ITMBC4DSoMA commences August 8

The In the Middle Book Club for Discerning Scholars of Medieval Arcana (ITMBC4DSoMA) will instigate its group read and communal blogging of Heather Blurton's brand new book Cannibalism in High Medieval English Literature in two weeks. Your three co-bloggers will be joined by two real scholars: Asa Simon Mittman and Susan Kim. Heather Blurton has agreed to compose and post a response as the discussion concludes (approx. 8/15).

Welcome to ITMBC4DSoMA

ITM welcomes our guest blogger, Asa Simon Mittman, to the In the Middle Book Club for Discerning Scholars of Medieval Arcana (ITMBC4DSoMA).

Professor Mittman has a beautiful web page you can access here. His book Monsters and Maps in Medieval England (New York: Routledge, 2006) -- a great favorite of mine -- is now in its third printing. Welcome, Asa!

We also welcome you our readers as we discuss Heather Blurton's Cannibalism in High Medieval English Literature. Conversation commences shortly.

ITMBC4DSoMA looms

2 days until ITMBC4DSoMA commences. Have you been doing your homework? (And if you've fallen behind in your blog reading and can't decipher that, follow this link.)

ITMBC4DSoMA 2 Victor + New Poll

by Karl Steel

Three Things:

A pleasant Florida to the Cohens, although for me a week without a laptop sounds like a phantom limb situation. That tingly feeling in your right hand, Jeffrey, is your RSS feed, desperate to be lanced and drained.

The Winner of Our Renowned ITMBC4DSoMA poll is Carolyn Dinshaw's Getting Medieval (pictured: my copy in its habitat). We'll start discussing it August 1st, so you've plenty of time to linger with it before the book club commences.

By all means, do not neglect the other books in the poll, if you can get them: Anna Kłosowska's Queer Love in the Middle Ages (a favorite insight: "all fiction corresponds to an absolute reality--not of existence, but of desire that calls fiction into being, performed by the authors and manuscript makers; and continuing desire for it performed by readers, a desire that sustains the book's material presence across the centuries" (7)); Valerie Allen's On Farting (I've read, and loved, what I think was part of this in the Exemplaria "Medieval Noise" issue); Emma Campbell and Robert Mills' Troubled Vision: Gender, Sexuality, and Sight in Medieval Images; and Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Herd's Queering the Nonhuman (if you can get your library, or your ILL, to give it to you: mine claims it's "too new.")

Finally, look to your left RIGHT please for a new poll! The comments to this post may be used to complain about or to plea for alterations to the poll.

ITMBC4DSoMA 2: You decide

by J J Cohen

Remember last year's In the Middle Book Club for Discerning Scholars of Medieval Arcana (ITMBC4DSoMA , or the Impenetrable Acronym Club for short)? We'll do another version this year, and next week will conduct a poll and allow our readers to decide what book to discuss together. So far we have on the table:

1. Valerie Allen, On Farting
2. Anna Klosowska, Queer Love in the Middle Ages
3. Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval (a reappraisal)
4. Emma Campbell and Robert Mills, eds: Troubled Vision: Gender, Sexuality, and Sight in Medieval Text and Image
5. Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Hird, Queering the Non/Human

Any other suggestions before we rig set up the voting?

Memorable Posts of 2007

As another year trickles to its close, I offer a roundup of some of the posts that have stayed with me. It's an idiosyncratic group, based solely on the criterion of "Posts that have burned themselves into my neurons sufficiently that I remember them at the moment I am typing this."

I'm sure I've overlooked some gems, so I'd be interested to hear what my cobloggers and our readers think.


JJC
Are Bioluminescent Bunnies Queer?
No Future: Terminus
Frontpaging the Future
Who mourns for Lindow Man?
For Eileen: A Shark in Formaldehyde
At the Holocaust Museum
Augustine, a Giant's Tooth, and Particles of Alterity
At Avebury
Infinite Realms

Eileen
The Terrible Beauty of Monsters
Not Knowing in Advance What Forms our Humanness Will Take
The Last One to Die, Please Turn Out the Light
Forks in the Rift of Time
In Praise of Surfing and Epicureanism
Art Reveals More of Life than Life Does
The Loving Hope of Working Groups
Medieval Studies, Unsettled Subjectivities
The Weight of History

Karl
Another Nature
The Child Gives Himself to the Wolf
What Does Caninophilia Matter?
Mute Beasts
Is it Wrong to Spurn the Gifts of Nature?
How About Them Fightin' Binaries?
Gay Wizards
The Disavowed Pleasures of Guthlac
The Bible Swoops Out

MKH
Only Connect
Endangered Languages, Dying Wor(l)ds
"But History Has Already Written That Story"
Dissertation Fragments
Ruins and Poetry
Dissertation Fragments II
Dissertation Fragments III

Michael O'Rourke
History's Tears
Fisting and Other Gifts for Graduate Students

Group
The ITMBC4DSoMA series

Geoffrey Chaucer
Chaucer Speaks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You Know It's Summer When You Have Dinshaw and The Gossip Girl On Your Mind: ITMBC4DSoMA Deux

by EILEEN JOY

When you find that Carolyn Dinshaw's Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern and The Gossip Girl and pomengranate martinis are on your mind, it must be almost August, and almost time for In The Middle's Book Club for Discerning Scholars of the Middle Ages, or ITMBC4SoMA-palooza, or something like that. So get out the cocktail shaker, decide how you feel about the "is she or isn't she naked?" Blair Waldorf ad scandal, and crack [or re-crack] open your copy of Dinshaw. Because sometime soon, at an In The Middle outlet near you, we'll be discussing this book [re-visiting it, as it were], and yes, also watching The Gossip Girl [well some of us, I mean Eileen, will be].

In the meantime, please read Mary Kate's "This I Believe" post and Jeffrey's two posts on the New Chaucer Society meeting here and here.

ITMBC4DSoMA 2: vote now

by J J Cohen

Links to your choices are here, poll is up at the right. Note that The Tiny Shriner's Tiny Book of Scatological Verse is NOT an option.

ITMBC4DSoMA 2 ends Friday

by J J Cohen

... so if you were thinking of commenting and have not yet posted, well, tempus fugit.

And: welcome Literature Compass readers.

Queer Foxes. Also, Queer Movie Medievalisms.

by J J Cohen

Where does one find whiskey, foxes, poetry, theory, and queer heterotopoi cohabitating? Under the editorship of Dan Remein, of course, at a promising new journal that many ITM readers will want to read. From the call for submissions (vivid orange coloration preserved):

we are interested in poetry and poetics committed to theory and historiography, and theory and historiography committed to poetry and poetics. The journal is interested currently in shorter forms or fragments, forms which might be classified as a missive, an aphorism, or a raid--although other forms and modes will be considered.

"All those other words make sense," you observe. "But why foxes?" Tsk, tsk, have you not read your bestiary lately? "The fox is crafty and deceitful. When it is hungry it rolls in red earth to look as if it is covered in blood. It feigns death by holding its breath. Birds come to sit on the body whereupon the fox jumps up and eats them."

Many an ITM reader will also be interested in the following book as well, forthcoming from Ashgate Press in the astonishing Queer Interventions series:

Queer Movie Medievalisms
edited by Tison Pugh and Kathleen Coyne Kelly

How is history even possible, since it involves the recuperation of a past that is already lost? In the urge to understand and even to feel or experience history, “medieval” films attempt to re-create the past, but can only do so through a queer re-visioning that inevitably replicates modernity. In these mediations between past and present, history becomes misty, and so, too, do constructions of gender and sexuality. Hence the impossibility of heterosexuality, or of any sexuality, predicated upon cinematic medievalism: identity as constructed through the past cannot escape the charge of presentism, and thus queerness can serve as the defining metaphor for studying both sexuality and historical films. In the collected essays of Queer Movie Medievalisms, contributors grapple with the ways in which mediations between past and present as registered on the silver screen queerly undercut assumptions about sexuality throughout time.

Table of Contents
Introduction
Queer History, Medievalism, and the Impossibility of Sexuality
Kathleen Coyne Kelly, Northeastern University, and Tison Pugh, University of Central Florida

Chapter 1
“In the Company of Orcs”: Peter Jackson’s Queer Tolkien
Jane Chance, Rice University

Chapter 2
Queering the Lionheart: Richard I in The Lion in Winter on Stage and Screen
R. Barton Palmer, Clemson University

Chapter 3
“He’s not an ardent suitor, is he, brother?”: Richard the Lionheart’s Ambiguous Sexuality in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1935 The Crusades”
Lorraine Kochanske Stock, University of Houston

Chapter 4
The Law of the Daughter: Queer Family Politics in Bertrand Tavernier’s La Passion Béatrice
Lisa Manter, St. Mary’s College of California

Chapter 5
Performance, Camp, and Queering History in Luc Besson’s Jeanne d’Arc
Susan Hayward, Exeter University

Chapter 6
The Eastern Western: Camp as a Response to Cultural Failure in The Conqueror
Anna Klosowska, Miami University, Ohio

Chapter 7
“In My Own Idiom”: Social Critique, Campy Gender, and Queer Performance in Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Susan Aronstein, University of Wyoming

Chapter 8
Sean Connery’s Star Persona and the Queer Middle Ages
Tison Pugh, University of Central Florida

Chapter 9
Will Rogers’ Pink Spot: A Connecticut Yankee
Kathleen Coyne Kelly, Northeastern University

Chapter 10
Danny Kaye and the “Fairy Tale” of Queerness in The Court Jester
Martha Bayless, University of Oregon

Chapter 11
Mourning and Sexual Difference in Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s Parsifal
Michelle Bolduc, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

Chapter 12
Superficial Medievalism and the Queer Futures of Film
Cary Howie, Cornell University

Afterword
Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger, Queen’s College, City University of New York

Thanks, MOR, for the tip on this one. The book looks terrific, and I have to say: do we not behold here our next ITMBC4DSoMA?

ITM Book Club: Heather Blurton on Cannibalism

Oprah can do it. Why can't we medievalists?

Announcing the first meeting of the In the Middle Book Club for Discerning Scholars of Medieval Arcana (ITMBC4DSoMA, for short). As voted upon below, we will be conducting a group read and communal blogging of Heather Blurton's brand new book Cannibalism in High Medieval English Literature. Details of the book below. Secure your copy now, lug it to the beach all summer (what could be tastier than reading about cannibalism while surrounded by all that flesh?), and check back with us in about a month as we start discussion.

---------

From Beowulf through the literature of the crusades and beyond, cannibals haunt the texts of medieval England. Cannibal Narratives attempts to explain their presence. It explores the relationship between the literary trope of cannibalism and the emergence of national identity in medieval England. If England suffered three centuries of invasion - beginning with the Vikings and continuing through Danish and Norman conquests of the island – it also developed a unique and uniquely literary response to these circumstances. This book reads the representations cannibalism so common in English medieval literature through cannibalism’s metaphoric associations with incorporation, consumption, and violent disruption of the boundaries between self and other. The result uncovers the ways in which these representations articulate a discourse of cannibalism as a privileged mode for thinking about English cultural, and ultimately national, identity in the face of the social crisis.

Author Bio

Heather Blurton is Lecturer in the Centre for Medieval Studies and the Department of English at the University of York

Praise for Cannibalism in High Medieval English Literature

“Organized around the unsettlingly frequent appearance of the figure of the cannibal and scenes of cannibalism in a wide assortment of texts produced in England between the tenth and fifteenth centuries, this book deeply explores the connections between literary representation and the processes of imperial conquest, territorial consolidation, and internal colonization that marked the continuous history of medieval England both before and after 1066. This book will immediately establish Blurton as a major voice in one of the most interesting conversations taking place in contemporary medieval studies. Blurton's study joins the ranks of those medievalists whose work is currently effacing the sharp divide that has separated the early from the later Middle Ages and ‘medieval alterity’ from modernity.”--Robert M. Stein, Purchase College and Columbia University

Table of contents

Cannibal Narratives * Selfeaters: The Cannibal Narrative of Andreas * Eotonweard: Watching for Cannibals in the Beowulf-manuscript * Cannibal Kings: Communion and Community in Twelfth-Century England * Tartars and Traitors: The Uses of Cannibalism in Matthew Paris’s Chronica majora * The Flesch of a Sarazeyn: Cannibalism, Genre and Nationalism

Quote of the Day: Heather Blurton

To whet your appetite for the first meeting of our ITMBC4DSoMA -- one week from today! -- here are some passages from the first volume we'll be discussing.

From the introduction ("Cannibal Narratives") to Heather Blurton, Cannibalism in High Medieval English Literature:

In the period covered by this book, from about 950-1250, the issues of invasion, territorial redistribution, multi-lingualism, and multi-culturalism provided a continuity across the lines of different dynastic and state formations. Against this historical backdrop, the following chapters read representations of cannibals and cannibalism as a literary response to the politics of external conquest, internal colonization, and territorial consolidation in medieval England. These cannibal narratives have in common, above all, a concern with the articulation of identity -- personal, religious and social ... The trope of cannibalism is concerned, above all, with the articulation of individual and corporate identity: metaphors of consuming, devouring, incorporating, effacing the boundaries between self and other. (2-3)

The medieval representation of cannibalism as a political metaphor is fundamentally dependent upon the possibility of the metaphorical incorporation -- and dismembering -- of the body politic. (7)

While cannibalism is a figurative mode for representing the incorporation of one space into another, it differs from other metaphors of incorporation -- eating, for example -- in so far as it is marked by the violence, fear, and revulsion evoked by the image of one person eating another. (9)

Together, these chapters articulate a discourse of cannibalism as a privileged mode for the conceptualization of English cultural, and ultimately national, identity in the face of the constant trauma of invasion. (11)

Whether articulating annihilation or identity, expressing conquest as consumption or incorporation, representations of cannibalism offer insights into the medieval response to the conquest and consolidation of territory as well as into the literary production of individual and communal identity. The trope of cannibalism in medieval texts consistently functions to alert interlocutors to the political subtexts of cannibal narratives. And the insistent representation of cannibalism in the literature of medieval England invites us to read it as a discursive process of contending with the disintegration of previously maintained differences and the concomitant articulation of new identities. (13)

Fragments Shattered by History

So on Saturday, as I've mentioned here, I will be responding to this paper by Aaron Hostetter , a colleague of mine from Princeton. This will all take place as a part of the fourth annual ASSC Graduate Student Conference.

So here, for your Valentine's Day evening perusal, is my remark/question for our discussion. Any critiques or questions would be quite helpful -- this was the first time I've read Andreas. Though I find it quite fascinating, it's also insanely complex. One day that characteristic of Old English poetry will stop surprising me. With a little luck though, I'll never lose that complexity's delight.

So: Go read Aaron's paper, "A Tasty Turn of Phrase: Cannibal Poetics in Andreas". Then, refresh your memory of the story with any one of these posts on Heather Blurton's Cannibalism in High Medieval English Literature from the ITMBC4DSoMA event this summer. I should note that in my haste I've not had the time to read through all of the entries, though I certainly hope to do so by Saturday's session. Then, return here to read my entry in this ongoing discussion of Anthropophagy. My bibliographical notes are not terribly precise, as I'm mostly going on what I've read from Aaron's paper: however, I'll have to add it in tomorrow morning, when I have time to figure out what I was drawing on! My title could also use a lift -- any ideas would be appreciated!

Fragments Shattered by History


Aaron argues that as a poem, the Andreas makes a comment on the relationship between the past and the present: most specifically, that fragments of a past identity inhabit the present construction of self – more importantly, they inhabit the text’s present construction of cultural identity. Using the poetic borrowings of Andreas, and making clear their poetic effect, the argument culminates in the assertion that, in the case of the “sad anthropophagites” of the Anglo-Saxon corpus:

the act of devoration leaves the eater with a raw sense of the self in time, of ones utter dependence on the presence of the past with which to construct a present, and a lingering sense of absolute difference from the apparent integrity of those pasts.

In some senses, his argument squares with the recent work on the poem done by Heather Blurton: in her dissertation, and its rendering in book form, Blurton argues that we might productively read the poem not merely for its conversion narrative, but for its “cannibal narrative” – a narrative that tells a story of invasion and conquest and the subsequent, postcolonial hybridity that results. Andreas, she argues, deliberately depicts the Mermedonians in ways which echo the descriptions of Anglo-Saxon warriors in other poems. Clearly, Blurton picks up on the same tendency which Aaron highlights: the citation of other Anglo-Saxon poems is used to an effect in Andreas, and to read the poem in any other light flattens a nuanced reading – performed by the poem – of those texts, and the culture which produced them.

As an opening provocation to discussion, I would like to reframe the question which Aaron is asking us to consider. In doing so, I want to engage with the idea of this solitary “self-in-time” – to ask, directly, the question of what the Mermedonians are doing in Anglo-Saxon England. If the self is related to the other in Andreas through a metaphoric act of consumption, devoration, or put in the slightly more post-colonial term favored by Blurton, incorporation – the question raised becomes more than simply one of “self” and “other” per se. The intermingling performed by the act of anthropophagy, and the intersection of the past and present that occurs in the building of cultural identity, suggests that the time of this “meal” is, to borrow a phrase, “out of joint.”

The question this raises about Andreas is the way in which the pasts upon which the present feasts are only apparently integral: the ways in which their narrative wholeness is shattered by the onset of a different kind of history. In Augustine’s conception of history, the human interpretation of history’s narrative is fundamentally altered by the intersection of the divine with the human: Christ’s advent necessarily rewrites the linear narrative of human history, and the truly integral events (his birth, death, resurrection and final judgment) shape the interpretation of any other narrative (though, and importantly, it doesn't annihilate the presence of all other narratives, which could be said to haunt it). My question then, is this: if we were to let the conversion narrative shape the cannibal narrative of the text, might we understand this story of sylfætan as an interpretation of the non-Christian digestion of history. Fundamentally incomplete, the past can only disappoint those who wish to use its narrative to shape the future from its fragments: those stories need interpretation, direction, a space to develop into that does not return to the same, human story. Rather, human history needs a divine supplement – otherwise, how could anyone seeking to feed on its remnants find adequate nourishment?


cross posted at OEinNY

Caninophilia II

After Kzoo, I wrote a post reevaluating my thoughts on animals. A revised version of the reevaluation became my diss's conclusion--epilogue, rather, as that sounds less final to me (since in this usage "epi" = "in addition to," what could be a better encapsulation of supplementarity than epilogos?). I'm defending in a few weeks, in the week after my Brooklyn College job starts. Although I'm able to take a break from dissertatin before the hammer drops on Sept 6th, I'm now in the mode of mad preparation for the 3 courses I'm teaching (Med. Lit., Bible as Lit., and Composition) : in other words, my blog contributions will likely be minimal until I get my footing.

I offer this post as, I suppose, my steward until I return to cast off my wretchedness (can you tell I just reread Sir Orfeo?). I expect that some of you may want to see what your comments wrought on my ideas. For the interested, here you go: a long post, my epilogue, very minimally edited for placement here. If you're tired of all this, or even if not, please do keep on with discussing Eileen's excellent course or keep the fun of the ITMBC4DSoMA going.

---

“Hospitality is the deconstruction of the at-home; deconstruction is hospitality to the other, to the other than oneself, the other than ‘its other,’ to an other who is beyond any ‘its other.'"

Derrida, “Hostipitality.”

“An hous he made of riligioun,
For to singe for Sire Bevoun
And ek for Josian the fre:
God on here saules have pité!
And also for [Bevis’s horse] Arondel
Yif men for eni hors bidde schel." (4613-18)
Bevis of Hampton

“If I am unsatisfied with the notion of a border between two homogeneous species, man on the one side and the animal on the other, it is not in order to claim, stupidly, that there is no limit between ‘animals’ and ‘man’: it is because I maintain that there is more than one limit, that there are many limits.”

Derrida and and Elisabeth Roudinesco, “Violence against Animals.”

My dissertation identifies a dominant method by which humans identified themselves as human in the Middle Ages. In a double process, humans claimed a set of capabilities for themselves—reason, language, authentically upright bodies, and immortal souls—and denied them to animals, which regardless of the differences among animal individuals and animal species, were all construed as fundamentally distinct from, and inferior to, humans. Animal life was finally only biological, as evidenced, for example, in the argument by the thirteenth-century Cistercian Helinand of Froimont that “s’il n’est autre vie, / entre ame a home et ame a truie / n’a donques point de diference” (if there is no other life, then there is no difference at all between the soul of a human and a sow). Yet unmistakable but persistent resemblances between humans and animals baffled human claims to uniqueness. Like animals, humans are made of flesh and blood; each hungers, each defecates, each dies, and the corpses of each rot and turn to dust. Human flesh was reputed to taste like animal flesh; it certainly could be cooked like it. Rational-seeming behavior in animals—for example, the wolf that, according to Albert the Great, had perfected its pig-snatching technique by practicing on a log—especially disturbed human confidence in their unique identity. As Nature observes in the Roman de la Rose, if animals were reasonable, “mal fust aus omes” (17779; it would not be good for humans), since animals might at the very least band together in rebellion against human oppression: “jamais li bel destrier crenu / ne se laisseraient donter, / ne chevaliers aus monter” (17800-2; never would beautifully maned chargers allow themselves to be broken nor to be mounted by knights) and “ja chien ne chat nou serviraient, car senz ome bien cheviraient” (17813-4; no cat or dog would ever serve us, since they can get along well without humans). Worse still, if animals and humans were each reasonable, then humans might be no better than animals: to rephrase Helinand, if there is no difference between the soul of a human and a sow, then there might be no other life.

As I have argued, in the face of such threats, humans established their difference through acts and discourses that subjugate animals. If animal reason would enable them to throw off their bonds, then surely animal degradation demonstrates their irrationality, and human mastery over them demonstrates human rationality. Augustine, for example, answered the question “what proof is there that men are superior to animals” by observing that “animals can be domesticated and tamed by men, but men not at all by animals.” Thus, domesticating, killing, and eating animals were instrumental in human self identification. Indeed, simply valuing human above animal life and producing written discourses that disparaged animals served this purpose. Humans could seal off their humanity from animality by declaring that wolves and other clever animals possessed not reason but only an inferior “estimative sense”; by relegating animal communication to being a mere “oonde”; and even by complaining, as Palemon does in the Knight’s Tale, that “when a beest is deed he hath no peyne / but a man after his deeth moot wepe and pleyne” (I.1319-20). My concern throughout these chapters has been to show that in this system, human identity was an effect of the action of domination, not an essence that preceded, and justified, the act. The centrality to human identity of this dynamic relationship between humans and animals revealed any claim to essential humanity as merely staged. Human identity was therefore constitutively restless, always seeking a foundation that it could never attain. No human could abandon the domination of animals without abandoning human identity, but in a sense, there was no human identity to abandon except the act of domination itself.

At the 43rd International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, in May of 2007, I described this relationship between human identity and the humiliation of animals to account for medieval reports on the supreme deliciousness of human flesh: as I explained, human superiority was apparent even in the flavor of their flesh, and human deaths could be a source of pleasure in a way that animal deaths could not. Thus, when a wolf, having tasted “savoury” and “pleasant” human flesh, refuses to “eat the flesh of other beasts, though [it] should die of hunger,” its pleasure and longing pays tribute to human uniqueness. In response to my paper, Jane Chance first spoke about her cats; during a conversation at a party the next night, James Paxson produced his cell phone, on which he had stored a picture of his dog. Such responses to my argument for human identity and animal degradation are usual, and I have usually dismissed these attestations of love for pets as mystifications of the brutal, fundamental truth of the human power of life and death over animals. After all, few, if any, humans would sacrifice themselves for their pets, despite their love for them; fewer still would sacrifice the life of an unknown animal instead of the life of an unknown human: but humans commonly give their lives for people they love and even for human strangers. Furthermore, as I have argued, the utilitarian calculations that might elevate an animal to equality with a human tend to do so only because the animal possesses to some degree the characteristics of an idealized humanity: this is not so much a system of animal rights as it is a more expansive anthropocentrism.

Lately, I have wanted to reevaluate my approach to the question of human identity. I have sought inspiration not only through a more generous remembrance of people’s love for their pets but also through Donna Haraway’s Companion Species Manifesto, which declares that “we [humans and animals] live with each other in the flesh in ways not exhausted by our ideologies. Stories are much bigger than ideologies. In that is our hope.” Stories are of course a way of promoting and concealing ideologies; but, as Haraway hopes, the individual characters in stories can also overflow the restrictions of ideology and its generalizations. I have thought also of Derrida’s cat in his “The Animal that Therefore I am (more to follow),” which Derrida insists is “a real cat, truly, believe me, a little cat. It isn’t the figure of a cat. It doesn’t silently enter the room as an allegory for all the cats on the earth.” Derrida’s insistence that this cat is this cat removes or preserves it—her, rather (as she is une chatte)—from the undifferentiated, humiliated mass of creatures confined to l’animot. This individual relationship between human and animal may suggest another, less fundamentally violent way for the human to be, or even, as I will finally propose, a way for the human to cease to be altogether.

Of course accounts of such encounters between individual humans and animals are not confined to the present day. Folcuin of Lobbes’ Deeds of the Abbots of Saint Bertin tells the story of the horse of a ninth-century bishop of Thérouanne, also named Folcuin. The horse loved Folcuin so much that “ante eius feretrum preisse” (it went before his bier) at its master’s funeral procession, and “omnem deinceps hominem ferre recusasse, nec passus est post menbra tanti pontificis voluptatibus deservire alicuius hominis” (afterwards it refused to carry all men, nor, because of its great delight in the bishop, would it suffer the limb of any other man). It would be simplistic to proclaim the horse’s love for Folcuin as just another instance of animal subjugation. The horse submits only to the bishop, not to humans in general, and once the bishop dies, it refuses to be mastered at all; it has ceased, then, to occupy the position of an animal. The humans attempt to reestablish a proper role for the horse after its death when they give it as food to the dogs, as this is a disgrace no human corpse should ever suffer. But the horse’s great love for the dead bishop protects even its carcass, since “a nullis illorum est attactus” (it was touched by none of [the dogs]). Finally:

Et merito cadaver eius canes non poterant lacerare, super quem ymnidica cantica Christo decantata erant sepissime. Quod videntes cives, eum humano more sepelierunt, quem nec bestiae nec volucres tangere presumpserunt.

And because of the merit of its carcass, upon which hymns to Christ were so often chanted, the dogs could not mangle it. When the citizens saw this, they gave a human burial to what neither beasts nor birds would presume to touch.

Edit A reader (who can identify him/herself if it wishes) writes, "If the Latin is as you've transcribed it, I think it's likely that 'merito' is an adverb meaning 'deservedly, justly' (Lewis and Short, s. v. 'mereo') and "cadaver" is a neuter nominative or accusative. So the first bit would be something like 'And justly dogs were not able to mangle its corpse.'"

I think also of Yvain and his lion, whose relationship I contrasted with that of the Wild Herdsman and his beasts in Chapter IV. While the Herdsman beats his beasts and considers them incapable of reason, Yvain responds to the lion’s plea for sympathy and companionship as he might have responded to a fellow knight. Soon, Yvain can declare “l’aim come mon cors” (3792; I love it like my own body), and when the lion disobeys Yvain by joining him in the fight to rescue Lunete, the lion knows that its master “l’en ainme plus” (4539; loved it all the more). After the fight, “quant mes sire Yvains voit blecié / son lÿon, molt a correcié / le cuer del vantre” (4543-45; when my lord Yvain saw his lion wounded, his heart was filled with anger), to which Chrétien adds, “et n’a pas tort” (4545; and rightly so). Yvain converts his shield into a litter, and fills it with moss to cushion the lion; he then has the lion healed by the same maidens who tend to his own wounds. This relationship is not only that between human master and servile animal; it seems to be a relationship of companions, one of intense, mutual affection.

As intense as these relationships are, I should not be uncritically enthusiastic. In the story of the horse and the bishop, the horse’s special qualities may simply reflect the sanctity and power of its master. Given the lion’s gestures of fealty before Yvain, the lion’s relationship with Yvain may literally be one of domination. All of these relationships may be only instances of what Cary Wolfe called “the logic of the pet,” “the sole exception, the individual who is exempted from the slaughter in order to vindicate, with exquisite bad faith, a sacrificial structure.” Folcuin of Lobbes implicitly records what happens to other horses: after their master’s death, they are passed to other humans, and after death, they are not honored with burial but rather disgraced by being given as food to other animals. Yvain’s love for the lion does not dissuade Yvain from hunting, killing, and eating other animals. Nevertheless, even if the lives of other animals are not improved by this interspecies love, or, for that matter, by the interspecies love of twenty-first century animals and humans, the relationship between a human and the loved individual animal still bears further analysis. Because the love of the horse for Folcuin removes it from a relationships of domination, because Arondel’s love for Bevis perhaps fits it to be memorialized in prayer, and because Yvain’s concern for his lion outweighs his concern for himself (4558-60), we should do this love the honor of thinking it a site of possibilities, of relationships not available to mere animals or, for that matter, to mere humans.

Such a relationship may be illustrated in a Middle English romance in which the dog Trewe-love buries the corpse of its murdered master, Sir Roger, and eventually tracks down and assaults Roger’s murderer at a noble feast:

[Trewe-Love] starte up verament,
The steward [Roger’s murderer] be the throte he hente:
The hownd wrekyd hys maystyrs dethe.
The stewardys lyfe ys lorne —
There was fewe that rewyd theron
And fewe for hym wepyth. (532-40)

This story is much more than just another story of canine loyalty for its human masters. When Roger’s pregnant wife, Margaret, flees the ambush in which Roger will die, she looks back and “Syr Roger…dydd behold / He hewe on ther bodyes bolde, / Hys hownde halpe hym at nede” (322-24). When Margaret gives birth, she commemorates Trewe-love’s fidelity and courage by christening her son with the dog’s name: hence the name of the romance, Sir Tryamour. This name does not function as a simile, as, for example, in Chrétien de Troyes’ description of Lancelot and Maleagant as fighting “plus fierement que dui sengler” (more fiercely than two boars). Nor is Tryamour’s name an instance of animal degradation; unlike the primitives in “The Former Age,” or like the demonic knight Gowther, forced to eat with dogs, he has not been dishonored through his association with animals. In granting her son the name of a particular animal, her dead husband’s dog, Margaret at once frees the dog Trewe-Love from animal degradation and demands that her son live up to the dog’s reputation. Having become centered around honor wherever it might be found, Sir Tryamour has ceased to be anthropocentric. Honor may be a human quality that Trewe-love exemplifies, but it may well be a canine quality that Tryamour exemplifies. This moment of naming, then, is a far more radical reimagining of the human/animal relationship than anything else I have described so far.

Through each singular creature and relationship I describe in my epilogue I am trying to imagine identities outside the human power of life and death over animals; and, as it should be apparent, I am no longer focused on the Middle Ages, as I am convinced the model of human identity I have described is still prevalent. To reimagine human identity, I return to my introduction, which simultaneously raised and suspended Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of “becoming-animal.” In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari portray a world comprising not subjects but “events, in assemblages that are inseparable from an hour, a season, an atmosphere, an air, a life.” Their paradigmatic example is the “deterritorialization” of a wasp pollinating an orchid, in which the wasp “becomes a liberated piece of the orchid’s reproductive system” and the orchid “becomes the object of an orgasm in the wasp, also liberated from its own reproduction.” In this symbiosis, it is no longer possible to speak of the singular wasp or orchid; it is necessary to speak—to use Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology—of the becoming-orchid of the wasp and the becoming-wasp of the orchid, of the breakdown from molar beings into the molecular becomings of an assemblage. Creatures form alliances with each other in modes of desire that are not driven, as they are in psychoanalytic models, by the insatiable effort to correct or compensate for some lack. The wasp is far from the impossible effort of trying to establish or complete itself by dominating or abandoning itself to the orchid, and vice versa. In short, this is a world in which human and animal identities, and the tyranny of the processes that try to form these identities, are not the only ways of being. We might think of Folcuin and his horse, for example, as having formed a “sacred circuit” in which sanctity and voluptas interpenetrate and join horse and rider to witness to the love of each.

Like Wolfe, Deleuze and Guattari are impatient with love for pets, since they “invite us to regress, draw us into a narcissistic contemplation...anyone who likes cats or dogs is a fool.” But, as Haraway argues, “caninophiliac narcissism,” that is, considering dogs to be childlike sources of unconditional love for humans, and other such precritical apprehensions of human and animal identity are not the only ways for humans and domestic animals to interact; as Harraway asserts, “co-habiting does not mean,” or at least does not necessarily mean, “fuzzy and touchy-feely.” The key to a “postdisenchanted” (to borrow a term from Dinshaw) approach to human and animal identity is to recall the insights of Deleuze and Guattari while still remembering “the very real torment of suffering individuals.” I imagine an approach that acknowledges the violence inherent to forming the two great separate categories of human and animal, that would acknowledge the human reluctance to sacrifice itself for what it identifies as animal, but that would hope for some other way of being with animals. We might try to stop locating ourselves through the humiliation of animals, but this approach would not entail treating pets as surrogate children or extend some form of “human rights” to certain animals.

To dislodge the grandeur and arrogance of human identity, I hope for something better, akin to Derrida’s Lévinasian conception of infinite, impossible hospitality: a way of being with animals and indeed with each other—a category that could in fact include animals—enacted with an awareness of our shared vulnerability, in which no one could act with any certainty that he or she was acting, or not acting, receiving, or not receiving, justly. As Derrida wrote, “If I welcome only what I welcome, what I am ready to welcome, and that I recognize in advance because I expect the coming of the hôte as invited, there is no hospitality.” We should welcome the other without losing our sense of difference from the other; we should apprehend a relationship between humans and animals, and indeed between humans and humans and animals and animals, that allows for multiple points of difference. At the same time, we should lose our certainty that any creature we encounter is an other. By abandoning our presumption of the other creature’s thoughts and character, either in its similarity to our own or its absolute difference, by abandoning our presumption of knowing ourselves, we lose the certainty of our identities. What remains is the imperative to welcome, which is both the beginning of ethics and, as Derrida remarks, of culture itself.

I conclude with Derrida’s cat, which may be the same cat that captures the attention of the camera in the film Derrida by staring out at us and meowing. This is an animal making noise, but it should be heard as something other than mere animal noise, more than an “oonde,” even if we cannot know precisely what the cat intends. We can simply be summoned by the meow to remember Derrida’s love for and indeed his vulnerability and embarrassment, his openness before this one cat. Before this cat, we can lose the certainty of our selves and cease to imagine that the animal is our other, without, however, losing our wonder at the cat’s singularity. In this moment, perhaps we will have ceased to be human, and will have ceased to wish for, and to defend, our human selves.

De amicitia

by J J Cohen

Today our second annual ITMBC4DSoMA, a communal reading of Carolyn Dinshaw's Getting Medieval, comes to its close.

CD's book has passed so thoroughly into the conversations of contemporary medieval studies that it is difficult to visit the text anew. Don't get me wrong: GM has been neither surpassed nor assimilated. But as our posts and discussions here have made clear, the volume continues to be a catalyst for some of the most important interchanges in the profession. Less than a decade after its publication, the book is well on its way to status as a classic.

So, some closing thoughts. What GM most leaves me with is its productive utopianism based in affective, heterogeneous communities. CD writes:

We can make alliances across conventional boundaries. And as we try to recontextualize the debates, to empower different players and audiences, I see the necessity of doing what I am doing here: preaching to the converted. (181)

"The converted," she warns, "is never a single, monolithic category":

Everyone reading this, I would hazard, already believes in academic freedom. But not everyone reading this, I imagine, is queer or queer-friendly ... And (in the spirit of Margery Kempe) all of us -- not just the elect -- can preach: each of us can embrace the project of building coalitions (those postmodern communities). (181, 182)

She concludes her book with what in the Middle Ages would be called a benedicite:

Getting medieval: not undertaking brutal private vengeance in a triumphal and unregulated bloodbath ... not turning from an impure identity to some solidity guaranteed by God ... but using ideas of the past, creating relations with the past, touching in this way in our efforts to build selves and communities now and into the future. (206)

Nine years after reading these lines for the first time, they still leave me dizzy: the vertigo of experiencing temporality in creative and nonlinear ways; the intoxication of their sheer affirmativeness; the (hopeless?) romanticism of believing that we can have a community beyond brutality, vengeance, purifications, boundary guarding -- beyond, that is, what medieval studies can be at its worst: intent on establishing a disciplinary cordon sanitaire, delighting in enforcing a licit ambit and using the anonymity of peer review and other mechanisms of the profession to police that territory.

That is not a vision of medieval studies that will be familiar to many of this blog's readers, thank goodness. Medieval studies is far more congenial now than it was a decade or two ago. Attempts to circumscribe narrowly what the discipline ought to be have not, however, wholly vanished: they are alive and well, and many of us have stories to tell of reader's reports or reviews in journals or comments in blogs. But even though I could tell many such tales myself, I must admit to finding them, ultimately, tiresome. They can come to seem the reality of the field when in fact -- take it from someone who has been working here for sixteen years -- they are only a small fragment of an expansive and, for the most part, convivial discipline.

Mary Kate recently called my attention back to a brilliant essay by Gillian Overing. Composed in 1993, the piece is a response to a paper by Tom Shippey and was delivered immediately after his remarks at an MLA panel. Shippey was, to put it mildly, ungracious towards the works he lingered over and then dismissed. Old English studies, he insisted, was headed in all the wrong directions, with scholars mired in their own narcissism, asking questions to which they were providing the answers. His paper contains statements about Overing's and other scholars' work like:

I often find myself rewriting her sentences ... Isn't this a case of starting with an ideal and turning over a literature till you find a match? ... But as a general rule I would say that any modern investigator who looks back at Old English and finds in it confirmation of a cherished modern thesis should check, and wonder whether this isn't too handy to be true. Also, of course, too familiar to be interesting.

To such an unsympathetic -- not to mention inaccurate -- account of what Language, Sign and Gender in Beowulf attempts or achieves, what is there to say? I suppose, like Kempe, like CD at a pivotal moment, Overing could have said Don't touch me. Who would blame her?

Instead she does something absolutely breathtaking. Mary Kate describes it, spot-on, thus: "in grand style, [she] was amazingly professional in her response ... she used her final paragraph not to excoriate, but as she puts it, to celebrate." I quote some of those words here, because ever since Mary Kate brought them back to me they have been foremost in my mind:

I come to this MLA in an unusual frame of mind--for I am here to celebrate. This session itself, and the reasons which occasion it, are cause for celebration. The developing body of recent critical scholarship in our field presents us with exciting perceptions and challenges, and enlivens and enriches our discipline overall, both our professional exchanges and our work in the classroom. I welcome it, and I would also add "about time." In the not-too-distant past I have been one of those who has lamented--and complained about--the tardy admission of new critical methodologies into the field of Old English. But I have changed my tune, because things have changed; we are changed by this new work. .... I wish to emphasize the connectedness of our work as scholars, and once again, to celebrate the ways in which this new body of scholarship in our field validates and affirms those connections between our present and past academic history, and between our own histories and the texts we study and create.

With their affirmative challenge, Overing's words resonate well with Carolyn's at the close of Getting Medieval. They are laden with possibilities for a feminist-postcolonialist-queerly inclusive future for the field, and they -- not the negative critique and boundary-drawing words to which they responded -- were the true prophecy for the field's best future. The graciousness that Overing's words possess is something that also characterizes CD's writing. We strive for something like it as well at ITM. I would be the first to admit that I often do not succeed. I removed a post recently because of such a failure. But for me it is important that scholarship take risks. Sometimes you will fall flat on your face, and it will hurt like hell. At rare times a book like Getting Medieval will be the yield of your hazard.

So I close, like Gillian Overing, with a celebration ... of friendship, because I find that word better suited to what I attempt here and in my own work than CD's community and coalition. Cicero, one of the many figures who have touched me across time, composed an essay on friendship, De amicitia. Here are some lines that have always been important to me:

When friendship has put itself forth and revealed its light, and has seen and recognized the same radiance in another, it draws near to that glow, and receives in return what the other has to give. From this convergence love [amor], or friendship [amicitia] -- call it what you will -- is ignited. These terms are, after all, equally derived in our language from loving.

Amor/amicitia. You will have gleaned already, readers, that even though we did not know each other well before we started blogging together, we four ITMers have fostered an amity that now lives as much off the blog as on. Recently I wrote to my co-bloggers: "Let some people dislike us. Whatever. We know what we value, and we hold to those values. Primary among these values is friendship, and the best thing about ITM is working and worrying with and celebrating with -- and also, simply, knowing -- you." With Carolyn Dinshaw's closing benediction still ringing in my ears, with Overing and Cicero likewise touching what I have tried to say, let me extend that last sentence and include you, the one who reads these words, whether you comment here or not. Knowing that you form part of an audience that is at times touched by "our efforts to build selves and communities now and into the future" make this enterprise, this work that can sometimes seem without reward, worth every moment spent upon it.

Here is to queer touch. Here is to affirmative challenge. Here is to amicitia, and amor.

Everybody's Reading Dinshaw

by J J Cohen

The Tiny Shriner is deeply absorbed in Getting Medieval. He's seeking "affective relations" and "another kind of 'felaweshipe' across time" (142). He's "using ideas of the past, creating relations with the past, touching in this way the past ... to build selves and communities now and into the future" (206). Are you?

ITMBC4DSoMA begins on Monday. Earlier if one of us gets bored and posts something before then. You have your weekend reading assignment. There will be a quiz. And we don't care if you read the book in 1999. This is 2008, and it is time to revisit the medieval future.