In short, how might we sketch out some of the futures (with an emphasis on the plural) of an early English studies that is not (and never really was) a realm apart from either later periods within literary-historical studies (including the later Middle Ages) or from contemporary life and thought? The cluster, featuring contributions by Kathleen Davis, Mary Dockray-Miller, Clare Lees and Gillian Overing, Carol Braun Pasternack, Jacqueline Stodnick and Renée Trilling, Elaine Treharne, and Lisa Weston, covers subjects as richly various as the marriage debate in Anglo-Saxon England and contemporary America and its textual production, past and present (Pasternack), the place of pleasure in Old English studies within the context of the California budget crisis (Weston), the contribution early English studies might make to studies of embodiment and the so-called ‘new materialisms’ (Stodnick and Trilling), the debt of modern poetry to Old English verse (Treharne), legal precedent and medieval/modern periodization (Davis), new media aliteracy and language study (Dockray-Miller), and our ethical (and gendered) relations to questions of temporality and disciplinarity (Lees and Overing).

In order to craft a bridge for this essay cluster between a journal that aims to bring the medieval and modern into productive critical relations for a broad audience within the humanities and beyond (postmedieval) and a journal that primarily specializes in studies of early medieval northwestern Europe (The Heroic Age), we are publishing this cluster across the two journals, with the essays by Davis, Pasternack, Stodnick and Trilling, and Weston appearing here in this issue, and the essays by Dockray-Miller, Lees and Overing, and Treharne appearing in Issue 14 of The Heroic Age. The Heroic Age is an online, open-access journal and the essays there are fully available online; the essays here by Davis, Pasternack, Stodnick and Trilling, and Weston will be available free online for a brief period in November [until Nov. 18th], in order that the entire cluster may be read together online at that time. In the spirit of the collaborative labors (which are also feminist) evidenced by so much of the work of the scholars published in this cluster, it is hoped that more such collaborative ventures between journals and other publishing media can be crafted in the future as well, in order to initiate and work to sustain a more collective humanities, across time ‘periods,’ research specialties, disciplinary affiliations, modes (and even genders and trans-genders) of transmission, and languages. Such might also be a move toward new collectives or networks, also called friendships, tilted at a futural humanities in which the study of the premodern past would play an integral and provocative role.

The photograph on the new issue's cover, by the way, was taken by Joshua Davies, recently graduated from King's College, London with a PhD in medieval English literature [he has a chapter, "The Absent Anglo-Saxon Past in Ted Hughes' Elmet," in the recently published book, Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination, ed. David Clark and Nicholas Perkins]: it is the standing remains of St Alphage London Wall, so-called because the circa tenth- to eleventh-century church used to sit right on the boundary wall of the city. We have aimed, in our covers for the inaugural volume, to capture the something of the spirit of the habitation of the medieval within the modern and vice versa, but also of the sharply delineated edges of past and present that still emerge apart from each other in their common locations, as well as the continual erasure and re-emergence of the past, and this site seems so apropos to us because, as its Wikipedia entry mentions,

The first church was built adjoining the London Wall, with the wall forming its northern side. The churchyard lay to the north of the wall. The earliest mention of this church dates to c. 1108-25, though it is said that it was established before 1068. The church was closed by Act of Parliament at the end of the sixteenth century and demolished. The London Wall was left standing. The site of the church became a carpenter's yard. In 1837 it was laid out as a public garden, which remains today, with a preserved section of the London Wall on its north edge. After the realignment of the road London Wall, that section formerly running past the site of this church was renamed St Alphage Gardens.

The churchyard to the north of the London Wall was still open in 1677, but was subsequently built over. The last building on the site, using the London wall as its southern boundary, was destroyed by bombing in the Second World War. This exposed the Roman city wall that the medieval wall had been built on. When a new Salters' Hall was built on the site (opened in 1976), the area north of the London Wall was made into a garden for the Hall.

The photograph seems fitting then, as well, for the cover of an issue also devoted to Holsinger's book, an elegant excavation of the medieval influences undergirding the work of some of the most brilliant thinkers of the postwar French intelligentsia, such as Georges Bataille and Roland Barthes.

Let me add, finally, that this issue also features a book review essay by Paul Strohm, "Historicity Without Historicism?", which covers the following volumes: Andrew Cole and D. Vance Smith, eds., The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages: On the Unwritten History of Theory (Duke Univ. Press, 2010); Elizabeth Scala and Sylvia Frederico, eds., The Post-Historical Middle Ages (Palgrave, 2009); and “Medieval Studies in the Twenty-First Century,” Theories and Methodologies essay cluster, PMLA 124.2 (March 2009): 576-646 [featuring essays by Josiah Blackmore, Jessica Brantley, Christine Chism, Bruce Holsinger, Steven Justice, Sharon Kinoshita, Karma Lochrie, Karla Mallette, and Peggy McCracken].

NEW NOTE: Josh Davies just emailed me to add this:

. . . although the church itself is post-conquest, it is named for St AElfheah of Canterbury, who was killed by Danes in Greenwich, south London in 1012. His wiki is here -- A very interesting character indeed (and I've got an essay on him and his church in Greenwich coming out next year, so he's been something of an obsession for me.

And werewolf lays for all

by J J Cohen

I am grateful to Noah Guynn of UC-Davis for directing my attention to the Liverpool Online Series: Critical Editions of French Texts. I've just downloaded the free PDF for Amanda Hopkins' edition of the werewolf lays Melion and Biclarel. Hopkins provides both the French and a modern English translation, as well as quite a full introduction ... so upon Noah's suggestion I will likely work these lays into my spring graduate seminar, and do an entire class on werewolf narratives.

Thanks, Noah!

Agency, Objects, and the Constitution of Life

by J J Cohen

photo by author

During my first semester as chair of English at GW, I attempted something foolish: running a rather large department and teaching an ambitious graduate seminar on medieval race (you may access the syllabus here). A good seminar takes me two solid days of prep work, and I didn't possess that much time any more. I ended up losing a major portion of each weekend, and was also a bit more on edge for this class than I should have been. So I've taken three years off from teaching graduate seminars as a result. This spring I return, and I am looking forward to it: there is an intensity to graduate-level teaching that I love.

Below is my description for the course I'll teach this coming spring. The primary texts have been more or less chosen: crazy narratives like Sir Orfeo, Gowther, Cleges, Launfal, Emare, Octavian, the Franklin's Tale, Guigemar, Bisclavret, Milun. And Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain. I'm still working on the theory list, but will append the draft below the course description. Any and all suggestions for primary and secondary texts will be welcomed.

Seminar in Medieval and Early Modern Studies: 

Agency, Objects, and the Constitution of Life

This seminar explores the topics foregrounded by the March GW MEMSI conference "Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects." We will survey contemporary ways of rethinking materiality and causality such as actor network theory (Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour, Manuel de Landa), object-oriented ontology (Graham Harman), psychoanalysis (Slavoj Zizek), vibrant materialisms (Jane Bennett), and queer ecocritical approaches (Timothy Morton), among others. We will in tandem investigate a body of work that constitutes a kind of minor literature for early Britain, wonder-filled "Breton lais" (short romances) that unfold -- or, better, explode --  in oceanic, geographic, cultural and temporal interspaces. Middle English works will be read in their original; French in translation. Time permitting, we will trace these durable narratives of possibility to their early modern forms.

Guiding aphorism: "Herein, perhaps, lies the secret: to bring into existence and not to judge." 

(Gilles Deleuze, "To Have Done with Judgment")

List of possible secondary texts:

• Graham Harman, Prince of Networks
• Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (maybe "One or Several Wolves?" or "How Do You make Yourself a Body without Organs?")
• Bruno Latour (Aramis, or The Love of Technology; The Pasteurization of France; Conversations on Science, Culture and Time; Pandora's Hope; OR Reassembling the Social. I am having a very hard time choosing because what I'd really like to do is teach a seminar on Latour!)
• Manuel de Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History
• Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art
• Gil Harris, Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare
• Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What?
• Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology
• Steve Mentz, At the Bottom of Shakespeare's Ocean
• Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology
• Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature; "Queer Ecology"
• Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter
• postmedieval 1.1 "when did we become post/human?"
• Queering the Non/Human, ed. Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Hird

That's already more than a semester's worth of reading, so I should be working on slenderizing the list ... but I'm curious to hear if anyone has suggestions for books or essays that they would have included. I'm also trying to compile a bibliography of provocative work already accomplished in this area by medievalists and early modernists -- e.g. not historicist "thing studies" but essays like Kellie Robertson's "Medieval Materialism: A Manifesto."