In Romaunce as We Rede

CFP: Teaching Gower

noreply@blogger.com (Kara) — Thu, 17 Aug 2017 13:42:00 +0000

This summer's adventures are coming to an end, but the work goes ever on! A post about summer research travels is coming, but for now, I offer a CFP to those of you who may be working on your fall courses....

CFP: Special Issue, Teaching Gower

The MLA published its Approaches to Teaching the Poetry of John Gower in 2011, starting a crucial conversation about teaching Gower’s works across a range of contexts. This cluster of essays intended for Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching will expand on the work of the 2011 MLA volume. Though considerable progress has been made in bringing Gower’s works into the classroom, Gower is nonetheless underrepresented in anthologies and thus on syllabi, and much less attention has been given to approaches to teaching his works. SMART has expressed initial interest in a cluster of essays, somewhere between three and eight pieces.

We welcome essays taking a range of approaches. Some potential approaches may include teaching Gower’s multilingual and/or multicultural contexts; Gower and the digital humanities; Gower’s work in the context of survey courses; and performative approaches to teaching Gower. We are particularly interested in pieces addressing teaching Gower in the context of the undergraduate classroom, and we invite authors to include practical approaches for doing so.

All pieces should follow the latest Chicago Manual of Style guidelines and otherwise follow SMART’s submission guidelines, available here. Final pieces should be approximately 2500 words, not including notes.

If interested in contributing, please contact kmcshane@ursinus.edu. Full-length drafts will be due no later than 30 December 2017.

Access, The Middle Ages, and You: A Talk for Ursinus College Summer Fellows 2017

noreply@blogger.com (Kara) — Wed, 05 Jul 2017 23:26:00 +0000

This summer, like last year, I am supervising some summer research. Ursinus College has an incredible program to support summer student research fellowships in every discipline: arts, humanities, sciences, social sciences, you name it. Student projects thus summer range from working in labs with worms of various kinds to writing plays and monologues meant to support sexual assault awareness education to digital exhibitions on elements of the College's history. (Spoiler: the last one is my student, shared with an extraordinary colleague of mine.)

As part of the eight-week program, faculty are invited to give lectures on Wednesday afternoons. These talks are sort of a combination of "how did I get here?" and "what do I do?", where faculty talk about their research lives and the paths that brought them to their work. I was asked to speak this summer, and the talk went over quite well - well enough that I thought perhaps I'd share it here. The script with select images appears below. (Sadly, I have cut my ad libbed jokes as well as images of Beinecke Osborn A.11, which I shared with the group in the context of talking about the edition I'm working on.)

~~~~

I want to open up with a question. What comes to mind when I say “medieval”?

The first page of results for a Google Image search for "medieval."

In general, you’re probably thinking of Western Europe – a knight on a horse. And probably, the people you’re picturing are white and Christian. This is a pretty common notion of what the Middle Ages is. As it turns out, it’s not that simple: the entire world existed for that whole thousand years. Not everyone was white, and not everyone was Christian, not everyone was a knight, and not everything worth studying was produced in Western Europe. Being a medievalist means lots of things: it’s a term that applies to people in a huge range of fields, studying a huge range of geographical regions over the span of a thousand or so years. However, inside that bubble, I look like a pretty old-school English literature kind of medievalist: most of my work deals with literature written in England during the fourteenth and fifteen centuries. But what I find most interesting is how England represented other cultures: how English literature presents a wide range of religions, races, and languages, and what those presentations can in turn tell us about England’s sense of itself during that two hundred-ish year period.

This is a sort of weird, oddly specific area of study, and in thinking about what I wanted to say today, I tried to think of way to tell you how I got interested in this weirdly specific stuff and what exactly it is that I try to do. In the process, I realized that the key word for my professional identity is access. So I’m going to break my comments today into three parts around that theme: first, I’m going to talk about how other people helped give me access to the world I’m part of now; second, I’m going to talk about how that idea of access carries over into my research life; and lastly, I’ll wrap up by talking a little bit about and why I think we all need to open up our research lives to bigger audiences.

Part 1: How did we get here?

First: I’m going to narrate you through some of the important mentoring experiences that got me here, which means I need to tell you a little bit about my background. I grew up outside of Providence, Rhode Island in the city of Pawtucket – a place known for dirty water, corrupt politicians, and the Triple A farm team for the Boston Red Sox. My dad worked three jobs for most of my childhood while attending college at night. (He got his bachelor’s degree when I was fourteen.) My mom stayed home with me until I started kindergarten, when she started working as a teaching assistant in the local school district. And then there was me, the child who got so focused on whatever she was reading that she genuinely didn’t hear her parents, say, calling her for dinner. (This was the cause of some good-natured disagreements between me and my dad.)

My dad’s parents lived around the corner, and the first person who taught me about access was my grandmother, Joan. Grandma was one of the first three female clergy in the Episcopal Church in the state of Rhode Island. In the late 1970s, the church started to discuss possibly ordaining women, something that began to happen in the early 1980s. My grandmother had spent most of her adult life working various part-time, so called “pink collar” jobs, raising three kids while my grandfather worked unpredictable hours as a lineman for the electric company. But she’d always felt connected to the church, and she was excited about these new potential possibilities for women. There was just one problem – if she was going to become a priest, she needed a college degree to be able to attend seminary.

So she got one, a couple of classes at a time at the University of Rhode Island. And a few years later, she invited her three grown kids over for dinner. This story predates me, but as my father tells it, it went a little bit like this: Grandma called all three of her children over for dinner one Friday night (and when my grandma told you to do something, you did it.) All five of them sat down around the table in the dining room of the house they had grown up in, the first floor of an old two-story tenement home. Once everyone was sitting down and had been served dinner, my grandmother declared: “Well, I’m going to be living in New York City for a few years. You kids will have to look in on your father.” (New York is home to General Theological Seminary, where she studied with two other women from Rhode Island, making flashcards for their Greek language class that she cheerfully threw away as soon as she possibly could.) My grandfather, to his credit, didn’t need that much looking in on, but he drove four hours every weekend to visit my grandmother in New York City. They used to buy bagels and sit on a bench near Times Square to watch the people go by, every weekend while my grandmother earned her master’s degree and then doctorate in divinity.

Rev. Joan McShane performing a baptism (mine).

My grandmother was an important model to me for a lot of reasons. She was the first person in my family to spend any part of her life living anywhere but Rhode Island (besides military service). But she also taught me something about grabbing opportunities, even opportunities that lead you down unconventional paths. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she faced a lot of resistance, even from close friends, at the idea of a woman priest. People refused to go to her ordination, left the church when she preached, or refused to take communion from her. (There wasn’t even a title for her when she was ordained – in the Episcopal tradition, especially in the 1980s, you usually called clergy “Father so-and-so,” but she sort of had to make her own rules.) But she understood that she was opening doors for more women to come after her, as indeed they have. Access sometimes means you have to kick the door down so you can hold it open for the people behind you.

Now we have to fast forward a few years – to me, high school aged Kara, looking at colleges. I was seventeen with absolutely no idea what I wanted to do. (If this doesn’t sound familiar to some of you, you’re lying.) To complicate things, while I’m not the first person in my family to have a college degree – I follow after Grandma Joan and my dad - I was the first person in my family to go to college in the traditional, post-high-school way. This meant that my family had no idea what we were doing. Financial aid letters were terrifying. Leaving the state was terrifying. Everywhere I applied was no more than an hour from home. So I wound up at a liberal arts college called College of the Holy Cross. And eventually, after dabbling with history and political science and even physics for one memorable semester, I settled on an English major.

But as much as I’d loved books since even before I learned to read them myself, I immediately encountered a problem with my English major. You see, in order to complete it, I had to take two course in literature from before 1800. As far as I was concerned, this amounted to cruel and unusual punishment – what did stuff that was hundreds of years old have to do with people now? And why should I be subjected to it?

Furious, I signed up for a course called “Arthurian Romance.” (It turned out this was a great choice for a lot of reasons. One of the things I hadn’t foreseen was that a friend from my work-study job took that class with me, and now she’s my wife.) I figured that if I had to read all this crappy old stuff, I could at least take the King Arthur course, which at least sounded vaguely cool. And the professor was supposed to be pretty scandalous – she was a feminist, which was pretty wild for my Jesuit college.

The second person who taught me about access was Sarah Stanbury. Professor Stanbury led us through a lot of old literature – I mean a lot, her syllabus was pretty brutal – but she never just answered our questions. (In fact, she almost never answered our questions.) We’d ask her something, and she’d ask more questions. It was infuriating. And so was the literature! We read a work called the Knight of the Cart, by Chretien de Troyes. (It’s a Lancelot and Guinevere story.) But it was like nothing I’d ever read before, because the narrator kept on interjecting, interrupting the story for pages at a time. The story would be moving along – Lancelot goes off on a quest to find Guinevere, who’s been captured by an enemy prince. And then here comes Chretien with a four page discourse on knightly honor and the importance of reputation and the shame of Lancelot sitting in a cart instead of riding a horse. Four pages. I was not impressed.

But I was getting pretty good at the college thing, so I went to office hours. “Why?” I asked Professor Stanbury. “Why won’t Chretien just shut up and tell the story? Why does he think I care about his long, boring digressions about love or honor or whatever?”

And she sat back in her chair, looking thoughtful. “That’s a good question,” she told me. “It sounds like a paper.”

I was still not impressed. And I didn’t really want to write the paper, but I had to write a paper for the class anyway. So I started digging, trying to find out what people thought was going on with medieval narrators.

And then I was hooked. It turned out, I wasn’t the first person with that question. A lot of people had asked it, and written about it. Suddenly there was a conversation going on, and a professor cared what I thought about it. I took a Chaucer class. And if I was doing that, probably, I thought, I should take Shakespeare – I was an English major, after all. I decided to do an honors thesis on Chaucer – mostly so I could keep working with Professor Stanbury - and I realized I didn’t know enough about Chaucer’s time period to understand everything I wanted to. So I took history – and art history, and philosophy, and suddenly I accidentally had a medieval studies minor. Professor Stanbury taught me about access in a few ways – first off, she gave me access to a world I hadn’t realized existed. And she helped me realize that yes, a kid from Pawtucket, Rhode Island, whose parents delivered newspapers on Sunday morning to put her through college, had a place in that world, as a thinker and a researcher and a writer.

But more importantly, she showed me that there was a way to get paid to ask questions, to have conversations about literature and the past. So I went to graduate school at the University of Rochester, and that’s where I got my next lesson in access, from a man named Thomas Hahn.

Tom was my graduate school adviser, the person who supervised my dissertation research. And Tom studied literature I hadn’t realized existed. He studied what he once called in a seminar “the pop culture junk of the Middle Ages”: the stuff that fell outside what people had for years understood as medieval literature. (To make medieval literature a serious pursuit, it was essential to make it absolutely no fun, and scholarly attention went to the “good stuff” – the poetry that was part of what we call the canon, the things that smart people had deemed beautiful and worthy of study.) Sure, Tom taught Chaucer, but he also studied Robin Hood ballads, English romance, medieval women’s writing, and crappy poems that only existed in one copy. Mark Twain reportedly once said that a classic was a book that everyone wants to have read, but no one wants to read. Tom studied the things that people *did* read. Up until that point, I don’t think I realized that was allowed.

It was a simple but powerful idea for me – if you really want to understand the culture that produced a particular kind of literature, you need to understand a range of their cultural products. Imagine what it would be like if you were trying to understand England in the 1990s by reading nothing but the Harry Potter books. They’re great books – a rich, complex world – but they can only give you insight into a tiny part of the whole picture, and you’d probably come away with some completely ridiculous misunderstandings about the time period. Tom’s lesson on access not only brought me into professional academic study – which he did, and has done with tremendous skill for upwards of twenty-five doctoral students – but it taught me about the importance of making that kind of pop culture junk accessible, about opening up the kinds of things we think are worthy of studying. And that, essentially, is what guides my research now.

Part 2: So what exactly do I do here?

I’m part of a larger scholarly movement to crack open what we mean by “the Middle Ages,” working alongside people in all kinds of fields. Most of your professors have a few research projects going on at once, but one of my big ones this summer is an edition of a Middle English poem from the fifteenth century called The Destruction of Jerusalem. There are eleven copies of it in the world – which suggests that probably it was reasonably well-read in the Middle Ages – but no one’s edited a version of it since 1905. (In the sixties, some scholars noted that the 1905 edition was really bad, but no one did anything about it. This is actually great news, because it’s where my collaborator and I come in.)

I’m going to actually read you the summary of the poem I submitted to the press I’m publishing the edition with:

The Destruction of Jerusalem, alternately titled Titus and Vespasian, consists of approximately 5100 rhymed lines. Its somewhat winding narrative recounts the death of Jesus before describing a messenger named Nathan, sent by Pontius Pilate to Rome. Nathan is blown off course, however, and lands in Gascony, where the king Vespasian is suffering from leprosy and a swarm of wasps living in his nose. Nathan’s description of the death and resurrection of Christ leads Vespasian to send a messenger to Jerusalem, and Vespasian’s messenger returns to Gascony with Veronica and her vernicle, the cloth with which she touched Jesus. After he is miraculously healed through the vernicle’s power, Vespasian vows to destroy Christ’s murderers, and he and his son Titus set out with an army for Jerusalem. The rest of the poem describes the seven year siege of the city, the extreme conditions within Jerusalem, and the ruthless treatment of the city’s Jewish inhabitants after the siege ends. The work exists in two major variants: the Short Version follows the trajectory outlined above, while the Long Version includes two major digressions, one on the posthumous travels of Pilate’s corpse, which the earth will not accept after his death, and one on the life of Judas Iscariot, including his incestuous marriage to his mother and eventual suicide.

I’m not kidding – I sent that paragraph to the press.

This poem is, from any modern perspective, weird. It’s inconsistent, graphically violent, appallingly anti-Semitic, and, to top it all off, it’s pretty mediocre as far as poetry goes. It’s also a complete reimaging of actual historical events, the actual siege of Jerusalem by Roman forces that took place from 66-73 CE, a siege sparked by Jewish protests of Roman rule. (Titus and Vespasian were real people: Vespasian was the emperor of Rome from 69-79 CE, and Titus succeeded him.) So if this poem is bad poetry *and* bad history, then what possessed me – and my collaborator, fellow Holy Cross alum Dr. Mark Wright – to do an edition? And what do I even mean by “doing an edition”?

Editions are literally about access. Much though I’d like to, I can’t bring you all to study the original manuscripts with me, and even if I could, it would take a lot of practice before you really knew what to do with them. But by examining them ourselves, Dr. Wright and I can create a version of the text that you can engage with. Let me walk you through the process: we start with manuscripts. For this project, seven of them: there’s one at Yale, at the Beinecke Library; three at the Bodleian Library at Oxford; and three at the British Library in London. There’s also one in New York City, at the Pierpont Morgan Library, that I am hoping to visit. We transcribe the entire poem, copying every letter, weird mistake, as best as we can read them. In the process, we make note of damage to the manuscript, or marginal notes someone has written in, or where there might be illuminated letters meant to indicate section breaks or make it easier for someone to find a passage. Then we compare our transcribed versions to try to find scribal errors in our base text; and then we very gently do what’s called emending the text, correcting those scribal mistakes and noting variations in the different transcriptions. Then we create what’s called a reader’s text. That’s exactly what it sounds like: it’s a version of the poem that a modern reader can interact with in a relatively straightforward way. (So, for example, the letters I and J are often used interchangeably in Middle English, but this is confusing for a modern reader, so we follow the press’s policy of modernizing them.)

A shelf full of METS texts.

The final version looks a little like this. The Middle English Texts Series is a project, fully funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities for the past twenty years, that makes hard-to-find texts that scholars want to teach available in scholarly, inexpensive editions. A team of staff editors at the University of Rochester helps make the work available online, which is especially helpful for scholars in other parts of the world, for whom shipping the books is often cost-prohibitive. (The series has produced over 80 volumes, with many, many more in progress by editors across the world.) In doing this, I’m opening up access to the material of the Middle Ages – simply put, people can’t teach The Destruction of Jerusalem right now, and they will be able to teach it once this version’s published. Transcribing manuscripts is also a way of opening up access: one of the copies of the poem that I’ll be working with in a couple of weeks, at the British Library, hasn’t been transcribed before.

But Dr. Wright and I are also opening up – I hope – our understanding of the Middle Ages. As weird as this poem is – and it’s pretty weird, which is part of why I love it – it has very strong connections to a lot of medieval English literature, especially drama, literature about the Crusades, broader medieval traditions of anti-Semitism, and other works. (It even has a shorter “sister text” called The Siege of Jerusalem, which has gotten a lot of attention from scholars lately, so I think this version of Destruction of Jerusalem will help us better understand the tradition of this poem.) But most importantly, reading The Destruction of Jerusalem helps us understand how medieval people reimagined and reshaped the past through their literature. Why did they create this totally fictionalized account of an actual historical event? What does their version tell us about the values of this poem’s creators? How has this poem influenced our own perceptions of these historical events? I’ve alluded to the fact that the poem is appallingly anti-Semitic and quite violent – it pays a lot of attention to acts of cannibalism, massive piles of smelly corpses, and mass starvation – and I actually think that those details are important, too. We need to read and engage with works of literature that make us uncomfortable – not just for the sake of being uncomfortable, but because they shake up our expectations and help us understand the world we’re living in now.

Part 3: Medievalists and the Twenty-First Century!

This idea of reshaping the past is where I want to end, talking about another interest of mine, medievalism. (Medievalism is basically any reimaging of the Middle Ages created after the Middle Ages. So it covers anything from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poetry to Renaissance Faires to Skyrim to Tolkien.) Outside the scholarly world, the Middle Ages is everywhere. Medievalists hold the dubious honor of getting more random e-mails than people specializing in any other period: nearly every medievalist I know has a story of that time someone e-mailed them (or in the old days, called) to explain how they were related to King Arthur, knew the truth about the real Robin Hood, or were otherwise connected to semi-mythical shenanigans.

Who’s read Chaucer? Who’s seen Game of Thrones? Lord of the Rings? The Netflix Marco Polo series? The new King Arthur movie? The horrible Robin Hood movie from a few years ago? A lot of our modern cultural productions rely on particular ideas about the Middle Ages, and those ideas often don’t include the cultural diversity of the period. One of the other things I do in my scholarly life is serving on the editorial board of an online, open-access journal called Medievally Speaking. The journal provides reviews of medieval-ish things: from books to TV shows to King Arthur cloth diapers. (Not kidding.) Our goal in doing so is to explore why we’re still so fascinated with the Middle Ages – to examine the range of ways in which we repurpose and reconstruct the period and how those reconstructions, in turn, shape today’s world.

In fact, lately something sinister has been happening with how we recycle the Middle Ages in modern society. Scholars and critics have noticed since 2001 how the Middle Ages is invoked to talk about Islam, for example, especially how framing a major world religion as “medieval” has become a way to present it as simultaneously backward and exotic. But something new has happened lately – new and troubling – as the Middle Ages is reimagined as a glorified time of white Christian supremacy. Thus, an idea of the Middle Ages gets deployed over and over, often accompanied by violence. To give only two recent examples: in late 2016, a mosque in Scotland was defaced with Crusader slogans – “deus vult” and “Saracen go home.” In the US, the killer in Portland, Oregon who verbally attacked two women he perceived as Muslim – and then killed two people who came to their defense, seriously injuring a third – likewise invoked the medieval. He reportedly shouted “hail Vinland,” taking his inspiration from the Vinland Sagas, two thirteenth-century Icelandic texts.

Less violent, but no less fascinating, was former FBI director James Comey’s invocation of twelfth-century Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket in his testimony before Congress, when Comey claimed that Donald Trump thought of him as a “meddlesome priest.” The line invokes a quote from the 1964 movie Becket about the Archbishop’s conflicts with King Henry II of England, in which Henry asks if no one will rid him of this meddlesome priest and four knights take him at his word and murder the archbishop. (The line was a later invention – that is, not medieval – as Sara Lipton observes.)

The point here is that all of these are constructions of a Middle Ages that literally doesn’t exist -- it never existed. Except maybe in movies. But as images, they hold a huge amount of power. To be clear, this isn’t a new problem: it’s exactly the same problem that I see in how Destruction of Jerusalem re-imagines the Roman siege of the city, in fact. But it seems to me that it’s an especially urgent problem right now – one that I as a scholar have an obligation and an opportunity to do something about. It’s important to me that I provide access to the medieval world – to students, yes, but also through projects like Medievally Speaking, or in my other hat as a blogger – not so much because facts are important (although they are), but because I believe that we need to think critically about how we reconstruct the past, especially the medieval past. I think examining medievalism tells us more about our own culture – our values, our interests, and our problems – than it does about the Middle Ages. And that’s the point. In understanding what various people imagine the Middle Ages to be, we can better understand their very real, very contemporary agendas.

Okay, but with one or two exceptions, you aren’t medievalists. So where does that leave you? I’m in literature, so I don’t think I can control how you interpret this talk, but here are some things I hope you’ll take away to your own scholarly and creative lives:

Don’t be afraid to kick the door down. (There are opportunities out there for you. Sometimes things fall into your lap, and that’s fantastic. Sometimes they don’t. Kick the door down even when people don’t understand why you’re doing what you’re doing – and don’t forget to hold it open for the people behind you.)
Try something you’re certain you’ll hate. (First off, this is literally what college is for. But more importantly, you never know how that class that sounds completely horrible will shape who you become.)
We can’t always see the ways that our research might matter when we start out. That’s okay. (Obviously I didn’t become a medievalist so I could challenge people’s invocation of crusader slogans in 2017.) But you should still think seriously about why other people need your research and how you can get it out into the world. (I was so inspired by your presentations early in the summer – each of you are doing really important, inspiring, valuable work. Knowing how and why it’s important, and thinking about how to tell other people it’s important, will make you a better researcher – but it will also inspire you in turn to keep going on the long days.)

At the risk of ending with a cliché “get out there and save the world,” I have to admit that I’m an optimist. I believe that research matters – questions matter. So I’m grateful to all of you for your work this summer, pursuing questions that matter to you, and for this opportunity to share some of the ones that matter to me. Get out there and save the world.

CFP: New Chaucer Society 2018

noreply@blogger.com (Kara) — Wed, 15 Feb 2017 18:14:00 +0000

I'm delighted to report that my radio silence has been productive. There are conference papers in the works, teaching is happening, and the spring 2017 semester is well underway. Of particular interest, I hope, is that the New Chaucer Society is planning for the 2018 Congress, to be held in Toronto. I enthusiastically share the panel that my colleague Jeffery Stoyanoff (Spring Hill College) and I are seeking submissions for:

25. The Object In/Of History
Organizers: Kara L. McShane, klmcshane@gmail.com; Jeffery G. Stoyanoff, jstoyanoff@shc.edu
Format: Paper Panel
History traditionally privileges the narrative of anthropocentric society, and thus in any discussion of literature and history we usually find ourselves engaging the elements of literature that also privilege that narrative. Contemporary literary theory, however, has made radical changes to the assumption of anthropocentrism as the default perspective in medieval literature. In particular, Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and Object Oriented Ontology (OOO) have led medievalists to fundamentally revise our understanding of the medieval world. These theories ask us to look at associations between objects and, perhaps most importantly, to realize that humans need not be part of the action, the relationship, or the world at all. This panel, then, seeks submissions that explore these moments in literature where we see the objects in/of history.

Submissions must be sent through the official NCS format: more details are available here. Whether it's this panel or another, I hope to see many of you in Toronto!

Looking Back at Year One

noreply@blogger.com (Kara) — Tue, 04 Oct 2016 18:14:00 +0000

This fall marks the start of my second year on the tenure track. This means that the newest element of my job is that I’m not “new” anymore – I have colleagues starting their first year, and I can answer at least some of the questions they are encountering for the first time. I know what policies need to go on my syllabus. I know where to find (most) things, and I’ve met the majority of our English majors. I even have “repeat offenders,” students who have signed up for a second (or third! or fourth!) course with me. In many ways, of course, I am still quite new – taking on new course preps and even some committee work while fiercely carving out time in the week to research and write. As I prepare my materials for initial review, I’ve had space to be reflective about what went well last year, what I wish I’d realized, and what my still-limited experience has taught me already.

Many people with far more experience than me have offered excellent advice for new faculty members, but now that most of us are a month (or more!) into the semester, I thought I would share the best advice I was given in my own first year. It’s deceptively simple, but perhaps especially important as the rush of mid-semester looms:

You don’t earn tenure in a year.

This is certainly obvious, but I think it bears repeating for many of us who have come off the current market. Given the overabundance of pieces detailing the humanities in crisis and the dismal outcomes for humanities PhDs, as well as watching beloved friends and colleagues struggle through fear, anxiety, and depression on the market, I think those of us who find ourselves in that shiny new Assistant Professor position are sometimes not quite sure how it happened. When I got my position, I certainly felt relief and joy, but a tiny piece of me was also certain some mistake had been made – I got that elusive tenure-track position? At an institution I really like? With supportive colleagues in my department and across the college? I have to assume I wasn’t – and am not – the only new faculty member to arrive on campus not entirely sure it isn’t all a wild dream of some kind, amazed that it was my name on the office door, on the faculty ID, on the campus parking pass. I think it’s tempting to feel that you have to continue to prove you deserve the job, even once it’s yours.

But while the tenure clock often feels short, it’s a longer game than it first seems. So here’s what “you don’t earn tenure in a year” means:

No one expects you to have your book in hand, hot off the press by January. (Unless, of course, it was already at the press before you arrived. On the other hand, if you successfully get your book in hand by the end of your first semester, PLEASE e-mail me and tell me how you have done this.)
No one expects you to know everything. Your colleagues are aware that you are adjusting to a new institutional context, new students, and a new home. All of them did it, too.
No one expects you will adjust magically without any hiccups or questions. Some of them will be small, such as how to fix the copier. Some might be bigger, and that’s okay, too.

The first year – my first year – was exciting, wonderful, exhausting, and overwhelming in turns. It was usually more than one of those things at once. You should, as much as you’re able to, enjoy it. Enjoy meeting your new students, especially majors. Enjoy the moment when you don’t have to look at the MLA job list the instant it drops. Perhaps more importantly, be a listening ear and a supportive reader for those who do.

Be strategic. You’re probably eager to get engaged, and that’s wonderful. But you can’t do everything – which I have discovered from trying! Consider how the new commitments you’re taking on fit with your long-term plans. Run new opportunities by senior colleagues who can help you think through what will move you forward and what will devour your time.
Do things on campus. Go to events, socials, campus theater productions, whatever. This is the best way to learn the culture, and it can also give you a broad sense of what kinds of cool things are happening on campus.
Meet people. You need mentors, co-conspirators in your own cohort, and friends. Your department might assign you a mentor – mine did, and she is marvelous – but find others, as well, including people who aren’t in your home department. If you can work with your office door open, keep your office door open. Befriend the department admin. (Mine likes cookies.) See if there’s support for research on campus, such as faculty writing groups. If not, try starting one.
Do things off campus. Sign up for Groupon-like services in your new neighborhood as a way to find restaurants and things to do. Find your new doctor, gym, salon, and the like. If things go as you hope, you're going to be living here for a while.

Monuments, memorials, & legacy

noreply@blogger.com (Kara) — Wed, 14 Sep 2016 12:17:00 +0000

During my nine days in London this summer in and around the inestimable NCS Congress, I was strongly reminded that memorials, especially graves, are everywhere. This realization is not, if you’ll forgive the pun, ground-breaking. Earth is old, and the people who have lived on it have long been concerned about how they will be remembered. I think I noticed it afresh in part because of the turn my research has been taking: I have been caught up in thinking about memorials and collective memory in Middle English literature over the past year as I reconsider how the dissertation-that-was is slowly morphing into the book-to-be.

And so: memorials. I spent part of a day on a pilgrimage of sorts to Southwark Cathedral. If you haven’t visited, you should – Southwark is a beautiful church, and Karen and I were lucky enough to be there while the organist was practicing. We explored the church and the gardens and the neighboring market all morning, then returned on Sunday to attend services there. The point of the trip, though, was to visit an old friend by the name of John Gower, the poet who has been a companion, a comfort, and an occasional aggravation to me since my first semester in graduate school. (As a sidenote: some of my earliest conference presentations were on Gower’s works, and I spent several months writing a chapter on Gower’s Visio Angliae that never made it into my dissertation. I find his work beautiful, compelling, powerful, and frustrating, and I return to it often: in fact, this upcoming year, I am working with my first independent study student, who is working on Gower’s Confessio Amantis.)

Selfie with John Gower: a photo I think many of us working in Middle English literature have taken.

Gower’s tomb is obviously invested in legacy, and it entwines literary and literal afterlives. Gower’s massive pillow, here obscured by my head, is made of his three major works, their names given in Latin. The inscription again emphasizes Gower’s poetic work: he is described first as a celebrated English poet (“anglorum poeta celeberrimus”) and then as benefactor to the building that houses his tomb. It seems to me that John Gower gets legacy. The tomb is trying to do for Gower what the opening lines of the Confessio Amantis seek to do for the work in question, that is, they put Gower’s work into the context of a broader canon:

Of hem that writen ous tofore
The bokes duelle, and we therfore
Ben tawht of that was write tho:
Forthi good is that we also
In oure tyme among ous hiere
Do wryte of newe som matiere,
Essampled of these olde wyse,
So that it myhte in such a wyse,
Whan we ben dede and elleswhere,
Beleve to the worldes eere
In tyme comende after this. (Confessio Amantis, Prol.1-11)

The “newe” thing in the reader’s hands thus fits into a perfect lineage: it emerges from old writings, then moves forward to inform “tyme comende.”

Yet what is obscured by this memorial? Well, to begin with, the rest of Gower’s work: his short Latin and French poetry and the English “In Praise of Peace” go unmemorialized, much as they often go unread. (Not that there are hordes of medievalists reading the Vox Clamantis or the Speculum Meditantis – unfortunately, I say, but that is perhaps a post for another time.) The monument to Gower’s work is thus partial, incomplete. It doesn’t capture the poet’s whole literary corpus – only the works that are themselves monumental. In fact, it doesn’t contain the poet’s physical corpus, either: the literary present tense means that Gower is always off doing something in the many articles and books written about his literary work.

A monument is a physical construction of history, but it can only be partial. Monuments require a context, a story: inscriptions are meant to help, but they only take us so far. Some Middle English literary monuments try to be complete: lengthy inscriptions capture an episode, a prophesy, some nugget of the story. The past gives the present much-needed context: in Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, the grave of Sir Patryse, who dies an untimely death through a poisoned fruit, reads: “Here lyeth sir Patryse of Irelonde, slayne by Sir Pynell le Saveaige that enpoysynde appelis to have slayne Sir Gawayne, and by myssefortune sir Patryse ete one of the applis, and than suddeynly he braste.” Thus, the inscription memorializes Sir Patrick himself, but it also preserves the circumstances of his death. Further, it emphasizes Guinevere’s innocence in that death for the future readers, since the tomb also includes a description of the trial by combat that proved she was not complicit in the murder (Malory, Works 621, lines 12-20). While Patryse’s memorial seems to feature quite a lengthy text, other literary monuments prove inaccessible: the “roynyshe” golden writing in St. Erkenwald troubles those gathered at St. Paul’s Cathedral precisely because it cannot be read, though all the physical signs suggest the person this tomb memorializes is important and should be known. While Sir Patryse’s grave tells the story of his death (if not many details of his life), the judge’s tomb in Erkenwald’s needs a narrative – the writing needs miraculous, posthumous glossing by the very figure it is meant to memorialize.

These monuments, it seems to me, are entangled with writing itself as a medium. The paradox and the power of the memorial is the same as that of writing: it can’t capture everything. As the burned manuscript means the medieval document is lost forever, so the misplaced notebook, the to-do list we accidentally wash, and the hard drive crash remind us that "writing it down" is no guarantee of survival. At the same time, sometimes writing preserves too much: debates about Gower’s recensions of the Confessio Amantis are ongoing, and we cannot know which one(s) Gower wanted in circulation.

While at NCS, I heard R. F. Yeager’s presentation on Gower’s afterlife in Reformation England. He opened the talk by comparing Gower’s monument to Chaucer’s, and he pointed out that Gower didn’t fare so well: the tomb is now restored, but evidently poor Gower had his nose broken off at one point, among other damages. Perhaps not so celebrated, then. (Access, too, is an interesting question: As M. W. Bychowski noted in her Facebook reflections post-conference, you can see Gower for free, but visiting Chaucer is a somewhat more costly enterprise.) Gower’s work long suffered a similar fate: extracts from the Confessio first appeared in the ninth of the Norton Anthology of British Literature, published in 2012. And yet, this summer I visited Gower’s restored monument, and next year I hope to return to the UK to join colleagues and friends for the fourth International John Gower Society conference, to be held in conjunction with the Early Book Society conference at Durham University.

Preservation – of books, of reputations, even of monuments – is always at the mercy of other’s judgments and interests, no matter how well we plan for it.

And a new era for In Romaunce begins!

noreply@blogger.com (Leila K. Norako) — Fri, 05 Aug 2016 21:37:00 +0000

I started this blog several years ago, inspired by an array of exciting public work being done by medievalists on the blogosphere. Since 2010, it has been a space for me to share and test-drive ideas I wasn't ready to pursue in (or that wouldn't fit the generic requirements of) article/chapter/conference paper forms. It has been an integral space for me as grad student, adjunct, and postdoc as a result, and I am so grateful for the support the blog has gotten from all its readers!

Shortly after creating In Romaunce, I started to feel as though the blog would be more generative -- not to mention fun! -- if it had more voices than just my own, and so I asked my good friend Kristi Castleberry if she'd like to become a co-author. I am grateful beyond words that she said yes. I could not have asked for a more generous, insightful, hilarious, and kind co-conspirator. I have had such a fantastic time working with her in this space, and my writing (both here and elsewhere) is so much better because of her friendship and collegial spirit. Transitions like these always bring about some wistfulness, but I know that Kristi and I will be co-conspiring for years to come if not here, then elsewhere!

In the Middle was and is a very special source of inspiration for me, and so I am nothing short of thrilled and delighted to be joining forces with Jeffrey, Karl, Jonathan, and Mary Kate as Blogger #5. But before I officially hoist the sails and head over to ITM, I want to share with all of you some truly exciting news about In Romaunce: it's new blogger!

It is a complete delight to say that Kara McShane -- a dear friend and brilliant colleague -- will now be the co-blogger at In Romaunce. She does fascinating work with Middle English romance, travel writing, medievalism, and the digital humanities, and I cannot wait to see what she writes about here. Please join me in welcoming her!

Kara L. McShane is Assistant Professor of English at Ursinus College, where she specializes in medieval literature and digital humanities. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Rochester in 2014. Her research interests include Middle English romance and dream vision, travel writing, cultural translation, and digital pedagogy; she is especially interested in the intersections between writing and the vernacular in medieval English culture.

Her work has appeared in the South Atlantic Review, The Once and Future Classroom, and Studies in Medievalism. She is presently at work on her first book, tentatively titled Exotic Documents and Vernacular Anxieties in Late Medieval England. In it, she examines instances of non-English writing across a range of Middle English narratives, arguing that these moments of writing create space for authors to express anxieties about writing as a means of memorialization and about the vernacular as a medium. The fascination with writing within Middle English literature, she argues, is central to understanding the relationship between language and national identity.

Kara’s interest in the development of English identity in the Middle Ages has led very naturally to an interest in medievalism, particularly how “the medieval” is deployed to address contemporary social and political issues. She is the general editor of Visualizing Chaucer, a Robbins Library Digital Project, and has contributed to The Camelot Project. She also serves as an assistant editor for medievally speaking, an open-access review journal supported by the International Society for the Study of Medievalism.
As “the medievalist” of her department, Kara teaches on all manner of medieval topics. Recent offerings have included courses on medieval & early modern travel writing, medieval women, and medieval romance. She also teaches a course called Structure of the English Language, which combines advanced grammar and history of English and is quite a lot of fun.

Kara shares her home and her fascination with all things medieval with her wife Karen, three chinchillas, and a grumpy but very handsome cat named Severus.

Kara, with Gower.

On NCS London and Orkney: Some Thoughts on Material History and Conviviality

noreply@blogger.com (Leila K. Norako) — Tue, 02 Aug 2016 20:17:00 +0000

As many/most know at this point, I'm now blogger #5 at In The Middle! The write-up below on NCS London and Orkney kind of ballooned in the last 24 hours, so I'll be writing a *separate* post (which will appear very soon -- likely tomorrow) with details on my move to In the Middle and on the fantastic person who will be the new co-blogger here at In Romaunce. More soon, but for now, some thoughts on NCS London, Orkney, "things material," and convivial scholarship.

*****

Between the NCS London conference and a brief but fulfilling trip to Orkney, the past few weeks have been a blur in the best of ways. The NCS conference was absolutely spectacular. So many meetings of friends old and new, fantastic sessions and plenaries, the joy seeing Kristi’s and my Narrative Conduit sessions come together as beautifully as they did, and a series of outings that ranged from a tour of the medieval Thames (more on that in a moment!) to the rare opportunity to see the Book of Margery Kempe and the Shewings of Julian of Norwich side by side (at an exhibit on Voice at the Wellcome Collection) to the concluding “pilgrimage” to Canterbury. I am so profoundly grateful to all who made this conference possible – it was, from start to finish, a wildly generative and innervating gathering, and it did so much to renew my energy and enthusiasm for all that I’m working on at the moment. Between the move and the intensity of the job search, I’d been feeling my momentum flagging in the weeks leading up to the trip, but I’ve come away from the conference feeling, as I always do after these gatherings, a much-needed surge of excitement for projects well underway, and for projects I hope to embark on in the not-too-distant future.

There is so much to write about, but I think I’ll focus these next few paragraphs on one particular, but enduring theme of the trip: the importance of interweaving material history/materiality into what I do as a literary scholar. Several happenings over the past two weeks brought home to me the importance of the material – how the spaces and places that we encounter in our studies of the Middle Ages can be made all the more vivid by bearing witness to them in tactile ways.

The tour of Medieval London and the Thames was the first of such happenings. Shortly after Kristi and I organized our session on Narrative Conduits, it occurred to me that getting to wander around together and be guided through the medieval parts of the city and the river might help to amplify our conversations. I was directly inspired by the glacier tour that Jeffrey J. Cohen organized for the Ice session presenters at NCS Iceland (you can read all about it here). That tour so beautifully informed and inflected the conversations that developed in our sessions, and I was hopeful that organizing a tour of medieval London might do the same for Kristi’s and my sessions this year.

Gustav Milne, walking us down a medieval road in Cheapside.

We were lucky enough – through a series of fortunate events – to have the incomparable Gustav Milne lead us on a tour of medieval London for three hours the day before the conference started. He was an extraordinary guide, and he began our tour at the Museum of London, showing us numerous artifacts that ranged from Anglo-Saxon pottery, to a clinker-built ship fragment (the etchings on which proved the numeric literacy of the shipbuilders), to a series of pilgrim souvenir badges that told the story of St. Thomas a Beckett. From there, we wandered briskly all over town, where he showed us all manner of things: vestiges of the medieval city wall; narrow medieval city roads; the place in Cheapside where Thomas a Beckett was likely born; ruins of medieval parish churches; the Vintner’s Hall (roundabouts where Chaucer would have been born); the Guild Hall – site of a medieval marketplace and, before that, a Roman amphitheater, the location of which is now marked by a curving black line on the ground; the site of the medieval London Bridge; glimpses across the river of Southwark; and, in closing, the site of Chaucer’s Custom House, where he worked as a comptroller and likely wrote the Canterbury Tales. The tour also included a trip to the Thames’ foreshore, where we got to hunt for shards of medieval and Roman pottery and tile. We wandered in and around vestiges of the medieval wharf, and Gustav was kind enough to identify and date what we found. I was stunned by how easy it was to find these sorts of things. There were little bits of them everywhere you looked! This particular portion of the trip, coupled with our stop at the site of the Custom House were especially powerful and moving. I found myself grateful to be reminded, so palpably, of the material reality of Chaucer’s London, especially since it can be easy to lose sight of those sorts of details as you attend to all that he wrote. I am, needless to say, looking forward all the more to teaching the Canterbury Tales and Troilus this fall, medieval pottery shards and photos of the tour in hand!

My findings, which included part of a large

medieval jug handle, part of a medieval

peg tile, and shards of glazed medieval pottery.

Remnants of the medieval wharf along
the Thames' foreshore.

Near the site of the Customs House. Gustav recited the opening

lines of the General Prologue, and reminded us that Chaucer

likely wrote the Canterbury Tales while at work there.

(photo by Jeffrey J. Cohen)

The tour reminded me, in short, of how valuable it can be to attend to the material reality of the culture that produces the literature we study, and it subsequently got me thinking about future projects. At present, I’ve got five out of six book chapters drafted, and it’s looking more and more as though I might be able to get a complete manuscript together by the end of next summer/early Fall. I’ve generated a few ideas for a subsequent major project for a while now, and have found myself going back and forth in the past several months about which one to pursue. I think I’ll always gravitate back to the literature of crusading, and to matters of Otherness and alterity in medieval literature, but I’m feeling a need right now to branch into other areas once this crusades book is realized. And, I’ll confess, I’ve been looking for an excuse to get back to work on my work on “animate books” in Chaucer’s poetry for a while now. So! Thanks to this incredibly tour (for which I cannot thank Gustav enough!), the energy of the NCS conference, and the much-needed validation and support of several friends, I’ve decided to put my energies into a book project on materialism and Chaucer once I’ve got a complete manuscript of Crusading Imaginary. I’ll save the details for later, but I am beyond excited about it, and it is currently serving as a much-needed “carrot” as I make my way through chapter revisions!

The trip to the Orkneys brought home the significance of material history all the more – and how helpful it can be to situate literature in its landscape. Kristi and I galavanted around the islands for about five days, and encountered Pictish artifacts, Neolithic stone circles and burial cairns, Viking settlement ruins, Viking graffiti *inside* Neolithic burial cairns, and we also had the privilege of listening to a phenomenal story-teller tell a series of traditional Orcadian folktales – stories viscerally tied to the landscape and traditions of these islands. I knew before going – thanks to Leah Haught’s work on the Orkney boys in Malory -- that Orkney was a bit of a liminal space. Because of its dual allegiance to the kings of Scotland and Norway, it was as Norse as it was Scottish in the Middle Ages, and I was curious to see how much of that liminality still remained. As it turns out, the Orcadians pride themselves on their Norse ancestry, and so much of what we encountered — the folktales, the richly layered material history of the place, the keen attempts to preserve that history — demonstrated as much.

Maeshowe.

The power of material history was especially prevalent at Maeshowe, the last place we visited before heading back to London. Following our guide, we half-crawled our way into the 5,000 year old neolithic burial mound, and then stood as a group in semi-darkness. Our guide told us the cairn’s story, starting with theories of how the Neolithic people managed to drag its massive stones to this spot. She then recounted how the mound was broken into by the Norsemen, many of whom decided to do what so many people feel moved to do in such places: carve their name. In this case, they carved their names in runes, and often wrote other things about themselves as well. There are references to crusaders (“Jerusalem-men broke this mound”), attractive women (“Ingigerth is the most beautiful,” which is accompanied by a drooling dog to stress the point), boasts (“Eyjolf Kolbeinson carved these runes high up”; “The man who is most skilled in runes west of the ocean carved these runes . . .”); and the names of recognizable figures such as Ragnar Lothbrok. Aside from the references to crusading (which both surprised and amazed me given my current work on viking crusaders), the most striking graffiti was the drawing of the Maeshowe "dragon" and its accompanying otter and coiled serpent. Our guide made a compelling case for the dragon not being a dragon at all, but rather a wolf, and a very specific wolf at that: Fenrir. The presence of the other animals supports this theory: the otter could be Otr, killed by Loki in one of many famous myths about the trickster God, and the serpent could, in turn, be Jormungand – the world serpent and, like Fenrir, Loki’s offspring.

The Maeshowe "dragon."
Photo by Charles Tait

As I'm sure you can imagine, Kristi and I gestured very excitedly to one another the entire time, much to the amusement of the non-medievalists in our midst, I think — but these runes were utterly fascinating to behold. They correspond with the description of Maeshowe (or Orkahaugr) in the Orkneyinga saga, and they have so much to tell us – in however fragmented a way -- about the Norsemen who wrote them. They are consistently hilarious and viscerally human, and they represent the largest collection of runic inscriptions (read: viking graffiti) outside Scandinavia proper. It was nothing short of incredible to stand in this space for as long as we did and witness up close a vivid example of richly imbricated history, and to see first-hand one of the major landmarks that features so prominently in Orkneyinga saga. We had similar experiences earlier on in the trip – our journey to Birsay for instance, a tidal island that features prominently in Orkneyinga saga as well, where the ruins of a Viking settlement (with some stray Pictish ruins in the mix) can be found; or our time spent inside the Dwarfie stane, a neolithic tomb carved out of a single, enormous glacial erratic. It too was covered in old graffiti (in this case 18th and 19th century travelers), and we spent ample time huddled inside the carved out cave, examining the inscriptions and (on the recommendation of the guide we met at Birsay), humming low notes to feel the walls reverberate and "hum back" -- among the most eery things I have ever experienced. But I think if I had to pick a single example that really brought home the value of coming into contact with a literary landscape – in this case, that of the Orkneyinga saga – it would without question be the experience of standing in Maeshowe.

Needless to say, I've come away from this trip with a renewed commitment to situating literature alongside its material history and within its particular landscape, and I have to confess: I am sorely tempted to create a course on the literature of the Orkneys to put this to practice in the classroom -- it would be a perfect place to teach a class about the ways in which literature springs from a particular cultural landscape.

In closing, I came away from these two weeks incredibly grateful to be a part of this field. Every day of the NCS conference promised an array of meetings (however brief!) with warm and enthusiastic colleagues, with good friends old (and new!), and an array of deeply generative conversations and presentations. So much conviviality, and so many commitments to make our field more open and inclusive. As a result, I came away from this journey with renewed energy for my own work but also a renewed sense of optimism for where we are headed as a community. Cheers, then, to our merry and electric band of interswervists -- I am already counting the days to NCS Toronto!

CFP for Kalamazoo 2017: Assembling Arthur

noreply@blogger.com (Leila K. Norako) — Sat, 09 Jul 2016 08:41:00 +0000

Thrilled to announce that my good friend Leah Haught (University of West Georgia) and yours truly (The University of Washington, starting this Fall) have gotten a roundtable session approved for ICMS 2017. Called "Assembling Arthur," it will invite scholars to consider ways in which reading Arthurian texts "compilationally" (a term borrowed from Arthur Bahr's work) might invite new interpretive possibilities to emerge, especially in terms of how we teach Arthurian materials.

You can find the full abstract below! If interested, please send abstracts to Leah and myself (lhhaught@gmail.com and lknorako@gmail.com) before September 15th:

Assembling Arthur

When we teach classes on the Arthurian tradition, many of us rely on anthologies such as James Wilhelm’s The Romance of Arthur or collections such as the William Kibler and Carleton Carroll edition of Chrétien de Troyes’ “complete” Arthurian Romances for the Penguin Classics Series. While indispensable to such courses, these assemblages present Arthurian texts in ways vastly different from how they appear in medieval manuscripts. Many medieval Arthurian texts, for instance, survive in a single manuscript alongside non-Arthurian writings and images from a wide array of diverse traditions and styles. Indeed, even when a single text is extant in more than one manuscript or a single manuscript includes more than one Arthurian text, the different materials surrounding these contributions to the larger legend highlight the numerous interpretive potentialities associated with Arthuriana instead of advancing a fixed meaning for a given contribution. Drawing on Arthur Bahr’s recent suggestion that literary value can be continuously (re)discovered among the interchanges between “codicological form and textual content” (Fragments and Assemblages 2013), this Round Table seeks to explore Arthurian manuscripts, broadly defined, as compilations. What insights are gained about individual texts and/or the larger legend as a whole when we accept Bahr’s invitation to read “compilationally”? How might such exchanges between codicology and formalism open up new avenues for future study of Arthuriana? And how might accounting for the complex realities of the Arthurian manuscript tradition in the classroom invite our students to participate in these alternate modes of critical engagement?

CFP for "Women at Sea" Symposium

noreply@blogger.com (Kristi J. Castleberry) — Wed, 03 Feb 2016 20:49:00 +0000

I am excited to announce that Roberta Magnani, Rachel Moss, and I are organizing a one-day symposium on the topic of "Women at Sea," which will take place on July 1st at the lovely National Waterfront Museum in Swansea, Wales. You can find the symposium website here. Please take a look at our call for papers, and please share this CFP with others who might be interested. We welcome papers from various disciplines, as well as creative pieces, and we're excited to see the many ways in which people might respond to the topic.

Symposium: Women at Sea

National Waterfront Museum, Swansea, Wales

July 1, 2016

Call for Papers

Keynote Speakers: Dorothy Kim and Jonathan Hsy

Countless women float through the waters of medieval narrative. In romance, Constance is pushed repeatedly into the waves without a rudder, often with an infant in her arms. Hagiography gives us Mary Magdalene’s journey to spread Christianity, sometimes with fate guiding her ship and other times with a captain and crew to do the sailing. Egeria makes a pilgrimage across the Mediterranean in the 4th century, and Margery Kempe travels from England to Jerusalem in the 15th. These women at sea populate the realms of literature and history, as well as the shadowy space between fact and fiction.

Tales of women at sea call our attention to questions of agency. The sea can seem to be dominated by men in economic and martial terms, and the woman at sea is often set adrift by men who on land have ultimate power over her. But perhaps at sea, a woman enters a more generative and transformative space. The woman at sea is frequently unmoored, lost, vulnerable, her direction chosen by wind and fate. Yet the sea may also open up a more feminine, queer, imaginative space: the woman adrift in a place of transformation, negotiation and transition in which she can re-cast her sense of self.

The sea is a place where boundaries are no longer visible, where there are no direct paths. The sea is its own space (and the largest on the planet), but it also overlaps with land. It is outside of national realms, but functions as a conduit between those realms. And while the edge of the ocean is a boundary, the open sea seems boundless. It defies linearity. Thus, women in oceanic narratives can inhabit a different temporality than is available in narratives defined by land. They enter an exceptional space, a place where bodies need not be territories.

This symposium seeks presentations from all disciplines, including creative responses and innovative re-imaginings that put medieval narratives in dialogue with current empowering or traumatic experiences of women at sea. Please submit abstracts of approximately 300 words to womenatseasymposium@swansea.ac.uk by 26 February 2016.

Loving the Alien: On David Bowie, Imbricated Time, and the Crusades

noreply@blogger.com (Leila K. Norako) — Mon, 11 Jan 2016 22:13:00 +0000

There are so many things I should be working on right now, but I can't stop thinking about David Bowie and his passing. As I wrote elsewhere, his music has inflected so much of my life and has been a constant source of inspiration. So many, many fond memories are tied to his songs in some way.

But one of the biggest surprises for me as a lifelong fan was when I discovered his song "Loving the Alien," while researching pop culture references to the crusades. I was working on an exhibit for Robbins Library entitled The Crusades and Western Cultural Imagination, and was amazed to find a Bowie song that talked about holy war, templars, saracens, and the cyclic nature of cultural and religious violence. It was a song that, it seems to me anyway, imbricates cultural moments as a gesture of both frustration and near despair over how little things seem to have changed—especially in terms of how religious fervor is so frequently harnessed for violent ends.

The first version I encountered was the stripped down arrangement performed on the Reality Tour, and it nearly brought me to tears. I will confess that the original music video, by contrast, baffled me to the point of weeping laughter. Though, having just watched it again, I think it's a deliberately unsettling response to contemporary events and to the concept of religion's capacity to inspire violence and oppression. . . consider the moment when he stands as a crusader caught on fire, for instance. But that's the thing I perhaps love most about Bowie as an artist: his ability always to unsettle me as an eager listener and receiver of his work. I love the fact that I oftentimes don't "get" (or sometimes even like) what he's produced on a first, second, or seventeenth listen or viewing. It's always signaled to me that he was unafraid to take his art in directions that ran the risk of alienation and failure. And that, just as much as the songs and albums I've come to adore and cherish, never ceases to inspire me in my own work.

As he said before he performed "Loving the Alien" on the DVD performance from the Reality Tour, he felt that the 2003 arrangement was "the way it should maybe always have been done," and so I'll share that version with you here. I think it's worth noting the cultural moment in which this arrangement was performed too: Dublin, 2003. Just two years after 9/11 and just months after the invasion of Iraq, a war that—based on erstwhile quotes from President Bush, patches worn by certain members of the U.S. armed forces, and many other examples—was regularly feared to be a form of crusading. Given that, this particular arrangement can—and perhaps should—be viewed as a powerful response to its cultural moment. A call, perhaps, to remember that history—as some unknown person once said—tends all too often to rhyme.

RIP, Mr. Bowie. You are so very missed.

Crusading in Disney's Robin Hood

noreply@blogger.com (Leila K. Norako) — Thu, 12 Nov 2015 18:58:00 +0000

My toddler has been madly in love with Disney's Robin Hood for some time now. So much so, in fact, that she starts dancing if my husband and I start humming or singing Alan-a-Dale's opening song. Needless to say, I've watched the cartoon more than few times over the past several months, and in the process, I noticed something rather interesting/peculiar about the way in which the Third Crusade is imagined and configured therein.

In the cartoon, Richard I is doing what he so often does in various iterations of the Robin Hood story: he's off fighting in the Holy Land, and his absence gives the wicked (but ultimately feckless) Prince John an opportunity to usurp the crown. We know this (albeit deeply fictive) part of the story from an early point in the narrative. However, the actual reason for his crusade is revealed in a conversation between Prince John and Sir Hiss while the two make their way to Nottingham:

The "real reason," then, for the Third Crusade -- as the film tells it -- is Sir Hiss's hypnotic powers, his ability to brainwash the King into waging holy war. I chatted about this scene with my friend and colleague Bronwen (who also has a toddler quite taken with the film) and she offered that this was a way, perhaps, to "excuse" the English king for waging a religious war that might have appeared vexed at best to contemporary audiences.

This theory seems to be confirmed by the way the film itself opens. The first shot is of a book that opens to the following text:

Long ago, good King Richard of England departed for the holy land on a great crusade. During his absence, Prince John his greedy and treacherous brother, usurped the crown. Robin Hood was the people's only hope. He robbed from the rich to feed the poor. He was beloved by all the people of England. Robin and his merry men hid in Sherwood Forest to...

Alan-a-Dale takes over the narration at this point, however, and tells his audience that

there's been a heap of legends and tall tales... about Robin Hood. All different too. Well, we folks of the animal kingdom have our own version. It's the story of what really happened in Sherwood Forest. (emphasis mine)

In other words, Alan-a-Dale suggests here that the "book version" to which we're introduced, and in which he ambles about with his lute, is merely one of those "legends and tall tales." As a result, we're invited to question all other iterations of the story, and this invitation creates a space in which to place the aforementioned revelation about Richard's crusade. By implication, then, we're encouraged to understand that Richard's crusade, despite what that first page of the book might tell us, was hardly "great" at all.

However, a slight wrinkle in this theory presents itself in Little John's boisterous song far later in the film, where he sings of "bonny good King Richard lead[ing] the great crusade he's on." The good people of Nottingham and Sherwood forest, then, perceive the crusade to be virtuous, and clearly have no idea either here (or at the end when Richard returns to England) that the whole campaign was waged because the king was hypnotized. The king fighting a holy war, in other words, doesn't seem to vex our heroes in the slightest.

So what can we make of all of this? Admittedly, Robin Hood was a rather hastily-constructed cartoon, so I do have my doubts over the amount of time the writers spent laboring over this particular plot point. Nevertheless, the representation of crusading (or at least the motivations for it), struck me as compelling, because the contradictory and disjointed allusions to Richard's crusade seem to reveal, if nothing else, a discomfort with the matter of crusading — and perhaps even a desire to find a way to tell a children's version of this story and maintain the heroic status of Richard and Robin Hood without implicitly championing crusading and holy war.

Steinway vs. Ikea

noreply@blogger.com (Leila K. Norako) — Fri, 07 Aug 2015 18:25:00 +0000

It's been a busy few days/weeks, hence the blog dormancy. I've been slogging away on the book project, and most recently had the immense pleasure of contributing to postmedieval Forum V: The Public Middle Ages. I'll be writing much more about the forum in an upcoming post, but for now wanted to jot down some brief (somewhat rage-induced) thoughts about an article I stumbled upon the other day:

I chanced upon this interview with Sebastian Thrun, Udacity's CEO, a little while back, and it bothered me deeply for a whole host of reasons. Don't get me wrong. I am hardly anti-online ed, having taught at an online institution for several years and having seen the tangible good it did to the many servicepersons who otherwise would have had a near-to-impossible time getting a college degree. But I developed -- over the course of my time there -- a deep aversion to and distrust of said institution's privileging of quantifiable vs. qualifiable teaching methodologies, not to mention its treatment of students as consumers who can and should dictate the ins and outs of their educational experience -- which resulted, for instance, in the mandatory intro to college-level writing course being shaved down to a mere 8-weeks because, I was told, students just didn't want to take a longer version.

My unease with quantifiable teaching methods being imposed on humanities courses, the quickness with which slow learning is dismissed, and the "student-as-consumer" perspective translates directly into my concerns over Thrun's approach to education. I could go on and on, but will just leave a few thoughts-in-progress here for now:

1. Thrun states in this article that he wants Udacity to be the Uber of education. Both of these companies, "use a network of freelancers paid per piece of work that they perform." He's perfectly content to boast that one such freelancer makes $11k/month at this work, but I'd be very interested to know how the rest of his corps of "adjuncts" fare, especially since we know from recent reports how poorly Uber drivers fare in their own work. He seems either oblivious to or callously dismissive of the ethical implications of this kind of educational model.

2. Thrun also compares Udacity to Ikea, saying the following:

He claims it would be harder to develop such a business in another part of the world and certainly not in an existing academic institution. “People in education are risk averse,” he says. “They want to build Steinways. I like to think of us having the impact Ikea has.”

First, the metaphor doesn't even work. Steinway doesn't build furniture, and Ikea sure as hell doesn't mass produce pianos. But even if that was the case, what he's essentially saying is this: because "academics" value slow and meticulous learning and craftsmanship, he doesn't want them involved. He wants people willing to sign up for his vision of swift, mass-produced education. Udacity's name for its degrees -- nanodegrees -- all but speaks for itself. Now, I'm not trying to vilify what Udacity offers in any wholesale way. There are several examples of how these nanodegrees have served Udacity's students well. I harbor concerns, however, over how his perspective reflects broader attitudes towards higher education -- how it stands as such a clear symptom of much larger and wider-reaching problems, problems that have a direct impact on how the humanities are being devalued at present.

3. The description of academics as "risk-averse" all but makes me froth at the mouth. Not only does it imply/assume that corporate business models can and should be imposed on academia writ large, but it also is wildly insulting in an even broader sense. It creates a hierarchy where the speed with which a degree is earned takes precedence over what is learned along the way, where the end result is of greater value than the learning process, where the quantifiable is always, already of greater worth than the qualifiable.

This points to the central concern I have with Thrun and his mogul/corporate approach to education. Nowhere in this interview does he express an interest in the student's experience at Udacity (beyond the speed with which they earn their nanodegrees). And nowhere is there any consideration of the ethics of the work that they are doing and will do as they venture into their careers. To that end, in labeling brick-and-mortar academics as "risk-averse," he demonstrates his complete misunderstanding (I want so much to believe it's not intentional disregard) for the ways in which slow learning cultivates empathy and, as Marion Turner stresses so beautifully, "encourages us constantly to question assumptions; in particular, perhaps, to question the idea that any part of how we live and how we are is natural, or self-evidently superior."

I sympathize with students attending college right now -- the pressure to make their time in college vocational is real, and I understand all too well why they don't feel as free to pursue their intellectual interests as I did back in the early 2000's. But, I've said it several times here and on social media, and I'll keep adding my voice to the chorus of humanists until I'm blue in the face: the humanities, and the slow learning that they require, teach us how to be decent human beings. They might not teach you how to code, or lead directly to making $100k right out of college, but they can, if you let them, enhance your capacity to move through the world more ethically. We need entrepreneurs, progressive thinkers, start-ups, and boom towns, to be sure. But we also need those same people/organizations/spaces to think past their own proverbial noses to consider the broader ramifications of their actions. I see that lacking out here in Silicon Valley in so many, many ways, which is why I feel such a sense of urgency in my current work (i.e. teaching humanities-based critical thinking courses to incoming freshmen at Stanford, many of whom will never take another humanities course in their time here). And to be blunt, if Thrun had any understanding of what's actually at stake in a college education, and what professors regularly put on the line when they commit to their teaching, he might have hesitated before using that term.

On Game of Thrones and Rape Culture

noreply@blogger.com (Leila K. Norako) — Wed, 17 Jun 2015 17:53:00 +0000

I haven't been able to stop thinking about the way in which the women in this particular season of Game of Thrones have been treated, and I started writing this post several weeks back. I waited (with equal doses of curiosity and dread) to see where things would go, and now that the season finale has aired and I've had a few days to mull things over a bit more, I'm happy to share my thoughts-in-progress on Sansa's now-infamous wedding night (as well a few other moments from the season). Like many, I responded to Sansa's rape in Episode 6 of the current Game of Thrones season with outrage:

For the record, I remain unconvinced by the arguments that Martin's story is simply grittier and more realistic than other high fantasy works and that the fetishistic brutalization of women is therefore necessary in some way. I also stand by my initial argument that this particular scene should not have focused so squarely on Theon's trauma over Sansa's. However, in the past week, and especially after watching the remaining episodes, I've come to reconsider my initial position that this scene is wholly unnecessary. My initial response stemmed from a burgeoning frustration with the show's tendency (which many have already noted) either to invent women solely for the purpose of brutalizing them and/or driving the plots of male characters (i.e. Ros or, to a certain extent, Karsi -- the wildling woman in episode 8) or to turn consensual sex into rape. Sansa's rape marks at least the third major instance of invented rape in the adapted show, and at the time it felt like simple fetishization. I realize that different mediums call for different approaches — that what works on the page does not necessarily translate to the screen. But one of the things I will give Martin credit for is his tendency -- though his world is deeply unkind to its women -- to avoid fetishizing their brutal treatment by leaving at least the majority of the rapes offscreen. This does not minimize their significance but rather, at least from my vantage point, gives them even more impact. These moments and others (I'm thinking in particular of the "discovery" of Reek's identity in the books and how we learn in passing of all he endured before we encounter him) work in a way quite similar to the film Children of Men. As Slavoj Zizek observed of it,

For me, Children of Men, I would say that the true focus ofthe film is there in the background, and it's crucial to leave it as a background. Here comes the true art, Cuaron's. It's the paradox of what I would call this anamorphosis. If you look at the thing too directly at the oppressive social dimension, you don't see it. You can see it in an oblique way only if it remains in the background.

What he's referring to is the film's masterful ability to keep viewers from becoming inured to the horrors of the world the protagonists inhabit. Unlike V for Vendetta, another dystopian film roughly contemporary to Children of Men, the nihilism and absurdity of the world is rarely foregrounded. As a result, it leaves a much deeper, lasting impression. I see Martin doing something similar in his books, and I know for a fact (again, using Children of Men and, hell, even Mad Max: Fury Road as examples) that film can successfully deploy/encourage similar forms of anamorphosis. The Game of Thrones franchise, however, regularly fails to do so.

Nevertheless, the more I've thought about Sansa's Rape and -- more recently -- the Braavos whore house, and the more thoughtful op-eds I've read (especially the one by Amanda Marcott) the more I started to reconsider and question my outrage.

As I interrogating my own reactions to Sansa's rape, it occurred to me that her story arc in the show directly parallels that of Daenerys' in Season 1. Granted, there are notable differences between Khal Drogo and Ramsey Snow, but when you boil the stories down to their essentials, the arcs are all but identical: a young (underage?) woman, subject to the ambitions of the powerful men around her, is forced into marrying a terrifying man she does not love. She is then raped on her wedding night, and is subject to nightly rapes and brutalizations thereafter. She must find ways of reacquiring agency, but she has to do so within the confines of an abusive relationship with wildly uneven power dynamics. Episode 8 made the parallels even clearer, with emphasis placed on Sansa's bruised and battered body and on her entrapment and powerlessness. This runs parallel to the scenes with Daenerys that follow her wedding night, where we bear witness to Khal Drogo forcing himself on her each night, and where Dany's only escape lies in her ability to change him. Let's just pause for a moment to consider how wildly problematic THAT line of thinking is when played out in the real world.

The thing is, while some did voice outrage over Daenerys' rape when the first season aired, that outrage pales in comparison to what we witnessed in reaction to Sansa's rape. And what is more, the scenes with Dany are far more graphic: we actually see more than one post-wedding night rape in that first season, whereas all of Sansa's rapes occur off-screen (at least so far). Added to which, the abusive dynamic is heavily romanticized. We are encouraged – especially since Khal Drogo and Daenery’s “relationship” morphs into a romance as the season continues – to ignore the horrors of Daenery’s marriage as we are in Sansa’s. I think there's also much to be said about the racial/racist implications at play here as well (Khal Drogo might be a rapist, but he and his fellow Dothraki are overtly depicted as simple barbarians who "just don't know better" -- but that's a post for another day).

The same sort of thing happened after both episode nine and ten aired. Most of those commenting about Episode 9, for instance, focused on Shireen's death (and not without reason), but I saw little to no commentary on Meryn Trant as serial pedophile (and child-murderer?). While I found Shireen's death traumatizing to watch, my stomach turned all the more once I realized where Meryn Trant's and Arya's story arc was headed. To recap: he asks the madam in (thinly) veiled terms for an underage girl. She does not have one, but dashes out of the room and enters with a hastily rouged and clearly confused young girl. The girl is roughly the same age and size as Arya, who we are made to fear for given her proximity to Trant and the unfolding scene. Trant roughly escorts the girl out of the room, but not before demanding that the woman have a "fresh" one for him the next day. We are made here to wonder whether he simply wants another virgin to brutalize or whether he plans to kill each child he rapes.

What is simultaneously horrifying and effective about this scene is how it plays on audiences emotional responses and draws our empathetic limitations into sharp relief. We are encouraged here to pity the girl being led away by Trant but to feel relief that Arya's avoided that same fate. In other words, we are ultimately encouraged, I think, to question (even chide ourselves) for our ability to care for one more than the other.

There's reason to think that the showrunners are thinking along these lines. Consider the following from James Hibbard's interview with David Weiss:

When I asked Weiss the question that fans surely have tonight: “How could you do that to Shireen?” Weiss philosophically noted you could “flip that question” into a larger debate about how we’re all highly selective about which characters deserve our empathy. Stannis has been burning people alive for seemingly trivial reasons since season 2, yet we’ve still tended to regard him as a great leader—at least, by Westeros standards.

“It’s like a two-tiered system,” he noted. “If a superhero knocks over a building and there are 5,000 people in the building that we can presume are now dead, does it matter? Because they’re not people we know. But if one dog we like gets run over by a car, it’s the worst thing we’ve we’ve ever seen. I totally understand where that visceral reaction comes from. I have that same reaction. There’s also something shitty about that. So instead of saying, ‘How could you do this to somebody you know and care about?’ maybe when it’s happening to somebody we don’t know so well, maybe then it should hit us all a bit harder.”

Given all of this, our tendency towards disproportionate outrage for some characters over others should give us pause. Why were we (and I include myself here) so much more outraged by Sansa's rape over Daenerys’? Why did we care about Shireen more than the others burned by Stannis and Melisandre? Why Arya over the unnamed girls brutalized by Meryn Trant? The answer, I think, lies in the dynamics of contemporary rape culture. When Dany is raped in Season 1, we had barely gotten to know her. It occurs in Episode 1. We never hear more than the screams of the others sacrificed to the Red God. And the child gifted to Meryn Trant is only onscreen for a minute or two. We have journeyed far longer with Sansa, Shireen, and Arya however, and have born witness to their many traumas. We know them. We know their history, and we know it well. And because of this, we care more.

This should disturb us, because by allowing ourselves to be more outraged on their behalf, we're essentially reinacting a version of the problematic "wives, daughters, mothers" rhetoric that abounds at the moment -- that even our President espouses. When we allow some rapes and brutalizations to upset us more than others, we're caving into the idea that we only need to care about women insofar as we know them, insofar as they are relevant to us.

What the disproportionate reactions reveal, then, is that we don't need to look further back than the past few weeks for examples of rape culture being perpetuated most palpably by the very people (again, including myself here) who are trying to decry it. As Kathleen Kennedy observes (and if you haven't already, read her fantastic post on Cersei, too):

Consent mattered in medieval culture just as it does in modern culture. Yet modern rape statistics demand that we recognize that it still happens with alarming frequency. The debate on whether Sansa Stark's rape was worth showing hides both how modern medieval culture was and how medieval our own culture still is. As Sarah Mesle in the Los Angeles Review of Books wrote, "This episode of Game of Thrones does to viewers what the world so often does to women: It mistakes presence for consent." The sexual reality of Game of Thrones is, in fact, our own.

The Game of Thrones franchise might have a lot to answer for in terms of how it treats its women, in other words, but so do we.

Middle English Romance and Virtual Pilgrimage

noreply@blogger.com (Leila K. Norako) — Sat, 13 Jun 2015 21:01:00 +0000

I promised, in my last post, to write a bit about the session in which I participated back in K'zoo and -- now that final grades have been posted -- I'm finally able to sit down and do just that!

To say I had a marvelous time participating in the session, entitled "Sacred and Secular Road Trips in Middle English Romance," would be an understatement. Presided over by Eve Salisbury and meticulously organized by Gina Marie Hurley, David Eugene Clark, and Justin Marie Baker, the session examined a variety of texts invested in matters of journeying. I was both struck and delighted by the way in which our papers converged with one another and how this led to a lively, fruitful, and energetic Q&A period. I took so much away from our conversations, but one question in particular led me to a revised way of thinking about Isumbras (the romance I just can't quit no matter how hard I might try). An audience member asked, in response to Elizabeth Williamsen's paper (which focused on Isumbras's topography), why there might be so little in the way of landscape descriptions once Isumbras arrives in the Levant -- why, in other words, the hills and other topographical features Williamsen noted disappear at this point in the narrative. As we talked, I offered that this leveling might correspond with something I noted a while back in my article on Isumbras: that Isumbras, especially in versions that refer to the eponymous hero and his sons conquering "three lands" in Christ's name, evokes a T-O map and suggests that the entire world has thus been conquered and Christianized. The leveling of topography, then, might facilitate this kind of visual/symbolic cueing. I never would have thought to consider the landscape of Isumbras and tie it to that portion of my own argument in this way had it not been for Williamsen's paper and the question that it inspired, so I remain deeply grateful for both.

It was also a complete pleasure getting the chance to present alongside my longtime friend and co-blogger, Kristi. She's published her wonderful paper in an earlier post, and I can't wait to see where she goes from here with the topic.

As for my own paper, the ideas are largely nascent and, especially in light of all that still want/need to tease out and all that I took away from the session, I might try to get this into article form sometime in the future. For now though, I'm happy to share my initial ideas on the topic and would more than welcome any thoughts and comments that you might have!

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Virtual Pilgrimage and Middle English Romance

In 1358, Giovanni Mandelli invited Petrarch on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Fears of either dying or becoming ill at sea caused him to decline the offer, and Petrarch decided instead to go virtual. He composed an intinerary to the Holy Land in lieu of a physical journey, in which he announces his plans to “complete a very long journey in a concise style” (trans. Cachey, 1.0). Petrarch’s Itinerarium is often cited as an example of the widespread medieval phenomenon of virtual pilgrimage, a practice rooted in the traditions of the Desert Fathers and one that became enduringly popular in the cultural landscape of medieval Europe.

While reenacted pilgrimages (such as those created and conducted by the convent of St. Katherine’s at Augsburg) were popular, written virtual pilgrimages enjoyed considerable pervasiveness.¹ As Suzanne M. Yeager observes, several well known medieval English writers (Margery Kempe, Julian of Norwich, Richard Role, Walter Hilton) participated in this tradition (14). It can even be glimpsed in the writings of Matthew Paris who, according to Daniel Connolly, intended the Chronica Majora, especially its maps, to be an “imaginative peregrination for readers who never intended to leave home.” Moreover, lists of holy sites in Rome and the Holy Land, such as the one penned by John Capgrave, were likely used in both devotional and practical contexts (Swanson, 240). And even prayer rolls like the Blairs 9 roll devoted to the arma Christi could be used for virtual pilgrimage purposes as well (see Newhauser and Russell).

This form of meditative travel, as Suzanne Yeager and others have observed, was considered as valid as actual peregrinations, and I would offer that this legitimization of virtual travel affected the representation of pilgrimage (martial or otherwise) in late Middle English literature. Moreover, I suspect that these texts could, in and of themselves, have offered meditative opportunities that run parallel to, and might even incorporate aspects of, the practice of virtual pilgrimage. The generic valence of romances such as Sir Isumbras, Sir Gowther, and Sir Perceval of Galles have long been noted, and I offer here that one reason for their fluidity may lie in their allusions to and encouragement of virtual, meditative travel. In other words, I argue here that the inclusion of pilgrimage contributed to the generic valence of these romances, which allowed them to circulate easily in both secular and devotional contexts. These texts, in the end, suggest that these very reading practices – for entertainment and for spiritual instruction -- were far from mutually exclusive.

On the surface, Sir Gowther, Sir Perceval of Galles, and Sir Isumbras – a small sampling of Middle English romance that include pilgrimage in their narratives – have wildly different plots, and I’ll just briefly summarize them so that their treatment of pilgrimage is made as clear as possible. Gowther tells the story of an unlikely hero: a child sired by an incubus (the same one, it turns out, who sired Merlin) who grows with unnatural, diabolic speed, bites off the nipples of wet nurses, and rapes and murders nuns. Upon discovering his demonic parentage, he vows to learn “anodur lare” and embarks on a pilgrimage to Rome. The Pope orders him to wander as a mute pilgrim who can only eat from the mouths of dogs until he receives word that he has been redeemed. His salvific journey culminates in a three-day tournament against a marauding Sultan, and at lay’s end he is hailed as a hero, an emperor, and a worker of miracles.

Like Gowther, Sir Perceval of Galles positions its eponymous hero outside the bounds of acceptable chivalric society; he is, however, a “fool of the field” — a far more harmless (however clueless) nobleman who must learn how to behave in courtly society, and, among other things, learn to distinguish a pregnant mare from a stallion. His story centers around this process of acculturation, one that includes a battle against a marauding Sultan, marriage to a noble woman (the queen of Maydenlande) and, crucially, his quest (cast very much as a form of pilgrimage) to reunite and rescue his mother, who he abandoned in order to reinter the civilized world. His story ends in the Holy Land, where he dies fighting on crusade, but only after he has successfully established his kingdom and helped restore his mother’s sanity.

Isumbras, by contrast, tells the story of a knight in good social standing at the outset of the hero’s eponymous romance, but he is punished by God for prioritizing secular over spiritual gains. He loses all of his worldly possessions (after choosing to suffer early rather than late in his life for his sins), and he and his family deliberately embark on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, one that gradually takes the shape of a crusade. Isumbras’ sons are lost to him along the way (kidnapped either marauding beasts or an angel depending on the version), and his wife is kidnapped by a Sultan on his way to lay siege to Christian territory. Isumbras’s redemptive journey requires that he defeat . . . wait for it . . . a marauding Sultan, seek absolution in the Holy Land itself and then reunite with his wife in the Levant. He becomes a king of the now-deceased Sultan’s territory, and his sons miraculously appear as he and his wife are about to die in battle against an army of 30,000 rebellious Saracen subjects. The family destroys the army and goes on to conquer other Levantine lands in Christ’s name.

Though their plots are quite different, their treatment of pilgrimage and redemption are strikingly convergent. Each of our heroes, for instance, decides at a crucial juncture to embark on a pilgrimage. Gowther makes this decision about a third of the way into the lay, and all that comes before it works to emphasize the unlikeliness, if not miraculousness, of this moment. The narrative lurches forward with considerable speed at this point, with Gowther’s pilgrimage to Rome barely described before he arrives and meets with the Pope. Given the gravity of his crimes, this swift pilgrimage account fails to satisfy (it’s not enough to attone for what he’s done) and what follows is hardly surprising: the Pope promises him absolution, but only after Gowther continues his penitent journey and earns his redemption. Isumbras, by contrast, vows to journey to Jerusalem far earlier in the narrative. He is introduced to us as a valiant and honorable lord, but it he is warned in the opening passage of the romance that he has privileged earthly gain overmuch. Isumbras, after losing all of his possessions, kneels down, carves a cross into his shoulder and vows to journey to Jerusalem with his family. Perceval of Galles, in turn, embarks on a pilgrimage to rescue his mother shortly after defending Maidenland against a Sultan (which results in his marrying the besieged princess and becoming both a knight of Arthur’s court and a king). His journey takes the form of a penitential pilgrimage as away for atoning for his negligence; he insists both on wearing goatskin rather than armor and on walking on foot rather than riding his horse.

All three heroes, in other words, are called to jettison their earthly identities in order to completely atone for their sins. Perceval, as this last passage suggests, eradicates what Jeffrey Cohen identifies as the “inhuman circuit” of horse, armor, and man, that makes him a knight in the first place; Gowther journeys to Rome on a pilgrimage for the sole intent of ridding himself of and atoning for his diabolic identity and is forced into muteness and near-complete subservience in order to guarantee his redemption, and Isumbras loses everything save the clothes on his back, with both him and his family turned into begging pilgrims, bereft of home and social status. Each hero, however, eventually reforges their identity – quite literally for Isumbras (he joins a troupe of smithies and crafts a set of armor for himself) -- in ways complementary to the salvation that they seek. And I think it is crucial that this process of redemption and ascension back up the social ladder hinges, for all three heroes, on martial victories over a Sultan. This move allows each romance to echo a particular brand of virtual pilgrimage: “the crusade of the soul,” a term coined by Suzanne Yeager to refer to texts that actively encourage virtual pilgrims to “besiege Jerusalem in their minds” (13). Crusades to Jerusalem were all but impossible to launch during the time in which these romances circulated, and as I have observed elsewhere (and as others have observed too), this was also a time that witnessed the encroachment of the Turkish Empire on the borders of Eastern Christendom, which resulted in considerable amounts of anxiety throughout Western Europe during the 14^th and 15^th centuries. These moments then -- Perceval’s defeat of the Sultan and his battle with the Sultan’s monstrous brother, Gowther’s crusade in miniature against a Sultan, one where we literally witness his purification through the changing colors (black, to red, to white) of his armor; to Isumbras’ numerous encounters and victories over Saracen enemies – encourage a similar form of meditative holy war by inviting audiences to envision and vicariously participate in such victories.

In addition to being cast – either partially or completely – as crusades, each of the hero’s journeys takes the form of a labyrinth, which is, in and of itself a form of virtual pilgrimage. When you first enter a labyrinth, like the one on the floor of Chartres cathedral, you walk directly towards the center only to be swiftly swung out to the very borders of the circle. You think that your journey will be an easy one, only to find yourself at the periphery. This process repeats itself over and over until, at long last, you reach the center and the end of your journey. Unlike a maze, a labyrinth offers up no tricks or false endings. There is only one, inexorable conclusion to your wandering, you just have to persevere to reach it. The same, in many respects can be said of each of the romances I just described. In Gowther, for instance, the narrator hastily tells of Gowther learning of his demonic parentage, his decision to embark on a pilgrimage, and his meeting in Rome with the pope – all of these events take places in a mere 71 lines, whereas the next four hundred lines or so are devoted to his continued penitential journey, which lurches forwards and backwards as he wends his way towards salvation.

Perceval’s process of acculturation and, importantly, his process of correctly sorting out his spiritual and earthly priorities mirrors this labyrinthine structure as well. He consistently makes headway in his efforts to adhere to court customs and behaviors in the early episodes of the romance, only to make additional blunders that require correcting. And even once he’s established himself as a husband, member of Arthur’s court, and king (having defeated a Sultan and been knighted by Arthur), he remembers his abandoned mother and must jettison all of these courtly accouterments and statuses in order to right the wrongs he did to her. And then, once he recovers his mother and reinstates her at his royal court, he journeys off to die on crusade in the Holy Land. In short, Perceval’s is a journey towards a proper sense of spiritual and earthly prioritization. He begins his journey squarely focused on the latter and, through a series of forward and backwards movements, wends his way towards the former. His would be an incomplete journey/pilgrimage without his crusade and death quest to the Holy Land.

Of the three, Isumbras perhaps mirrors the labyrinth most closely. While his life — initially so calm and peaceful (even complacent) — is rapidly destabilized, the journey he undertakes inexorably leads him to a state of absolution, a spiritual prosperity mirrored in his ascension to kingship and the reunion of his family. Like a wanderer in the labyrinth, Isumbras is flung to the far edge of his faith – he, like Gowther, is forced into a state of complete abjection -- and has to slowly find his way back to his center, and further, figure out what belongs in that center to begin with. Along the way, he – like Perceval and Gowther -- models the process of a penitent pilgrim for audiences of the story, and offers opportunities for reflection on the tensions between the earthly and spiritual priorities that all men must reckon with.

Each of these romances, which do overlap with one another in extant manuscripts (both Isumbras and Perceval of Galles appear in the Lincoln Thornton, and both Isumbras and Gowther appear in MS Advocates 19.3.1), proffer stories of spiritual redemption that stress – through a variety of convergent episodes and themes – the need to keep ones’ spiritual and earthly priorities in check. They also reveal that no one – whether the most diabolical or the most upstanding – can escape the need to embark on this kind of journey. Their stories are inherently disruptive, because – while, based on the provenances of the MSS that include them, they would have been read in secular mercantile/courtly setting -- they point an ultimately condemning finger at the trappings of earthly (and specifically noble/courtly) life. They are, in this sense, operating in ways quite similar to the Grail Quest in Malory’s Morte, which is ultimately a death quest that – through its requirement that Knight’s seek spiritual over earthly gain – obliterates the gravitational pull that Camelot had earlier enjoyed. Each, in the end, proffers a similar message – through their emphasis on pilgrimage and its redemptive potential -- about how crucial it is not to hold secular gains higher than the spiritual.

1 For more on the nuns of Augsburg and their virtual pilgrimage practices, see Ehrenschwendtner's "Virtual Pilgrimages." ^↩

References:

Cachey, Theodore J. (ed. and trans.). Petrarch's Guide to the Holy Land: Itinerary to the Sepulcher of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002.

Connolly, Daniel. "Imagined Pilgrimage in the Itinerary Maps of Matthew Paris." The Art Bulletin (December 1999): 598-622.

Ehrenschwendtner, Marie-Luise. "Virtual Pilgrimages: Enclosure and the Practice of Piety at St. Katherine's Convent, Augsburg." The Journal of Ecclesiastical History (January 2009): 45-73.

Newhauser, Richard C. and Arthur J. Russell. "Mapping Virtual Pilgrimage in an Early Fifteenth Century Arma Christi Roll." In The Arma Christi in Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture. Eds. Lisa H. Cooper and Andrea Denny-Brown. Burlington: Ashgate, 2014. Pp. 83-112.

Swanson, R. N. Indulgences in Late Medieval England: Passports to Paradise? Cambridge UP, 2011.

Yeager, Suzanne M. Jerusalem in Medieval Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008.

Writing Across Time and Space: My Paper about Elaine of Astolat at Kalamazoo 2015

noreply@blogger.com (Kristi J. Castleberry) — Tue, 26 May 2015 16:14:00 +0000

*Before you read my Kalamazoo post, check out Kate's excellent Kalamazoo 2015 Round-up.*

I am just now recovering from the joyful exhaustion that characterizes the International Congress on Medieval Studies. Each year brings a more hectic schedule of events and reunions to the congress, with more people to see and more people I don't see enough. It always reminds me how lucky I am to be a part of such a wonderful and inclusive academic community. This congress was especially delightful and especially tiring. It's been a busy year for me so far. For those who don't yet know, I have some exciting news -- I've accepted a tenure-track position at Lyndon State College in Vermont, and I am focusing on finishing my dissertation and preparing to move. Perhaps, then, it makes sense that my Kalamazoo paper dealt with anxieties about writing and traveling. I presented on Elaine of Astolat, a woman who goes to great lengths to ensure that her words travel where/how she wants them to even after her death. I presented on a panel called "Sacred and Secular Road Trips in Middle English Romance," presided over by Eve Salisbury and organized by David Eugene Clark, Gina Marie Hurley, and Justin Lynn Barker. My panel was fantastic, featuring my co-blogger Leila (Kate) Norako, who presented on Virtual Pilgrimage, Elizabeth A. Williamsen, who presented on Sir Isumbras, and Amber Dove-Clark, who presented on Guy of Warwick.

My paper was called "Ascolat to Camelot, Guildford to Winchester: Narrative Travel in Malory’s Morte d'Arthur," and I've only just begin thinking on the topic. The q and a really gave me a lot of ideas, so the paper I give you here only represents my initial sketches on the geotemporalty in Elaine's story. Any ideas, questions, or critiques would be very welcome.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Arthur Rackham image (1917)
courtesy of the Camelot Project

Elaine of Astolat may be dead, but she seems to be everywhere. Even as I speak, she is wending her watery way across the walls of museums, poster stores, and college dorm rooms worldwide. Her mythic status both fixes and unfixes her in time, allowing her to be always setting out for Camelot, always floating there, always arriving. She lives in the romance world and moves in romance time. Yet Malory's version of her tale connects her romance rivertrip from Ascolat to Camelot with real places, as Malory clarifies that Ascolat corresponds to contemporary Guildford and Camelot to Winchester. Elaine’s journey is a moment of geographical specificity in a text that often unfolds in a geotemporal haze. Her journey, despite its more fantastical elements, is granted a sense of real possibility, since the trip from Guildford to Winchester can be traced on a map. Guildford and Ascolat share the same ground, bringing the romance world and the historical world into startling proximity. Ever since Geoffrey of Monmouth, and perhaps before, Arthurian narrative has been sitting on the line between history and literature. How many of us have received questions from well-meaning friends and family members about whether or not Arthur was real? But the dynamic tension between history and romance takes new significance in Malory's version of Elaine's story, since her journey collapses clear boundaries between image and word, passive and active, here and gone.

I connect this overlapping with medieval world maps, in which historical timelines are arranged geographically, the meaning of each piece of text rooted in spatial relation to other pieces of text. (Here's where Lot's Wife looked back, here's where Alexander the Great camped, etc. [You can find more of my thoughts on medieval maps here and here.]) The visual and narrative are mutually constitutive on these mappae mundi. In Malory, space and time collapse in ways similar to medieval maps, as Elaine’s body and letter are inextricable as she moves through a romance landscape that looks very much like a real one (or, perhaps, a real landscape that looks like romance). Multiple geographies and temporalities overlap as she becomes both visual spectacle and narrative conduit. She chooses to travel by river, a linear, teleological mode of transportation in which currents lead to her destination. She moves into a center of power, and yet asserts her own version of events so strongly that they are literally set in stone on her tomb. I contend that the simultaneity of multiple geographic and temporal modes in Elaine’s story call attention to the complicated and contradictory way in which her most powerful moment is also the end of her life, her most visible moment is also the pinnacle of her narrative authority. The fact that Elaine is most active and authoritative when she is dead and unable to move or speak works well with the convergence of historical and mythic time, since she is static and in motion, an image and a narrative. She embodies her letter, and her body and her story find their resting place in Camelot.

Though Elaine’s story is linear in that she floats from one location to another, Malory’s telling is also cyclical. (Again, like the world maps, which presented a linear narrative in a spatial way.) In essence, we get her story three times (at least) and in different ways. As soon as we meet her, Malory tells us that “she keste such a love unto sir Launcelot that she cowde never withdraw hir loove, wherefore she dyed,” giving us the tragic end to her story before it even begins (623). This particular Elaine exists inside the larger myth of the fair maiden of Astolat. There is thus a cyclical quality to this narrative defined by clear teleology. The tale, which itself has been retold, is retold in the text. The first version is simply part of her introduction, but important because it renders her introduction narrative rather than visual. We learn who she is and what she does (and notice how active these verbs are — she cast her love, she died), but not what she looks like. And, for the first time in her tradition, we get a name for her character, which allows her a subject position to go with all those active verbs.

As we continue with the largest portion of the narrative, Elaine consistently communicates her own thoughts and wishes. She tells Launcelot (and Gawain, and everyone else, for that matter) directly of her love. She asks Launcelot to wear her favor, and later asks him to be her husband ... or at least her lover. She seeks him in a quest when she takes over Gawain's search, and then she directly interacts with his body as she heals it. Even as she performs the more traditionally feminine role of healer, she is only able to do so because she has taken on a knight's quest given by King Arthur himself. Launcelot's body is the object of both her quest and of her healing. Though her most famous (and most illustrated) voyage is her post-mortem one, she also seeks Launcelot on land (while alive) and succeeds in reaching him where Gawain fails.

Launcelot tries to give her options other than death, but she'll have none of it. He, not seeing the insult in his offer, attempts to provide her with a dowry to marry another, but she responds matter-of-factly: "Alas! Than', seyde she, 'I must dye for youre love'" (638). Her assertion troubles the world of the romance, since she is not imperiled in a way that allows for masculine rescue. As Dorsey Armstrong explains, "the Pentecostal Oath constructs male and female in terms of a binary which opposes active, aggressive masculinity to passive, helpless femininity" (45). Knights gain honor by saving damsels in distress. Yet neither Launcelot nor her brothers nor her father nor anyone else can save her once she asserts her coming demise. Molly Martin has pointed out that Perceval's sister, another lady in a boat, chooses to die in such a way that her brother cannot rescue her, and Elaine’s death is similarly outside of the chivalric system.

Instead, her death forms a new narrative all her own. Walsh notes that "Malory does not let Elaine die offstage, as she does in both the sources" (144). And it is in fact her death (and the related fact that we see her voyage from her perspective and thus vicariously journey with her to Camelot rather than just seeing her arrive) in Malory's version that creates such a strong sense of her character. As Martin points out, "Malory carefully reworks the material surrounding her death to show a particularly active Fayre maydyn creating an image of her own dead body" (154). Knowing that she'll die, she first requests to dictate a letter, and then describes the way in which her father and brother should arrange her body. All of these requests are meant to prepare a narrative for the court, and all are meant to give her authorial control. The fact that she mentions the letter first means that all arrangements are in terms of that letter. Gawain may send a deathbed missive to Launcelot, but Elaine sends her deathbed. Her deathbed is in fact part of the missive. She requests, "'And whyle my body is hote lat thys letter be put in my ryght honde, and my honde bounde faste to the letter untyll that I be colde" (640). The letter thus provides the link between living and dead maiden. The willful clasp of warm hand will be followed by the inert touch of cold fingers, but the letter will witness the moment of transition and remain. The further details she requests, to be put on a bed with rich clothes, to be taken to the Thames, and to have her barge covered in black samite, all function as extensions of this request for a written message (640). All these details are meant to be read and understood by the court in conjunction with the letter and to properly convey her version of herself and her story. She'll make a spectacular entrance, but also an epistolary one.

There are a number of ways that she maintains control over her letter. She asks that a mute oarsman row her barge, assuring that someone will be present to ensure the barge goes where she wants but that no one can provide an alternate version of her story. She travels by river, which, unlike an ocean voyage, has a specific direction. If we see the linear movement of the river as historical time, then Elaine's movement in history is brief and tragic. Martin B. Shichtman points out that Elaine “has no real story beyond that which can be summed up in two sentences. Her entrance into the realm of historical time is brief, incomplete, and fatal” (261). And this is certainly true. Yet it's also true that historical time here is not wholly separate from a-historical romance time. Joseph D. Parry discusses the way in which Malory locates Elaine's story in both Guildford, specifically locatable to a 15th century reader, and also Astolat, "a place firmly inscribed in the Arthurian landscape of surprise adventures" (159). He notes that the text "locates the river down which the Fair Maid's funerary procession travels, in two settings. One can locate the river – the Thames . . . in Malory's fifteenth-century world. But Elaine's final river trip is also a journey elevated to mythical status." Her journey thus complicates both spatiality and temporality. Meg Rowland calls Malory's manner of pairing mythical and 15th century locations "pluralistic geography," in conjunction with the coexistence of chronicle and romance time. Elaine's journey functions in such geographically and temporally complex ways. The movement of a river is narrative in itself, and combines the static quality of Elaine's dead body with the narrative quality of her story. Word and image, text and body, fuse as she makes her first and last trip to Camelot.

As she floats to Camelot, everyone's talking about her, and she is ultimately able to squash all the rumors and give the last word on the subject. At fist, Arthur only notices the spectacle -- the corpse's great beauty and riches -- without understanding its full import. He does observe that "she lay as she had smyled" (640). Sue Ellen Holbrook points out that "the smile . . . is the sign of a soul at rest," and I think this sign is legible to the knights of the court (177). It is the queen who notices the letter and points it out to Arthur and the knights, thus recognizing the body's full narrative potential. The letter then gets a public audience, her version of the story read directly to all. Alan Lupack explains that "her arrival is . . . an elaborately staged performance. … The public display is important because it provides the setting for Elaine's letter" (260). I would even argue that the performance, the spectacle of it all, is part of the letter. Her letter is inextricable from her cold hand, from her beautiful face, from her smile, from her lovely garments, from the strange mode by which she enters the court.

The letter is Malory's third iteration of the Fair Maiden's tale; as a deathbed epistle, Elaine's version of events holds some authority. Malory expands upon this authority by giving us the letter in its entirety:

'Moste noble knyght, my lorde sir Launcelot, now hath dethe made us two at debate for youre love. And I was youre lover, that men called the Fayre Maydyn of Astolate. Therefore unto all ladyes I make my mone, yet for my soule ye pray and bury me at the leste, and offir ye my masse-peny: thys ys my laste requeste. And a clene maydyn I dyed, I take God to wytnesse. And pray for my soule, sir Launcelot, as thou arte pereless.' (641)

As many critics have noted, this version of her letter differs from those that place blame on Launcelot. Malory's version focuses not on vengeance, but rather on asserting Elaine’s own character and providing her personal narrative. As Georgiana Donavin explains, "Where the letter's narratio, or news, would ordinarily be, there is, instead, her assertion of identity . . . Elaine's subject position is the story in her epistle" (7). She wants a proper burial, she wants a mass-penny, and she wants everyone to know that she loved Launcelot and died a clean maiden. That she wants a mass-penny and prayers for her soul indicates a connection between the body in the barge and the soul of the maiden, even as her earlier deathbed assertion to a priest that she was a worldly woman coincided with preparation for her departure from the world. In short, the journey itself is a boundary collapse between sacred and secular road trips. Thus Elaine can not only assure that her story is understood but she can tell that story in such a way that it will have real efficacy for her, even after her death.

And Elaine's letter certainly rouses the crowd. By the time they call in Launcelot, "the kynge, the quene and all the knyghtes wepte for pité of the dolefull complayntes" (641). Public feeling is on the maiden's side before Launcelot even enters the scene. Even the queen pities Elaine and blames Launcelot. It's telling that even an audience as prejudiced against Elaine as the queen can see the pity in her narrative. It also seems that the queen can’t see outside of the chivalric system, assuming that Launcelot could have saved Elaine somehow, whereas Elaine herself resisted this model. Camelot is the geographical heart of the round table narrative, and the people of the court, epitomized by the queen, live by the chivalric system that Elayne has rejected. When she enters the court, her own identity and story collide with a realm she never knew in life, and her words become part of the official narrative.

Thus, the maiden's tale does not end with her death, but instead with her version of her story. The tale ends with a retelling of itself from her perspective only made possible by her journey in death. This cyclical method of telling a story with such a clearly linear direction (i.e. the river) furthers the complicated way in which Elaine's body and letter function as image-text. Simultaneous cyclical and linear movements render the maiden's story both ever-happening and ever-new, while the contemporary geographical details place it in the past as well. The past tense and the literary present collide and verbs fail to express the temporal possibilities of Malory's version of the tale. Elaine is both a static image and a moving narrative. Just as she has the ability to travel when she can no longer move and to communicate when she can no longer speak, her story is characterized by contradiction.We gain proper nouns to allow Elaine a subject position, but our verb tenses explode between already-happened and always-happening. Disrupting time and space in this way allows her to be fixed and moving, visual and narrative, all at once. Her funeral literally fixes the story she has told in stone and gives both her body and her tale a permanent place in the land to which she sailed.

Kalamazoo 2015 Round-up!

noreply@blogger.com (Leila K. Norako) — Fri, 22 May 2015 17:45:00 +0000

I know I’ve said it before, but I’ve really come to see my (usually) annual journey The International Congress on Medieval Studies as a kind of pilgrimage, and this particular journey to K’zoo was no exception. Traveling here had its salient differences though. I left my baby (called Pixie here and elsewhere online as a form of protection and, well, because she looks like a little woodland sprite!) at home for the first time since she was born, and I also departed while in the midst of a teaching quarter (as opposed to being at the end of a semester). Both were deeply disconcerting, to say the least!

The leaving part was hard, harder than I’d anticipated (though, I’ll admit, watching Interstellar on the flight to Detroit was an apt exercise in perspective), and there were moments on the trip that were even harder. To that end, here is a hard-won tip for fellow new(ish) parents: if you have to travel away from your little, and he/she is under 13 months, approach Skype/FaceTime with deep wells of caution. My husband set up his phone so she and I could see each other that first night, and as soon as she heard my voice she looked around at the front door expecting me to be there (cue the shattering heart). She then turned her head around, saw mom in the tiny box, stuck out a trembling lower lip, and started to wail. Fortunately, I happened to be at Bells with dear friends and a beer flight waiting for me back at the table. Robbie, sweet spouse that he is, also sent me a video of a smiling and giggling Pixie (taken moments after we signed off and she calmed down), that helped me even more. He sent me pictures just about every day along with updates, and – truth be told – I found myself so happily surrounded by friends and colleagues, and so busy and energized by all the things I needed and wanted to do, that my time away was easier to manage than I had thought it would be. Oh, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t thank the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship, the Medieval Institute, and the conference organizers for how skillfully they set up and advertised the nursing/lactation rooms. As a nursing mother traveling without my babe, these were crucial to my being able to participate in the conference as fully as possible (without them I would have had to head back to the hotel several times and miss out on much of the conference in the process). I found myself very comforted by their presence and by how easy they were to access throughout the day.

I attended a number of truly innervating sessions, but there were a few that especially stuck with me. The first was the panel honoring the twenty-fifth anniversary of Carolyn Dinshaw’s Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics. Having come up in Academia long after the book’s publication, I was grateful for the reminders of the book’s seminal importance and how much of a productive disruptor it was when it first came out. Steve Kruger reminded us of how the book “challenged dominate masculinist readings” and how it challenged us “to ask different questions about medieval and modern reading practices.” Emma Solberg echoed this sentiment as well by pointing out that the book proffers “liberating, energizing, and empowering readings” that weren’t considered possible/feasible/acceptable at the time, and how Dinshaw, in the book, “seized permission and authority” to do so. To her (and I agree with her wholly), the book acts like a kind of Griselda in the ways it exposes patriarchal chauvinism. Lynn Shutters, in turn, talked both about the book’s importance and Dinshaw’s ability to find the utility in “necessary discomfort” and “a lack of resolution.” By way of example, she explained how the final chapter of Dinshaw's dissertation, which she wasn’t entirely satisfied with at the time, contained the raw material that would later become Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics. In turn, the ideas in the final chapter of that very book — “Eunuch Hermenutics” — would be explored and teased out even further in Getting Medieval. On hearing Shutters talk about the evolution of Dinshaw's work, I took solace in the reminder that discomfort with your work can, if you let it, be a productive and motivating force. It’s a reminder I very much needed since I've found myself more than a bit overwhelmed of late with my own book project.

These responses to Dinshaw’s work were truly compelling, and I found myself equally compelled by her response, where she revealed that – while this book did eventually get her tenure -- she was initially turned down for tenure (a decision that was ultimately overturned by the deans) because of the book and the way in which it threatened the endemic chauvinism of the academy. I’ve always admired her work for its boldness and its ingenuity, and I was reminded – especially as she told her story -- of how indebted I am to her and to others like her for creating room for younger scholars like me to breathe and thrive. It is no exaggeration to say that I would not be able to do the kind of work that I do had it not been for her willingness –- and the willingness of others –- to publish bold and brave works that argued passionately (either implicitly and explicitly) for the power and importance of reflexive analysis. I came away from the session very grateful for her work and for the reminders of its importance provided by each of the speakers.

And I left another session, on being a Public Medievalist, equally innervated. Having been invited to write a brief write-up on my experience as a type of public medievalist (soon to appear on postmedieval’s Forum), I attended the session quite eagerly, and I found myself particularly compelled by the conversations and ideas that emerged throughout the talks and Q&A, especially those surrounding the talk that David Perry gave. He offered insights into the complications of being both a journalist/public writer and an academic, especially when one’s worlds converge (i.e. when, as a crusade’s scholar, you write an 800 word op-ed on a crusades-related topic to a popular audience, knowing you’ll provoke the ire of both scholars and non-specialists). He also spoke compellingly about the risks and perils of going public, and now we – as a community – need to be more humane, more aware of the potential effects our written words can have on social media. He reminded us that a single tweet about a young scholar’s “boring” presentation can and, in this day and age, likely will have an negative impact on his/her career, and he ended his talk with the following recommendation: “If you can’t tweet something nice, don’t tweet it at all.”

I really appreciated his talk, since it helped me to tease out some of the issues and frustrations I’ve had with how I’ve been approaching my own blogging. I know for a fact that I spend more time than I should on each blog post I submit here at In Romaunce. I want to write more frequently and to be bolder, but I also feel immense pressure to watch what I say out here in the blogosphere and in social media. I feel palpably in these spaces how very precarious I am at this point in my career, and this results in my feeling more than a little hesitant about what I say and how I say it. This is why, for instance, it took me well over a week to muster up the courage to post my thoughts on Obama’s prayer breakfast. I’m ultimately glad I wrote what I did, but I’ve wished for sometime now that I could find a way to be braver more frequently (and more swiftly). Attending the session and chatting with him and fellow attendees afterwards, however, reminded me that my cautiousness might not be a bad thing at all. I might not produce as much as I’d like, but at this point in my career, a little extra caution probably can’t hurt.

This year's K'zoo also marked the last time I served as the organizer and presider over Malory Aloud/Performing Malory. I inherited these roles somewhat by accident, but I couldn't be more grateful for having had the opportunity to lead this group for the past eight years. In addition to each performance session being a rollicking good time, the process of rereading significant portions of Malory's Morte each year has been deeply enriching, especially when I needed to track certain themes or characters. Last year, for instance, we hosted a performance entitled "Malory Interruptus: Sex and Love in the Morte." In addition to (re)discovering that Perceval nearly boinks Satan while on the Grail Quest (!!!!!!!!), I noticed how consistently fraught sexual encounters are in the Morte, and how the problematics of sex are often tangled up with the non-procreative nature of these same encounters. I wouldn't have arrived at that idea, or others, were it not for my work on these sessions, and I remain truly grateful for having been able to take the helm for so long as a result. Also, and just as importantly, I had the privilege to get to know an array of truly lovely and inspirational scholars along the way, and I remain so excited to see what the merry troupe will continue to do in the years to come!

I’ll save my own session for a separate post, but for now, I want to end with a few parting thoughts on conviviality, community, and affect. Though I was (sadly) unable to attend Richard Utz’s plenary, I heard much about it from friends who did, and I was deeply appreciative not only of his discussion of affect (and how we need to dismantle notions that work and pleasure need necessarily be mutually exclusive). I was also glad that BABEL was acknowledged, because I’ve grown very deeply fond of the organization since graduating from Rochester. I am currently very fortunate in my postdoctoral position, but the job search last year showed me how difficult and uncertain my road ahead will be. I know that I might not have a professional future in academia once all is said and done. But I do know that I will always be a medievalist one way or another. I know this because I love the material deeply. But I also know this because of BABEL’s willingness – even insistence – on including non-traditional scholars in its mix. Knowing that I will always genuinely be welcome at their gatherings, that I won’t be looked at askance, is truly comforting to me. It gives me courage, especially as I steel myself for the upcoming job search this Fall.

In the end, I left this conference with a full head and heart. I wished I’d had more time to connect with even more people than I did, but was so grateful for the deep and fruitful conversations I was fortunate enough to have with so many of you. As many have said on social media already (and as, for example, Elaine Treharne’s recent #GenderImbalance tweets reveal) we have quite a ways to go in how we treat one another, but I was encouraged all the same to see so many of us working towards positive changes at this gathering. Onwards!

On Holy Terror

noreply@blogger.com (Leila K. Norako) — Mon, 27 Apr 2015 16:30:00 +0000

Years ago in graduate school, I wrote a paper about Frank Miller's 300, arguing that the film version was a deliberate and brash manifestation of post-9/11 paranoia and xenophobia. I was only just venturing into my studies of late medieval crusades literature, but I already noticed startling similarities between the narrative mechanics of the film and of the romances that fascinated me. I remember sitting in the theater watching the film, amazed by its beauty and appalled by its blatant homophobia and racism. I had expected, however, that Frank Miller (for all intents and purposes the godfather on set) and Zach Snyder (the director) would at least try to offer some sort of defense of the film. In interiews, Miller waxed downright belligerent whenever questions about the film's depiction of the Persians and its implied critique of the contemporary Middle-East came up. Take, for instance, his statements during NPR's State of the Union broadcast (the irony of his segment following Kwame Anthony Appiah's was not lost on me):

FM: When you think about what Americans accomplished, building these amazing cities, and all the good it’s done in the world, it’s kind of disheartening to hear so much hatred of America, not just from abroad, but internally.

NPR: A lot of people would say what America has done abroad has led to the doubts and even the hatred of its own citizens.

FM: Well, okay, then let’s finally talk about the enemy. For some reason, nobody seems to be talking about who we’re up against, and the sixth century barbarism that they actually represent. These people saw people’s heads off. They enslave women, they genitally mutilate their daughters, they do not behave by any cultural norms that are sensible to us. I’m speaking into a microphone that never could have been a product of their culture, and I’m living in a city where three thousand of my neighbors were killed by thieves of airplanes they never could have built.

It's perhaps unsurprising, then, that Miller would go on to create Holy Terror. The comic was originally intended to be a Batman story that pitted the caped crusader against Bin Laden and other extremists. Somewhere along the way, and perhaps to the relief of most franchise lovers, Miller decided that this was not, in fact, a Batman story. Batman was replaced by a hero known as The Fixer, and his accomplice/lover is a catburgler rather than Catwoman.

I remember hearing about Miller's Holy Terror a few years ago, but it fell off my radar rather quickly amid the maelstrom of dissertating and a cross country move. It came to mind a couple of weeks ago, however, after I got into a lively conversation on Twitter about modern iterations of militant Christianity, and I realized -- especially since I plan to talk about this topic at length in the conclusion to my book -- that I needed to read it. I bought a copy (used, since I couldn't in good conscience buy a new one) and have spent the past couple of weeks figuring out what to say about it.

Its xenophobic portrait of Middle Easterners is so appalling that -- at first -- it's hard to know where even to start. I'll describe a few of the most crucial moments in the comic, however, in part to give readers a sense of what takes place in the comic, and in part to help me sort out my thoughts on it.

You don't need to look any further than the cover or the comic's epigraph to gather that this comic is is a reactionary post-9/11 revenge fantasy (that it was released close to the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks is, perhaps, evidence enough). The cover (pictured left), gives us the first glimpse of the The Fixer and one of many nameless assailants. I couldn't help but notice the difference in the features: consider the clearly defined white/Anglocentric face of our hero with the faceless (and black) void, human only insofar as it has eyes and, at least in the recent past, teeth. From its inception, then, the comic perpetuates the horrendous notion that dark skin connotes threat. And we need only look at any number of tragic narratives in our own country's very recent history to get a sense of why the perpetuation of that kind of imagery is both grotesque and downright dangerous.

Things escalate quickly just a few pages into the comic, where we encounter this epigraph:

"If you meet the Infidel, kill the infidel" -- Mohammed

This is not, in fact, a direct quotation from the Q'uran. At best, it's a heavily paraphrased (and wildly decontextualized) version of 9:5: "Slay the pagans wherever you may come upon them, and take the captive, and besiege them, and lie in wait for them at ever conceivable space . . . ." It's unclear whether Miller is aware of the original version and its context, but the point of this epigraph is nevertheless crystal clear: to ensure that readers of the comic are encouraged from the start to perceive Muslims as inherently threatening. Again, wildly problematic, but hardly unsurprising.

The first sequence in the comic introduces both The Fixer and the Catburgler, the former chasing the latter on account of a stolen bracelet. The chase takes an erotic turn, but a nail bomb interrupts their rooftop tryst. The comic then flashes back to the events leading up to that bomb going off, and it is here that we are introduced to the first of many caricatured Middle-Eastern villains:

The fact that Amina is both an exchange student and a humanities major should give us pause. In this one panel, Miller implies that both exchange programs and the humanities are in some way in direct/indirect collusion with al Qaeda. And as we recently saw with UMass's decision to deny Iranian students entry, or this study on the likely effects of post 9/11 policies on Muslim exchange students, Middle-Eastern students seeking an education in the U.S. face a plethora of difficulties and are discriminated against in a variety of overt and covert ways. The roots of this discrimination are found in post 9/11 fears of al Qaeda and other forms of militant Islam gaining traction in the U.S., and Holy Terror directly capitalizes on those fears in its depiction of Amina.

Several reviewers have mocked the fact that she's a "humanities major" since no such major actually exists, but I think Miller knew exactly what he wanted to do here as well. All of the characters, both heroic and villanous, in Holy Terror are generalized caricatures created for the sake of the jingoism Miller wished to promulgate. Amina, as a humanities major, then, embodies dangers Miller sees in academia writ large, as he apparently views the scholars within it as left-leaning cultural relativists who inadvertently support the causes of those who would see the end to freedom of thought or expression. His inability to envision academia (or, let's be honest, any corner of the globe) as a space occupied by an array of complex and dynamic persons would be hilarious if it its effects weren't so awful. The representation the Amina as the femme-fatale-suicide bomber-humanities-majoring-exchange-student is deeply problematic, then, because -- like the epigraph that begins the comic -- it relies on a host of oversights that, when played out in the actual world, have direct and downright catastrophic consequences. It perpetuates a cancerous and self-contradictory mythology that condemns freedom of expression while trying to protect it, while also pointing an accusing finger at any exchange student who happens to come from the Middle-East and/or be Muslim (Miller regularly fails to distinguish between the two).

He also deliberately conflates al-Qaeda/Islam (the two are, regrettably, one and the same to him) with "the Dark Ages," implying that the insurgents in his story will usher in second Dark Age if they are allowed to succeed (see left). As many have argued (myself included), to associate anything we perceive as Other or as aberrant with "the Medieval" betrays both ignorance and an unwillingness to grapple with the very real and modern problems of the contemporary world. Al Qaeda is not medieval. It is the result of a complex series of modern events, pressure points, and entanglements. To refuse to see that, is to refuse to take ownership of our contemporary world. An interpretive and an imaginative failure to say the least.

To make matters worse, the comic insists on genocide and torture as the only way to confront and defeat the Other, resorting every step of the way to one-dimensional and caricatured portraits of both hero and villain. Consider, for instance, the implications of this portrait of an insurgent (below right), or the crude and offensive scenes of mass-killing and torture (below left).

The comic reaches its zenith of anti-Muslim rhetoric in its depiction and description of a mosque in Empire City:

The Saudis spent a fortune on this place. It's the oldest mosque in Empire city. People come from miles around -- but only a very few are let inside. It's as close to an inner-city sovereign nation as you'll find, this side of Rome. It's as silent as a tomb. It keeps secrets.

It goes without saying that this evokes and plays upon the the xenophobia that surrounded (and in some ways dominated) discussion of The Ground Zero mosque back in 2010. Consider the following quotation from this regrettable and inflammatory op-ed about the proposed mosque, for example:

Not only that, but Rauf [the Imam behind the proposed project] has called America compatible with sharia law. Indeed, America, he says helped deepen his identification with Islam; talking to The New York Times, he stated, "in that sense, you could say I found my faith in this country. For me, Islam and America are organically bound together. This is not my story alone. The American way of life has helped many Muslims make a conscious decision to embrace their faith." And his partner, el-Gamal? He turned to Islam after the attacks of 9/11. (He also has a history of violent crime, with attacks coming as recently as 2005.)

This, of course, raises the question of whether Cordoba [the name of the proposed mosque] can or will become a seat of a jihadist movement. And the truth is, the more we know about Feisal Abdul Rauf and his cohorts, the more I tend to wonder. Rauf has already skillfully turned American Muslims and non-Muslims into enemies of one another -- something even Osama bin Laden failed to do. His disingenuousness, dishonesty, and disrespect make me wonder what else he and his mosque might be capable of achieving in the name of what he calls 'peace.'"

The author's cognitive dissonance and weak arguments in this quotation (and in the article as a whole) are obvious, but the paranoia seeping from the op-ed is worth considering alongside Miller's Holy Terror. Both respond to perceived threats of Islam by assuming that we're embroiled in a religious war. Both strongly suggest that a mosque -- ANY mosque -- can and will harbor terrorists. Both insinuate -- if not state outright -- that all Muslims are to be feared and are, to greater or lesser degrees, complicit in acts of terror waged by Muslims extremists. Both authors, in other words, caricaturize twenty three percent of the world's population in order to promote a deeply xenophobic jingoism.

It's no surprise then, that the mosque in Holy Terror affirms and validates such a worldview. The Catburgler enters it -- grudgingly disguised in a burka -- with our narrator describing "the night wind blow[ing] away seven centuries." Yet another attempt to distance the heroes in the text from the insurgents (and, more broadly, America from the Middle East), by insinuating that the latter is somehow still "stuck" in the Middle Ages.

The description of the mosque's interior only builds on that assumption. The Catburgler is almost immediately apprehended by the mosque's inhabitants, and she is led down below sea level into what she describes as "The Old City -- built by long-forgotten ancients . . . a race of madmen." As you can see in the image below, this underground space is adorned with grotesque sculptures and -- oddly -- what appear to be ancient Greek helmets. She encounters both a traitorous drunk Irishman who has teamed up with al-Qaeda and a leader of sorts -- a diminutive figure so covered in jewelry that only his misshapen mouth is visible. This leader ridicules Westerners for their

obliviousness and states the following:

"We come right out and call ourselves al-Qaeda -- the cell -- and you don't stop to consider what that means. We're scarcely a microbe, a speck, a tiny part of an organism so vast as to be beyond belief. Were I utterly at your mercy . . . even I could only provide the vaguest hint of the organization's size -- or its true purpose. Even Sheik Osama -- may peace be upon him -- was merely a slave beneath a slave beneath a slave."

In sum, we're given a vision of a vast and impossibly organized network of insurgents, and we're told that The West (America specifically) has been too blind and oblivious to its vastness. And, as a aside, Miller appears to completely misinterpret and mistranslate the meaning of the name al Qaeda. Again though, here we have an instance where the paranoia and xenophobia characteristic of Miller's worldview loudly proclaim themselves. The insurgents, as we soon discover, are about to launch a weapon of mass destruction on Empire City. They are halted (read: massacred) by the Fixer in the nick of time, the weapon described in ways that clearly attempt to justify the indiscriminate killing. The comic doesn't end there though. Instead, we're introduced one final time to Dan Donegal -- the tough-talking cop in league with The Fixer. We see him "shivering in his sheets like a scared little boy," traumatized by the terrorist attacks at the outset of the story. We are made to bear witness to his trauma, again, as a means of justifying the brutality and xenophobia that precede it.

In sum, this raw, wildly problematic, and downright incoherent story is even more virulent and extreme than the post-9/11 film version of 300. I kept thinking about that film, and about Miller's incendiary comments about Islam and the Middle East at the time of the film's release, as I read this comic, because Holy Terror strikes me as simply a more ossified (I can't really bring myself to call it "refined") reflection of his fear and hatred of Islam and his inability to distinguish between the majority of its adherents and the extremists who warp it.

It struck me as curious (and, if I'm being honest, more than a little hopeful), then, that this comic garnered nowhere near as much attention as either the graphic novel or the film version of 300, and that few -- if any -- could formulate any sort of defense or dismissal for the obvious anti-Muslim sentiment. Supporters and defenders of 300 often resorted to the argument that it's "just an action flick" and that people who objected to the vilification of the Persians (and, to be fair, any non-white person in the film) were just "thinking too hard." The film was frequently praised for its cinematic prowess and was relatively popular at the box office. To be sure, it garnered a reasonable degree of criticism, but there seemed to be a somewhat even number of critics who overlooked or weren't concerned enough to comment upon the racist/xenophobic undertones of the narrative. With Holy Terror, however, you're hard pressed to find a review that doesn't comment on the awfulness of the worldview it espouses, and it garnered nowhere near the cultural traction as 300, even though the two works proffer similar kinds of cultural fantasies.

I wonder, as a result, what role temporal distance has to play in these reactions. Is it easier to tell a story laced with xenophobia when you place the events in the distant past and bury your message in a swords and sandals epic? When, in other words, you appropriate and elide ancient historical particulars as opposed to recent ones? That certainly seems to be the case when you compare the two stories and their reception. And it has made me wonder about the similar "problems" I see in Richard Coer de Lion. As I write in one of my book chapters, relatively few versions of the medieval story include the more fantastical episodes that we often associate with it (the repeat cannibalism, the demonic horses, the lion-heart-eating, the demon mother), and I argue that these omissions in the RCL tradition have to do with the problems inherent in presenting a fantasy version of events in the relatively recent past.

Perhaps, then, we could consider Holy Terror as a very modern sort of "recovery romance" -- a type of romance that, as I describe in my book project, proffers fantasies of Christian/Western triumph over perceived Muslim enemies. Like Isumbras or RCL, Holy Terror (and 300) are symptomatic of cultural desires, appetites and impulses -- specifically of desires for stability and superiority at a time where neither seemed or were possible. It's very easy to dismiss Miller's Holy Terror for its awfulness, its incoherence, even its artlessness, but I think it's important to avoid Othering him over much. To do so would be to risk making the same moves that he deploys by repeatedly arguing that Islam is "medieval." I see Miller, then, as an alarming harbinger of sorts -- as a representative, however, hyperbolic, of a worldview that needs to be paid careful attention to so that we can find ways of pushing back against it. We need -- especially in light of the persistent tendency to code anything that we don't want to acknowledge as modern as "medieval" -- to remind ourselves of the fact that his work is symptomatic of a worldview hardly unique to him and him alone.

Mongolian Chaucer

noreply@blogger.com (Leila K. Norako) — Sat, 21 Mar 2015 05:22:00 +0000

If you follow this blog, or have ever chatted with me in person, you probably know that I harbor a not-so-minor fascination with the way in which the Mongols are represented in Medieval (specifically, Middle English) literature. The fourth chapter of my dissertation focuses squarely on the subject, and I'm just days away from sending off an article version of that chapter for review. Middle English Mongols -- at least as it stands right now -- will occupy not one but two chapters in the book.

You can imagine, then, my delight and fascination when I learned from a friend (who visited Mongolia while her sister lived there for a time) that contemporary Mongolians apparently hold Geoffrey Chaucer in high esteem due to his largely favorable portrayal of Genghis Khan in The Squire' Tale. This anecdote piqued my curiosity, and I finally made some headway today and discovered, thanks to Jack Weatherford (anthropologist and author of Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World), that the Squire's Tale has, in fact, been translated into Mongolian. I don't know much more than that for the time being, save that it's available in bookstores in Mongolia.

Needless to say, my detective work has only just begun! Among other things, I want to figure out whether this is a strict translation or more of an adaptation, the date of the first and any subsequent translations (and/or editions of the translation), the identity of the translator and his/her background and interests in medieval literature (and, if possible, their goals in extracting The Squire's Tale and translating into Mongolian). I also want to learn more about contemporary perceptions of Chaucer in Mongolia and how much of an impact this translation may have had on said perceptions.

I'm going to keep putting feelers in hopes that a) I can get my hands on a copy of this translation and b) I can find someone fluent in Mongolian who can help me answer these and other questions. In the meantime though, I just couldn't resist sharing the news that a translation exists!

Join us at NCS 2016 in London

noreply@blogger.com (Leila K. Norako) — Wed, 11 Feb 2015 23:46:00 +0000

Good news!

Kristi and I recently had a roundtable session approved for the upcoming New Chaucer Society Congress (London, 2016). If you work on representations of waterways in medieval literature and/or are intrigued by the ways in which waterways serve as conduits of narratives, please consider submitting a paper proposal to the two of us. The deadline for submissions is April 15th, and -- as is the way with deadlines -- it'll be here before you know it!

Here's our official description, which you can also find on the NCS website:

Session Title: Narrative Conduits

From the watery borders of the Celtic Otherworld, to the vibrant matrices of transmission in the Mediterranean, to the Thames as meeting point of king and poet in John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, rivers and other bodies of water commonly serve as thresholds, starting points, narrative conduits. The wide-ranging sources we find in Chaucer’s work show us that narratives and texts (and even poets) made their way back and forth across the English Channel. This session welcomes papers that explore how navigable bodies of water like the Thames are represented in medieval literature and how they function as transmitters of narratives themselves.

We're looking to have five speakers, each of whom will talk for 5-7 minutes. Rousing conversation will hopefully ensue! If you have any questions, please feel free to either post them here or email Kristi (kristi dot castleberry at gmail dot com) or myself (lknorako at stanford dot edu).

Hope to see you in London!

On Obama's Crusades "Controversy"

noreply@blogger.com (Leila K. Norako) — Mon, 09 Feb 2015 18:46:00 +0000

I ended my latest blog post by commenting on the alarming convergences between stories that promote a modern, militant Christianity and the crusades romances I study. Watching American Sniper only affirmed in my mind the fact that fantasies of Christian (in this case American Christian) superiority have gone nowhere, and that we need to forge bridges between the past and present instead of building walls between the two in an attempt to praise ourselves for being “evolved” in some way. I think the popularity of crusades narratives in late 14^th and 15^th century England has a lot to offer to a conversation about contemporary narratives of Christian triumphalism. As a result, I have been following the “controversy” surrounding Obama’s National Prayer Breakfast speech rather closely. The fact that it even IS a controversy is embarrassing to say the least, and as Ta-Nehisi Coates observes so well, says a lot about the “limited tolerance for any honest conversation around racism” or, I’d add, militant Christianity, “in our politics.”

David Perry has already posted an excellent list of responses to the controversy, so I won’t repeat that effort here. As many have observed, all Obama did in those comments is remind us that we are not, in fact, at war with Islam itself and that the extremists like those of ISIS do not speak for the majority of Muslims. He calls, as Perry points out, for humility — for Americans to take a longer view and for us to approach our present with a rueful awareness of our cultures’ and religions’ pasts. Sadly, too many failed to understand and internalize that aspect of Obama’s speech and, instead, have produced an array of knee-jerk responses that only – in the end – reveal that the kind of humility called for in the POTUS' speech is sorely lacking in our culture at the moment. Obama points to the fact (I repeat, FACT) that all religions can be and have been used to justify violence, that none are immune from that potential fate. That's apparently something many in this country do not want to hear, because to hear it -- as others have already articulated/suggested – would be to acknowledge the fact that Christianity and/or America is not always in the right.

I expect these kinds of knee-jerk reactions from extremely conservative pundits. I expect them, in other words, to do exactly what American Sniper does so well: to elide inconvenient historical details in order to paint a portrait of easy Christian/American superiority. I like to think, however, that scholars would know all too well the dangers and risks that come with oversimplifying the past, especially when writing an op-ed piece accusing someone else of doing just that. And so, I was more than a little dismayed to detect similar tactics in Thomas Madden’s recent piece in the National Review. Many have pointed out that Madden’s post -- especially in its refusal to say anything about the pogroms against the Jews related to crusading efforts -- paints a deeply flawed portrait of the crusades as strictly defensive wars. His op-ed promulgates, in other words, exactly the view of the Islam that the conservative Right wants: a view that endorses the notion that we are in a religious war and that Islam is/was always, already an aggressive enemy of Christianity.

For the record, there are many things about Madden’s work that I have admired and appreciated over the years and that I continue to admire. His first edition of The Concise History of the Crusades was the textbook for Phillip Daileader’s brilliant course on the subject — a class I eagerly took as a senior at William and Mary. I devoured that book and the lectures, and it is no exaggeration to say that my current work on crusades literature is inspired by all that I read and learned during that semester. The final essay that I wrote for the class, in fact, was the one I submitted with my graduate school applications. I have always admired Madden’s effortless and approachable writing style, too – which I have often used as an example of effective writing for my students over the years. And, on a more personal note, I’ve enjoyed more than one conversation with him over the years about the need to write works accessible to folks outside of academia as well as within it, something that has directly impacted the kind of writing style I chose to cultivate over the years.

This last point, perhaps, is why I found his editorial so disconcerting. Because it actually seems to argue against that very ideal. He seems to be saying/suggesting that only medieval historians (and, I worry, only historians who agree with his thesis that the crusades were “defensive”) have a right to discuss the crusades, and that seems to completely defeat the purpose of writing to those outside of the ivory tower in the first place. I could understand his frustrations with Obama's reference to the crusades if it was in any way inaccurate. I could understand said frustrations if Obama had in any way ventured into what Perry calls the "simplistic rhetoric of atrocity as applied to the crusades." The thing is though, Obama didn't really do that at all. As many have observed already, while his comments might have been generalizing, they were hardly untrue. Again, all he spoke of is the (very real) tendency for religious belief to give way to violence and how we owe it to ourselves to be aware of that historic tendency and strive to be better. In other words, instead of Christians automatically labeling themselves as "more evolved" (as I've heard at least a few conservative pundits express over the past few days) Obama asks them in this speech to pay careful attention to history and endeavor to avoid repeating it. Hardly a radical idea at all.

I do think there are fruitful debates to be had about the historical crusades and the motivations behind them, and I more than agree with the importance of recognizing the crusades as an incredibly complex and shifting concept and practice. I also agree that the crusades are all too often misunderstood in popular culture. But what I cannot understand or accept, in the end, is the argument that the President has no right to talk about the crusades in the first place. Madden closes his piece by saying that the President can/should just focus on the here and now — as if we live in some kind of vacuum where the past, and our varied interpretations of that past, have no bearing on the present. In the end, I'll gladly accept the POTUS cautioning against crusades -- however generally -- than (accidentally?) calling for them. Because in the end, as Perry put it so well in his recent post, the history of religious violence -- in all of its permutations -- warns again and again of the dangers of binary worldviews, especially when they lead one to believe that one's "violent acts are necessary" and good.

On that note, I think I’ll close by quoting Eileen Joy, who cautions against this distancing of the medieval from the modern far more eloquently than I ever could. Certainly food for thought and an inspiration to keep forging meaningful bridges with care:

The alterity of history, and of different times, events, persons, texts and other artifacts in history, will always obtain and thereby, will always remain as a proper object of medieval historiography [as well as a caution against the exhaustion of any historical method — by which I mean, we never exhaust history’s alterity by any one method, but rather, work to make its alterity more complex by a variety of methods and approaches, which is a good thing, in my mind]. At the same time, to say that only those events most proximate in chronological time have the most to say to us about our present situation [whatever that present situation might be], strikes me as an altogether too impoverished view of what history can do and say in the present, and also of where it is we think we are in time — on some island called modernity, floating in open space, completely untethered from “the medieval”?

American Sniper: A 21st-Century Crusades Romance?

noreply@blogger.com (Leila K. Norako) — Wed, 04 Feb 2015 19:57:00 +0000

I’ve always considered myself a bit of an odd duck in the various circles in which I run, in part because I inhabit several of them, and not all of them mesh in easy ways. I am, on the one hand, a left-of-center feminist scholar who regularly harbors mixed feelings about the recent wars our country has waged and who regularly takes issue with the way in which Muslims are depicted in Europe and America. By the same token, I am a proud member of a large military family. I have seen my brother go off to war, and I spent time every night while he was gone pleading with the powers that be for his safe return. And I now live for the opportunities I can get to Skype with him and with my sister (also in the military), both of whom are stationed far away from me. As a little one, I saw my father get called up for yet another deployment when I was not quite four, my sister was not quite two, and my mother was five months pregnant with my brother. She gave birth via c-section while my father was at sea. He found out my brother was born, and that he had a son, via a brief morse code message that contained little aside from my brother’s name. I remember vividly my father coming home a couple of months early and the way we ceremoniously clipped each one of the cardboard paper links in the chain we’d created to mark the time he was away. The chain had a different color for each month, and I don’t think I’d ever been so excited to take a pair of scissors to so much paper. And truly, I doubt I would be the scholar that I am today were it not for my father’s service. The time we spent in Europe instilled in me a deep fascination with the Middle Ages, and it is no exaggeration to say that it contributed in a large way to my decision to make a career out of studying that time period.

It can be hard to explain – to both family and to my friends -- how I can simultaneously be deeply proud of (and grateful for) my family’s service while taking issue with the very conflicts in which they have fought. What I know, however, is that these wars are far from simple: that the people who fight in them are not the same people who launch them, and that those on the ground – more often than not – are people like my family members. Smart, capable, and good people who do their jobs thoughtfully and with the very best of intentions. I also know, both from the family in which I was raised and from the many accounts I’ve read, that servicepersons harbor complex and varied feelings about the recent conflicts in the Middle East, and that the damage that those wars have wreaked is immeasurable.

The reason I’m telling you this before I get to my thoughts on American Sniper is rather simple: I wish, as someone who has grown up in and around military families, that the film had focused squarely on that kind of damage. As a member of a large military family, I went to the theater hoping to see a film that would shed light on the struggles that servicewomen and men – especially those who see combat – face when they try to reintegrate into civilian life. I know, from all of the stories I’ve heard over the years, this issue is a hugely important one, and based on what both Clint Eastwood and Bradley Cooper had expressed in recent interviews — namely that they hoped the film would encourage people to sympathize with contemporary vets — I was optimistic that the film would be focused on those struggles. Sadly, while certain parts of the film gestured in that area, it was not. Parts of the film do examine Chris Kyle’s actual experiences abroad and his actual struggles at home, but in large part the film seems invested in creating a hero that can easily be read as infallible. As Brian Turner has said so well, that’s just not the kind of war film we need.

Since I saw the film, I’ve found myself struggling to come to terms with it. On the one hand, I all but forgot that I was watching Bradley Cooper playing Chris Kyle — he thoroughly gave himself up to that role, and I was beyond impressed with his convincing performance. And to be fair, the parts of the film that focus on Kyle’s struggles — even inability — to reintegrate struck me as both sincere and incredibly well-wrought. And for the record, I DO think that those involved with the film were sincere in their attempts to address the quieter tragedies of war, especially PTSD. Hall explains as much in a recent interview and says, in the end that he was only trying to promote discussion:

To me, the point of art is to promote discussion — and this film is doing that. It's time that we had this discussion, that we understand the sacrifice of these warriors. We didn't set out to explore the archetype of war; we set out to explore the archetype of the warrior. We did that from one man's point of view. While the movie is being criticized for not providing a larger context, this point was to explore war through the eyes of this person. That's the POV we used. It's a character study.

Fair enough. But as I always stress to my students, your intentions and the way in which your actions/writing/speech are interpreted will not always be mutually inclusive, and as a result it’s your responsibility — if you're trying to make a particular point — to make sure you’re being as transparent as possible. I can certainly agree with Hall that making a film about a single person's experience all but guarantees that you can't widen the lens overmuch. But if he really wanted to do a character study, as he says above, why the insistence on white-washing so much of said character and fictionalizing a good deal as well? Why resort to tired stereotypes of the enemy? Why try so hard to ensure that audiences resist questioning Kyle and his worldview?

The film had so many chances to be self-reflective in ways that Kyle’s autobiography — given his insistence on his own worldview, one that cannot seem to allow for or conceive of an enemy more complex than a two-dimensional, intrinsically evil Other — cannot be. It had so many opportunities to point out the limitations of his worldview and, to a certain extent, its tragic inevitability. As Suzanne Akbari observed in a recent Facebook conversation — and as I’ve heard more than one serviceperson express, and not without some ruefulness — the belief that your enemy is simply evil is a tempting one to espouse when in combat. How else can you possibly pull the trigger if you don’t at some level dehumanize the person in your crosshairs? How else do you live with yourself afterwards?

But instead of taking a reflective approach and trying to encourage an audience to problematize Kyle’s worldview, the film seemed to be trying to endorse it instead. Rather than sticking closely (or at least close enough) to accounts of Kyle’s actual experiences on his four tours, Eastwood and Hall felt the need to impose a more dramatic/cinematic narrative on Kyle’s tours in Iraq and their respective motivations. Whereas his reasons for going to war and returning to war were on the more predictable/mundane side according to his autobiography, in the film he feels compelled to enlist because of terrorist attacks on American embassies and his first tour in Iraq appears to be directly tied to the events on 9/11 (even though, as many have observed, the terrorist attacks had no bearing on his decision to enlist and the complex “connections” between 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq are completely white-washed in the film). And while in his autobiography he does admit to feeling pressure to return to war, in the film Kyle is drawn back to Iraq because of the continued presence of two specific villains: a child-torturing insurgent known as “The Butcher” (who is only loosely based on an actual person who, as it turns out, Kyle never encountered during any of his four tours) and a Syrian marksman/sniper. The sniper, at least, is described briefly in Kyle’s autobiography, but Kyle never hunted him down and/or fixated on him in the way that he does in the film.

It’s one thing simply to acknowledge that Kyle views his enemies as two-dimensional savages, but it is another thing entirely to validate that worldview (however accidentally) through the construction of fictional, stereotyped villains. The film reaches its low point in this regard in the child-torture scene, where The Butcher takes a power drill to an Iraqi child’s leg and head in full view of his family and Kyle (because the father of that family had talked to the Americans and helped them). The scene is beyond disturbing, not only because of its content but because of its obvious attempt to force audiences to see the Iraqis as, at best, nameless collateral damage and, at worst, as the savages Kyle believes them to be. I remember scribbling angrily in my notebook as I watched the scene that I needed to find out whether or not this had even happened during any of Kyle’s tours.

It hadn’t.

This kind of revelation happened again and again as I researched the differences between the film and the actual events of Kyle's life. In this way, the film's persistent rewriting of history continuously reminded me of the narrative mechanics of the crusades romances I study. Richard Coer de Lion (RCL) kept coming to mind in particular because it, like, American Sniper, focuses on an actual warrior — a warrior who reached legendary status in his own lifetime, no less (Kyle was, after all, nicknamed “Legend” during the course of his four tours in Iraq). Both stories elide crucial historical details in order to tell a very particular, and consistently flattering, story about a Christian hero.

Compare, for instance the way in which Richard in RCL has near-supernatural power and authority. He wields a virtually magical (and, as Akbari has observed, very “English”) battle-ax, capable of cleaving a massive chain in two – which allows his fleet entry into a Levantine harbor. He consistently proves himself superior even to his own men on the killing fields, and regularly kills multiple men with single blows. Chris Kyle enjoys similar prestige in American Sniper. One of his fellow soldiers in the film half-jokingly praises him for killing a hundred men in a single blow, and he is repeatedly reminded (far more somberly/seriously) of the courage he gives to the men whenever they know he’s hidden somewhere above them with his rifle and his scope. As one soldier quipped, they feel invincible when they know he’s watching out for them. Kyle also carries a bible that takes on near reliquary status. Someone even asks him at one point — again half-jokingly — whether it’s bullet-proof. At the end, in the (completely fictional) final firefight of his military career, he barely escapes with his life and (accidentally?) leaves both his bullet and the fabled bible in the dust, signifying perhaps, that he’s done his duty to both God and Country and that Family (which had always been third on his list of priorities) might finally get a somewhat higher billing. But I had to wonder, given that his Bible becomes a sort of talisman, whether or not its loss is the first cinematic “hint” at Kyle’s tragic death. Regardless, it struck me that the film version of Kyle and the Richard of RCL are indelibly tied to and defined by their faith, and are imbued with near impossible amounts of strength and charisma.

In the film, Kyle’s identity as a Christian —and as an unapologetically martial Christian at that— is also made clear in his decision to have a crusader cross tattooed on his arm. The actual Kyle did so as well, and he describes his motivations behind it in his autobiography:

On the front of my arm, I had a crusader cross inked in. I wanted everyone to know I was a Christian. I had it put in in red, for blood. I hated the damn savages I'd been fighting. I always will. They've taken so much from me. (American Sniper, Kindle edition)

In the film, no such explanation for the choice of tattoo is provided by Kyle or anyone else, and I noticed that the film makes this kind of move repeatedly – offering up clearly controversial/polarizing aspects of Kyle, his life, and his story (whether fictional or actual) and refusing to provide any kind of clear interpretation of them. Now, I’m not saying that a film necessarily needs to do so, or that it even should, but I do think that this refusal to explain (which happens on multiple occasions) points, at least in part, to why the film is so divisive. It is incredibly easy to come to wildly different conclusions about the implications of, say, this crusader cross tattoo (i.e. is the film saying it’s praiseworthy? Worthy of critique? Is it even aware of its implications?), when you aren’t getting clear clues from the film about its intentions in emphasizing it.

This same problem crops up in the representation of the Iraqis in the film. Both the insurgents and the civilians are repeatedly referred to as “savages,” a term that Kyle himself uses regularly in his book. Interestingly, Kyle never uses that term in the film – it’s a term uttered only by those around him. I found this curious, because it seemed to suggest

a) that the creators of the film knew that having Kyle refer to them as such would risk problematizing him

b) they still felt a need to emphasize – and depict – Iraqi “savagery” (however hyperbolized/fictionalized).

This is another instance, then, where the creators of the film elide history for the sake of the narrative they’re trying to construct. Kyle, based on the first few pages of his book alone, makes it clear that he views any and all of his enemies as savages, and he is unwilling/unable to see them any other way. Consider this excerpt from the prologue to his book, entitled "Evil in the Crosshairs," where he describes the female insurgent he shoots and kills:

It was clear that not only did she want to kill them, but she didn't care about anybody else nearby who would have been blown up by the grenade or killed in the firefight. Children on the street, people in the houses, maybe her child . . . She was too blinded by evil to consider them.

My shots saved several Americans, whose lives were worth clearly more than that woman's twisted soul. I can stand before God with a clear conscience about doing my job. But I truly, deeply hated the evil that woman possessed. I hate it to this day.

Savage, despicable evil. That's what we're fighting in Iraq. That's why a lot of people, myself included, call the enemy "savages." There really was no other way to describe what we encountered there. (American Sniper, Kindle edition).

Here, it's a bit difficult to tell whether Kyle sees the people as inherently evil, or whether he is trying to class only their actions as evil. What is clear, however, is that Kyle has created a stark hierarchy where Iraqis are "lesser" and, in the vast majority of cases, eventually outed as savages who need to be killed. He elaborates somewhat on this perspective in a later section of the book, entitled "Evil":

I had never known that much about Islam. Raised as a Christian, obviously I knew there had been religious conflicts for centuries. I knew about the Crusades, and I knew that there had been fighting and atrocities forever.

But I also knew that Christianity had evolved from the Middle Ages. We don't kill people because they're a different religion.

The people we were fighting in Iraq, after Saddam's army fled or was defeated, were fanatics. They hated us because we weren't Muslim. They wanted to kill us, even though we'd just booted out their dictator, because we practiced a different religion than they did.

Isn't religion supposed to teach tolerance? (American Sniper, Kindle edition)

Here, then, Chris Kyle attempts to distance himself from the idea of holy war, implying that he and his fellow Christians have "evolved" while his Muslim enemies are still stuck in the Middle Ages. And this move is certainly a bit of a head-scratcher given his red-cross tattoo which, as he said in the quote above, he got so that everyone would know him to be a Christian. I was reminded, as I read these wildly conflicting passages, of Whitman: "Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes" ("Song of Myself," 51). As those lines suggest so well, our identities are rarely stable and coherent, and part of what struck me so much about Kyle's autobiography is its authenticity in that regard — how very clearly you can see him trying to make sense of himself and his ideals and not always succeeding in that endeavor.

The film, however, tries to solve that "problem" by erasing any of these inconsistencies and, in the process, any aspect of Kyle that might seem distasteful. He rarely uses the word "evil" (I can only recall a single instance), and -- as I mentioned previously -- he never refers to the Iraqi insurgents as "savages." The film keeps him from using that problematic language while still trying to ensure that an audience becomes comfortable with its usage, and it does so by resorting to gross stereotypes. Medieval crusades romances do so with aplomb as well. Take, for instance, Sir Isumbras (the text I just can’t quit, no matter how hard I try!); the Saracens in that text are always, already villainous, guaranteed – even when they seem peaceable – to betray and/or malign and/or threaten the Christian heroes. The Sultan captures Isumbras’ wife and brutalizes Isumbras, and the Saracens over whom Isumbras eventually rules predictably betray him almost as soon as he comes to power, which requires their complete annihilation. American Sniper seems to proffer the same kind of message. Consider, for instance, the scene where they find guns in the house of the Iraqi family with whom they’re eating dinner. Consider, for instance, the (completely fictional) scene where they find guns in the house of the Iraqi family with whom they’re eating dinner. It starts off promisingly enough, with the family and the U.S. soldiers sharing a meal, conversing, etc. But Kyle eventually grows suspicious because of a bruise on his host’s elbow (?!?!?!) and eventually uncovers a weapons stash, which proves that the family supported the insurgents all along. To be clear, I am by NO means saying that this scenario isn’t believable or that similar ones never happened or could not have happened throughout the course of the war. But the fact that the scene in the film is fictional means that it was created to serve a point, namely that Iraqis (like the Saracens of crusades romances) can never be trusted, nor can they change. And like the Saracen, if they prove intractable they have to be destroyed. And that is exactly what happens to virtually all of the Iraqis we see on the screen in the film. We are given no other perspective. Now, some -- Jason Hall included -- have argued/suggested that we only see the Iraqis in the film this way because, as a film about one man’s experiences and perspectives on the war, to do anything else would be inauthentic. The thing is, though, the film is ALREADY wildly inauthentic, which makes it hard to legitimize that kind of stance.

To make matters worse, the film seems to suggest (deliberately or indeliberately) that harboring any kind of ambivalence, uncertainty, or critical thoughts about the war is wrong and will at best make you weak and at worst get you killed. This worldview is established early on in the film, with Kyle’s father explaining that the world is made up of wolves, sheep, and sheepdogs (who must protect the sheep given their inability to believe that evil – i.e. wolves – exist). And it comes full circle with Kyle criticizing a dead comrade-in-arms for his criticism of the war. Marc Lee had written a letter shortly before his death warning against the dangers of glory and how it can lead one to launch an “ill-advised crusade.” In the film, the letter is read by Lee's mother at his funeral. But rather than allowing this to lead to a reflection/commentary on the war, the ensuing scene involves a conversation between Kyle and his wife Taya, in which he explains that the ideas in that letter are what killed his friend — that the letter “killed him and he paid the price for it.” As Courtney Duckworth points out in her Slate article, this is one instance when the actual Chris Kyle comes out looking more compassionate (in his autobiography, he has nothing but kind things to say about Lee and his letter, which does not seem to have contained any of the aforementioned criticism). And were it not for the fact that this conversation between Kyle and Taya seems obviously fabricated, I could believe the arguments that it’s attempting to achieve some measure of authenticity in its depiction of Kyle and his worldview. But since the scene is a fiction – like the aforementioned scenes with The Butcher and the Iraqi family – it seems instead to be crafted aspects of a "morality tale" (as Duckworth calls the film) that lionizes a black-and-white view of the world.

One of the tragedies of this film, then, is the very likely possibility that neither Clint Eastwood nor Jason Hall intended to create an anti-nuance morality tale in the first place. Eastwood himself has been open about his criticism of the Iraq war (however garbled/incoherent), and I believe Cooper when he’s spoken about his hope that the film would draw attention to the plight of vets in America. The film, however, did not need to strip away the complexities of the Iraq war and/or systematically open up opportunities for critical reflection only to shut them down in order to tell that kind of story. But by fabricating so many scenes pivotal to the narrative arc of American Sniper, those involved in the process created (however intentionally/unintentionally) a film that, at best, presents a wildly inaccurate account of Kyle’s experiences as a SEAL and at worst, promulgates a tragically simplistic ideology by failing to fully interrogate its limitations on screen.

For these reasons, I am all but set on drawing American Sniper into the conclusion of my book. I certainly plan to teach it alongside Richard Coer de Lion and other crusades romances whenever I have the opportunity. Because, given all of the problems I’ve outlined above, it is alarming indeed to realize that these kinds of stories continue to be so enduringly popular.

Report from The Word Hoard*: Getting To Work on THE BOOK

noreply@blogger.com (Leila K. Norako) — Fri, 16 Jan 2015 19:22:00 +0000

I've begun working in earnest on my book project, and as I mentioned on Facebook the other day, I've found myself fighting the paralysis that comes with lots of unstructured time, much like Mitchell in Modern Family who, once he quits his job, remarks -- while nearly hyperventilating -- that he "feels the weight of endless possibilities just sitting on [his] chest." Finding the time and resources to do this kind of work has been an immense challenge since I graduated and Rochester back in 2012, and I find myself inordinately grateful to finally have the institutional support and the time to finally make some headway. All the same, the task is a daunting one, especially since -- much like the dissertation writing itself -- it's a large and complex endeavor for which I have little context. Given the precariousness of my future in academia though -- especially given the dismal market and the fact that I have, at most, two and a half years left in my current postdoctoral position -- 2015 really does need to be The Year of the Book.

To generate some momentum, I decided to start revising the first chapter of the dissertation. It is, in certain ways, the most cohesive of the four— the most "book-like" — and my sensing was that by getting this one into shape first, I'll be able to do the hard work (i.e splitting my behemoth fourth chapter in two!) with more confidence and enthusiasm.

Happily, that strategy seems to have worked out so far. I just finished overhauling the chapter a couple days ago and, as I quipped on Twitter, tended -- at least on most occasions -- to find the process more energizing than agonizing:

Maintaining a sense of humor is key, I think. And I've also found that the time I've spent away from the dissertation has made it a lot easier to be ruthless in the editing and revision process. Definitely a "physician, heal thyself" experience, considering how much I stress the value of such distance to my students on a near daily basis! At the same time, I'm trying mix in some kindness with all the ruthlessness. Again, I know all too well the importance of honest, but humane, feedback from all of my teaching, and so -- in opposition to my subliminal, but incessant worry that being too kind to myself will result in my turning into some sort of hopeless slacker (my head is SUCH a fun place to be sometimes, I know) -- I'm trying to see how things go when I write comments to myself that are as humane as the ones I always try to write to my students. And you know? It really made the past couple of weeks a lot more energizing and -- dare I say it? -- fun.

As with the dissertation itself, I've avoided the temptation to start with the introduction. Surprisingly, and despite my penchant for discursive and non-linear thinking (not to mention procrastinating, but that's another post entirely . . . ), I've always tended to write in a very linear way. The process of finishing the dissertation, however, really showed me the value of waiting to introduce your material until, well, you've actually gotten to know what you're introducing. And so, while I did read over my original introduction before rolling up my sleeves and getting to work on Chapter 1, I'm letting it be for now.

I am, however, keeping an eye out -- both as I do the hard editing work and as read secondary scholarship with which the book needs to engage -- for things I might want to include. And the other day, perhaps because of the lingering Christmas season, I found myself remembering Carl Sandburg's "Star-Silver." In particular, what I kept coming back to is that repeated question in the poem: "Why does this story never wear out?" I remembered, in the end, that if my book is trying to do anything, it's trying to answer that very question. Why are these fantasies of crusades-that-can-never-be so popular in the late Middle Ages? What lies behind their pervasiveness? And what does it say about us that similar narratives continue to enjoy popularity even today? Certainly something to tuck away for (potential) future use and to keep in mind as I try to ensure that each chapter "speaks" to the others in direct enough ways.

For now though, I'm finishing up the revisions on my Mongol article and, starting next week, will likely begin the process of tackling my much-more-difficult Richard Coer de Lion chapter. Onwards!

*The affectionate name I've given to my office/lair/hobbit-hole.

Musings on Eyrbyggja saga

noreply@blogger.com (Leila K. Norako) — Wed, 05 Nov 2014 04:46:00 +0000

As promised in my last blog post, I've decided to post brief reflections after I finish reading a given saga. I was midway through Eyrbyggja saga when I started this particular reading challenge, and I finished it right before the quarter started at Stanford. I had every intention to write about it immediately, but the past six weeks have been a blur (however innervating), and my saga reading and blogging have taken a bit of a nose-dive in the process. With the start of National Academic Writing Month (or #AcWriMo), however, I've vowed to publish at least three times here at In Romaunce (in addition to tying the bow on a couple of projects). And so, without further ado, I'll offer up a few speculative musings on this particular saga.

It's rapidly become a favorite of mine for a few reasons:

1) It's packed to the gills with vengeful draugr. Thorolf Lame-foot, for instance, haunts the hills around Hvamm, causing -- among other things -- cows to "moo" themselves to death. He kills so many livestock (and people, but the text spends far more time describing the cows) that his son Arnkel has him reinterred at a place eventually dubbed Lame-foot hill, and said son builds a wall around the cairn so high that only birds can fly over it. The narrator tells us, at this point, that he rests in peace for the rest of Arnkel's life.

2) It includes perhaps the greatest scatological kenning in the history of kennings: álfrek, which means "elf-frighteners."

3) It includes a seal revenant. And yes. You did read that correctly. The episode is so spectacularly odd that I feel absolutely compelled to share it with you here:

During the winter just before Yule, Thorodd the farmer went out to Nes to fetch his dried fish. There were six men altogether in the ten-oared boat, and they spent the night out there. The same night that Thorodd had left, when the people at Froda came up to the fireside that evening, they saw a seal's head coming up out of the fireplace. One of the servants saw it first when she came in. She took a club that was inside the doorway and struck the seal on the head. But the seal rose up with the blow and reared up towards Thorgunna's bed-curtains. Then one of Thorodd's men went up and started beating the seal, but with every blow it rose up further until its flippers appeared, and then the man fell down unconscious. Everyone else who was present became very frightened.
Then the boy Kjartan rushed forward and lifted up an iron sledgehammer and brought it down on the seal's head. It was a tremendous blow, but the seal just shook its head and looked around. Kjartan kept going, with blow after blow, and the seal went back down as if he were driving a nail. He kept beating until the seal went so far down that he hammered the floor over its head. And so it went on throughout the winter, with all the revenants fearing Kjartan the most. (Chapter 53).

4) The fact that everyone (seriously, EVERYONE) is named after Thor. This is fascinating given that the saga begins with Thorolf Moster-beard relocating from Norway to Iceland and, once he settles on the Snaefellsness peninsula, rebuilds the temple to Thor (which he had overseen in his homeland) on Helgafell. This description of a pagan temple is a rarity in Old Norse literature, and the frequency with which Thor is evoked in this saga (mainly through nomenclature) certainly indicates his sustained popularity among this particular group of settlers. But it also makes it damned near impossible to keep everyone straight. Case in point:

He married Astrid, who was the daughter of Hrolf the hersir and the sister of Steinold the Short, and they had three children. Their son was Thorgrim the Godi and their daughter Gerd was married to Thormod the Godi, the son of Odd the Bold . . . . In his old age, Thorolf Moster-beard married a woman named Unn. Some people say she was the daughter of Thorstein the Red, but Ari Thorgilsson the Learned does not count her among his children. Thorolf and Unn had a son named Stein, whom Thorolf dedicated to his friend Thor, calling him Thorstein. The boy matured very quickly. Hallstein Thorolfsson married Osk, the daughter of Thorstein the Red. Their son was also named Thorstein, and he was fostered by Thorolf. Thorolf called him Thorstein Surt (Black) and his own son Thorstein Cod-biter. . . . (Chapter 7)

I rest my case.

5) The tendency of the characters to burst in to magnificently gory skaldic verse. Case in point:

I had to defend myself
against the valkyrie's derision:
the dart-of-wounds was driven,
and the raven delighted in gore.
When the sword of my father's son
rang against helmets in the field,
gashes spurted blood
and wound-streams ran. (Chapter 19.8)

Every time I read a saga, a not-so-small part of me wishes I lived in a world where bursting into opaquely metaphorical poetry was a perfectly normal way of expressing oneself.

All mirth and snark aside, I plan to keep musing and writing on these aspects in the weeks and months ahead. This saga has, for instance, inspired a deep fascination with the way in which draugr function in Old Icelandic sagas, and once I surface from my current deluge of projects, I vow to do some research to figure out what fellow scholars have said about them. I have a feeling someone has to have done work in this area already, but I was particularly struck by how a draugr's presence seems to parallel/mirror the bloody conflicts that permeate a good deal of the saga's narrative action.

For now though, I want to spend a bit of time musing on the way in which ice functions in the text.
As I read the saga, I found myself fascinated by the persistent presence of ice in the saga, and the role it seems to play in anticipating, facilitating, and ultimately halting, the violence and feuding at the heart of this particular story.

The first significant reference to ice occurs in Chapter 40. Thorodd and Thorgrima Magic-Cheek attempt to thwart Bjorn's affair with Froda because Thorodd fears the dangers of Bjorn's continued association with her:

. . . but when he left to go home that evenings, the sky was overcast and it had started to rain, and he was rather late getting going. By the time he came up to the heath, the weather had turned very cold and there were snowdrifts. It was so dark that he could not see the path in front of him. After that a blizzard blew up with so much force that he could hardly stand up. His clothes, which were soaked through, began to freeze, and he had completely lost his bearings and did not know which way he was going. He came upon a cave jutting out of the land, and went into it to shelter for the night, but it was a cold campsite. (146)

Bjorn spends three miserable days in the cave — even composing an angsty poem about his experience — and decides to spend the rest of the winter at home after the storm abates. By implication then, Thorodd successfully halts Bjorn's pursuit of Thurid (at least for a time), one that would have easily led to feuding had it continued.

Another vivid description of ice occurs in Chapter 45, where a pivotal battle between Steinthor and his men and the Thorbrandssons occur Hofstadir bay, which had frozen over:

Hofstadir bay was completely frozen over right out to Bakki the Greater, so they walked across the ice and on over the isthmus to Vigrafjord, which was also entirely iced over. In that fjord the water ebbed all the way out until it was dry, so that the ice rested on mud at low-tide, and the rocks in the fjord jutted up out of the ice, which was broken up around them. There were a lot of uneven ice floes past the rocks, and powdery snow had fallen over the ice, making it very slippery. (Chapter 45)

The battle that ensues is brutal to say the least, and the narrator describes in detail how the iced-over bay makes for an environment by turns ideal and treacherous. Ice-sheets pushed up near a large rock make for good cover, for instance, but the ice's slipperiness makes for a difficult and slower battle. Interestingly, this battle serves as a follow-up to a major skirmish at Alftafjord. After this battle on the ice, the wounds and deaths from both sides are tallied up and -- given the roughly equal number of wounds and deaths on each side -- a settlement is reached that lasts for as long as Steinthor and Snorri the Godi live. This battle on the ice, by implication, ultimately allows for a crucial truce to occur. Ice, then, acts in a strange way as an agent of circuitous/indirect peace-making.

Ice plays a final, significant role in Chapter 61, where another frozen bay forces Snorri to hold off on retaliating against Ospak (a marauding Norseman) and his band. But while it prevents Snorri from waging open war, it doesn't prevent him from summoning a supernatural ally, Thrand. Described as a former heathen and shape-shifter, Thrand makes his way through the snowy and icy terrain at a preternaturally fast pace once he receives Snorri's summons, and he proves a pivotal member of the band that eventually defeats Ospak and his men. In this passage, then, treacherous and icy landscapes force Snorri into the role of strategist rather than retaliator, and the waiting Snorri has to do seems to contribute rather directly to his victory.

Moving forward, I'm curious to see how ice and snow are represented in other sagas. The vividness of these rimy landscapes struck me unusual, because the sagas (at least in my current understanding) tend to leave a surprising amount unsaid when it comes to describing the landscapes in which these narratives occur. There's nary a mention of a volcano, for instance, and references to glaciers seem to be relatively few and far between as well. Like the draugr that populate the narrative, these landscapes -- when they are described in any detail -- seem to offer up some kind of tacit commentary on the feuding that takes place upon them. The kind of ice described, after all, is impermanent and seasonal, and so too, the saga narrator implies, are the resolutions and truces that are made in the snow or on the ice. Perhaps the harsh, hibernal setting emphasizes this point (one that the saga makes again and again) — and this possibility leaves me wondering how other saga landscapes might be made to reflect and anticipate the events that take place upon them. On a related note, I'm likewise intrigued by the frequency with which violent encounters take place on or around Yule in this saga (yet another thing to research and explore further), and I wonder whether the linkage is unique to this saga or whether it's part of a broader tradition (and, if it is, what that might signify/suggest). Certainly things to keep investigating in the weeks and months ahead!

Next up on the reading list: Gísla saga and Bárðar saga Snæfellsáss, given that both occur on or near to the Snaefellsness Peninsula as well.

A year (and a half) of saga reading begins . . . NOW.

noreply@blogger.com (Leila K. Norako) — Thu, 28 Aug 2014 23:03:00 +0000

My parents (who know me so very, very well) recently sent this incredibly thoughtful and generous gift to me for my birthday:

Since traveling to Iceland in 2006, I've acquired an ever-increasing interest in the country and its literature. I have vivid memories of wandering around the Culture House during that initial visit, marveling over the stunning manuscripts on display and by the fact that modern Icelandic is in many ways merely an upgraded version of the language in which the sagas were written (I was told, at the time, that there exists a greater difference between Shakespearean English and modern English -- quite remarkable, given the centuries that lie between the composition of these sagas and today). And when I visited Iceland again in 2009 (the Snaefellsness peninsula in particular), I was struck by the way in which the sagas are evoked. It seemed that everywhere I looked, I found placards retelling or quoting passages from sagas that took place in those particular areas. I don't know when I've seen a nation's literature etched so lovingly into its terrain.

I've read several sagas over the years, but have always found myself amazed by their vast quantity and the sheer number of them I have yet to explore. I've also become increasingly drawn to the sagas of Icelanders specifically because of my burgeoning interest in world-building; as I mentioned a while back, I had the immense privilege of organizing a roundtable on medieval world-building as one of BABEL's sessions at this past Kalamazoo. To my delight, the session was very well-received, and I am now in the process of assembling a special volume on the topic for postmedieval (due out in early 2018). As the editor of the volume, I'll be writing a general introduction, and I'm leaning towards using the Icelandic sagas as a starting point. Because, as the editors of this collection point out:

. . . the world of the sagas and the tales is a unified whole in several senses. They belong to the same geographical setting and tell of a particular period in history. They also share a recognizable narrative technique, although individual sagas often differ sharply in style and content. Each saga highlights various aspects of this common world and presents it from an individual perspective. (1.xv)

Needless to say, I'm especially eager to explore more of the Icelandic sagas in light of this project. I want to see firsthand how world-building occurs in these narratives and how the aforementioned consistency can be born out of the work of numerous (almost entirely anonymous) authors and copyists. I was, as a result, beyond thrilled to receive this gift. It feels like it weighs a good ten pounds more than my daughter, and it contains all of the sagas that focus predominately on Icelanders. When I opened the gift and promptly called my parents to thank them, I learned that my dad had also purchased a copy for himself; we all traveled to Iceland together so that they could do some sight-seeing and also help out and visit with their grandbaby while I attended the NCS conference, and my dad and I had an array of wonderful conversations about medieval Iceland and saga literature while there.

So, upon learning that he has a copy of his own, I issued the following challenge: that we would read the collection in its entirety by Christmas 2015. He enthusiastically accepted the challenge, so the game is on!

All of which is to say that you, oh intrepid readers, will be hearing a lot about medieval Iceland between now and December of next year. My plan, at least as it stands right now, is to write at least a brief entry on each saga as I finish them. Currently up: Eyrbyggja saga, which includes tales of cow-killing revenants, witches, and "elf-frighteners." More on all of that later!

On Chaucer and Vanishing Ice: A partial retrospective of NCS 2014

noreply@blogger.com (Leila K. Norako) — Tue, 26 Aug 2014 18:32:00 +0000

Jökulsárlón (March, 2006).

I have so much to say about my recent trip to Iceland — and about the marvelous New Chaucer Society conference I attended there — that I barely know where to begin. My fondness for this particular gathering of medievalists seems to amplify with each successive conference, and so much of what I said about the Portland gathering certainly rings true here as well: that as a fairly recent Ph.D. who, until just two months prior to NCS found herself still in the yawning realm of job contingency, this conference — given and its assemblage of so many kind-hearted and enthusiastic colleagues and friends — always seems to innervate me when I need it most. There are so many parts of the trip and the conference that I want to write about — from the magnificent Settlement Museum, to the stark beauty of the Icelandic countryside, to the deep intellectual and personal generosity of colleagues and friends, to the joys and challenges of traveling to a foreign country and a conference with a three month old — but for now, I'll limit myself to the topic of ice.

Jökulsárlón (March, 2006)

I was thrilled to be a part of Jeffrey Cohen's Ice sessions at this particular gathering, in no small part because I've found myself fascinated and in awe of Iceland's glaciers ever since I first caught glimpses of them during my 2006 trip to the country. They loomed in the distance as the Flybus hurtled down the road from the airport to Reykjavík, and they towered over us magnificently as Robbie and I careened around the Ring Road from Reykjavík to Skaftafell National Park and back (over a period of a few days, of course!). I remember being simultaneously awestruck by the immensity of Skaftafellsjökull and alarmed by how much the glacier had retreated over the past few decades. I vividly remember ambling along the edge of Jökulsárlón, marveling at the eery quiet, the otherworldly blue hues of the ice, and the seals that frolicked between the icebergs.

Perhaps my most vivid memory of glacial ice, however, is of the lagoon at Gígjökull, one of Eyjafjallajökull's outlet glaciers. We scampered on top of icebergs encased in the frozen waters and hiked to the edge of the glacier itself. The snow-coated landscape could not have been more gorgeous -- I even recall our guide, Kristin, matter-of-factly assuring us that heaven would be at least this beautiful. But I also remember being stunned to hear Kristin say that, just fifty years prior, the glacier extended far past the edge of the lagoon itself. I thought I heard him wrong at first. "Surely," I thought, "he said five hundred years." I simply couldn't wrap my head around that much vanished ice.

The Gígjökull lagoon, as I will always remember it.

I have an immense fondness for that lagoon and for the hours that we spent in awe of both its stark beauty and its ephemerality. And so, I was more than a little saddened when I learned from Oddur (the glaciologist who participated in the Ice sessions at this years NCS gathering) that the lagoon (featured right) was obliterated when the now infamous volcano under Eyjafjallajökull erupted back in 2010. I'm fairly certain, in fact, that this video captures its destruction; you can also see current photos of the location here. Saddened as I was to hear of the lagoon's extinction, its swift demise brought home to me the volatility of Iceland's landscape, and of how a glaciers can act as both its creator and destroyer. In this way, my brief conversation with Oddur anticipated what so many of us evoked in our papers: that glacial ice remains a dangerous and remarkable substance — but also a deeply imperiled — substance. After all, as Jeffrey stated in his introductory remarks, Iceland's glaciers will cease to exist in two hundred years' time — a span that, by all accounts, is but a geological blink of the eye.

Jeffrey has already summarized each of our papers in his post about the sessions, so I won't repeat that work here, but what I will say is how struck I was by the ways in which our papers intersected with one another and how our ensuing conversations encouraged me to revisit certain aspects of my own speculations. Case in point: I asked in my own paper how deft of a reader Geoffrey (HoF's narrator) can possibly be if he can't figure out, and quickly, that he's climbing all over a massive rock of ice. Dan Remein pointed out, however, that it can be startlingly easy to mistake parts of a glacier for rock when one is climbing upon it — something he discovered while on our group's glacier hike the previous day. Perhaps, then, Geoffrey's not a bad reader -- just a confused one! As an aside, Dan's observation, born out of the visceral experiences of the day prior, truly brought home how essential that glacier hike was to our session; and for that reason I do hope, like Jeffrey, that more of us will consider taking these kinds of interdisciplinary turns in our work -- especially at conferences, which are by their very nature designed us to present exploratory works-in-progress.

During the Q&A, Dave Hadbawnik asked about the indeterminacy of the House of Fame's foundation (is it made or is it natural? certainly a question to keep musing upon as I work on this nascent topic), while another attendee asked about the likeliness/possibility of Chaucer having ever seen a glacier on his travels and what that question might mean for an "icy" reading of the poem. Regarding the latter, the matter of imagination was offered up -- the notion that if modern day scientists can imagine what other kinds of ice are possible (at, say, the center of the earth or on distant planets), certainly Chaucer could have conjured up an imagined glacier having only heard of one. And towards the end of our second Ice session, Karl Steel asked us to comment on the risks of giving ice a privileged ontological position. I appreciated that question very much, because it forced me to ask myself whether there was anything arbitrary in my approach to HoF. Was I, in other words, randomly privileging a particular object and, in the process, forcing an otherwise untenable reading out of the poem? I think that Karl's question is an important one to keep asking myself as I continue to examine potentially agential objects in Chaucer's works. At the same time, though, my sensing was that our sessions, didn't afford any undue privilege to ice but rather encouraged us to scrutinize references that all too often go unnoticed and, in the process, see what happens to the texts in question when we do so.

And so, in that spirit, I'll offer up my paper:

"Vanishing Ice and The House of Fame: An Ecocritical Interrogation"

In this talk, I want to consider ice-as-agent in House of Fame. What does it mean for ice to have agency in this poem? How does ice fit within the ecological framework of The House of Fame? And what happens when we consider the agential force of Ice in House of Fame alongside images of moving, melting glaciers? While many scholars have explored the poem’s emphasis on poetic creativity and limitation, reading ice as an agential object (rather than as a mere descriptive feature) might offer an interpretation of the poem that more accurately captures its persistent enjambment of the non-human with the human. The powerful presence of ice in The House of Fame reminds us that, while the poem concerns itself in vibrant ways with human stories and objects, there exists in tandem to the manmade a force that (however glacial its movements or its meltings) may ultimately get the last word.

Ásbyrgi. Photo by Mats Wibe Lund (www.mats.is)

But let’s talk for a moment about glaciers and their creative movements. In the north of Iceland lies Ásbyrgi, a canyon carved out by one (possibly two) enormous jökulhlaup — flashfloods born of subglacial volcanic eruptions — at Vatnajökull during the last ice age. The eruptions, which took place under the mighty Vatnajokull, instantly melted a tremendous amount of ice, and the resulting flashfloods violently carved out the canyon in a matter of days. The canyon is approximately three kilometers long and one hundred meters high at its deepest point. Vatnajökull itself lies far to the southeast, and covers almost eight percent of Iceland’s landmass. It is parent to over thirty outlet glaciers, and you can reach one of them, Skaftafellsjökull, by a scenic and sobering hike. Along the path, stakes labeled by decade mark the points where the glacier used to reach. And in the background, where there arrow is located, you can see the glacier itself. The amount of absent ice attested by these posts is simply staggering, almost as staggering as the massive expanse of land carved out in its wake, or the stones in the valley that lay split like hardboiled eggs from the immense pressure of the now-absent glacial mass. These spaces stand as quiet, looming memorials to the power and the impermanence of ice.

Ice, by its very nature, is liminal, and its liminality likely contributed to Chaucer’s decision to perch his House of Fame upon it. The palace sits, after all, “in myddes of the weye / betwixen” heaven, earth, and the sea — an allusion, perhaps, to the vaporous, solid, and liquid forms that water can take. The melting of the building’s glacial foundation, in all of its inexorability, consistently threatens its existence and the stories preserved in its walls. Like the Mississippi River described by Jeffrey Cohen in Prismatic Ecologies, ice is an “earth artist,” “its projects tak[ing] so long to execute that humans have a difficult time discerning their genius” (xix). This very problem of perception certainly plagues our narrator in HoF. Consider, for instance, how he struggles to identify what kind of [CUE] “rock” the HoF is built upon:

But up I clomb with alle payne,

And though to clymbe it greved me,

Yit I ententyf was to see,

And for to powren wonder lowe,

Yf I koude any weyes knowe

What maker stoon this roche was.

For hyt was lyke alum de glas,

But that hyt shoon ful more clere;

But of what congealed matere

Hyt was, I nyste redely.

But at the laste aspied I,

And found that it was every del

A roche of yse, and not of steel.

Thought I, "By Seynt Thomas of Kent,

This were a feble fundament

To bilden on a place hye.

He ought him lytel glorifye

That hereon bilt, God so me save!"

-- House of Fame, 1118-35

It takes him sixteen lines-worth of musing to figure out that the “rock” is actually ice, which certainly brings into question (given that he’s climbing all over it) how adept he is at reading his surroundings (i.e. couldn’t he feel that it was cold?).

Consider as well how he struggles to understand why it’s built on ice in the first place. He criticizes the builder — essentially calling him/her a fool — and then ponders over the names etched on one of the foundation’s walls that have all but melted away. He seems reassured, however, by the castle, which, as he describes it, seems to protect one of the walls from the melting effects of the heat (lines 1136-64). I think, however, that HoF invites its audience to see Geoffrey’s shortcomings in this very analysis. For as Bernd Herzogenrath observes, ice is “a shapeshifter” “prone to powerful expansion.” And while humans might not be able to see that expansion take place, the fact remains that all ice, even the glacial foundation of HoF, is forever on the move.

Geoffrey’s initial lamentation over the feebleness of the House of Fame's foundation is, then, the more accurate of his two observations. But it seems to be one that Geoffrey cannot sustain, because to do so would be to admit how much of human ingenuity and accomplishment lie at the mercy of the natural world. A message that these images* of moving and melting glaciers certainly bring home to us in vital ways. Our narrator may largely assume that ice can be managed by manmade forces, but the fact remains that The House of Fame — and all that it seems to represent and contain — remains forever at the mercy of the foundation upon which it has been built. Human achievement and existence are, by extension, forever at the mercy of the non-human. Ice, then, becomes the primary agential object in HoF, quietly moving, melting, threatening the collapse of all that humans seek to build upon it. Our narrator’s description of the House of Fame and its glacial foundation, then, ruefully reveals the limits of human perception, especially of our ability to read the movements of the natural world and measure our power over it with complete accuracy.

By foregrounding a vibrant ecology with ice as the primary agential object and mover, HoF invites us to reflect upon the tensions between nature and culture that Lisa Kiser sees in Parliament of Fowles, and also invites us to reconsider the limits of human sensory perception. John Muir, the great American naturalist, encountered glaciers in sensual ways not all that removed from Geoffrey in this poem. He saw and embraced them as “vibrating, vibrant things” (to paraphrase Lowell Duckert) and Geoffrey, at least for a brief moment, acknowledges them as such (an admission that I think audiences are meant to keep firmly in mind even if the poem’s narrator cannot). In this way, HoF, through its positioning of ice as the unstable foundation upon which all human achievement is laid to rest, reminds us of a truth that Muir heard echoing through an Alaskan glacier — that “the world, though made, is yet being made; that this is still the morning of creation.”** Thank You.

*In the actual presentation, I showed excerpts from James Balog's time-lapse photography, which he showcased in both his TED talk and the documentary Chasing Ice. I selected two clips: one of Sólheimajökull (the glacier on which many of my fellow panelists hiked the day before), and one of the Ilulissat glacier in Greenland. You can find them in this video, which is worth watching in its entirety in order to get a sense of Balog's project and the staggering amount of vanished glacial ice across our planet.

**I owe a debt of gratitude to Lowell Duckert, whose article "Glacier" introduced me to Muir's description of the Alaskan glacier.

Bibliography

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, ed. Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory Beyond Green. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

Duckert, Lowell. “Glacier.” postmedieval 4.1 (2013): 68-79.

Herzogenrath, Bernd. “White.” In Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory Beyond Green. Ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

Kiser, Lisa J. “Chaucer and the Politics of Nature.” In Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism. Eds. Karla Armbruster and Kathleen R. Wallace. Charlottesville, VA: UP of Virginia, 2001, 41-56.