(Untitled)

[k_navit]

I need to submit this tomorrow for a job app. I think there will be medievalists and early modernists on this search committee - it's a department apparently trying to develop something bigger with medieval lit, and they already have someone teaching OE and ME, so I do need to presume that my readers are at least familiar with these works. So I don

Comments

[k_navit]

In short, it's not one of those projects that looks at work A in ch 1, work B in ch 2, NOR one of those projects that looks at decade A (or country A or genre A) in ch 1, decade B in ch 2, etc. In large part that's because I can't give a "start date" for my OE homilies and poems - nobody can. (Part of the trouble with putting actual dates in is that we can't date any of these OE works with any certainty, and the extant mss all certainly posdate the original composition by lengths of time that people get into actual, heated fights about. So when I tell people what I study, I tell them "Old English literature" and "Middle English literature," or just "medieval English literature" -- those *are* the time periods/eras, so in lit circles that would be understood as all the lit of the OE period and all the lit of the ME period. So while I can appreciate what you're saying about needing to be better anchored --and I'm glad you said that, because of the things that had occurred to me as potential problems, that was not one of them-- I'm not really sure what to say other than the "medieval English literature" of the title that would clear it up. Would it be clearer if I got rid of the coda and Augustine business and started with a statement something like the "tracing the ways in which their dominant images and metaphors shift over time" stuff? So, stating up front that I'm tracing these changes from Old English through Middle English (except I don't stop there - I do a full reading of the ontology of Paradise Lost, so I really am going from literature that may very well have been circulating in some form in the 700s, give or take 100 or so years on either side, to 1667, after an intro that takes us through the late 4th century in what is today Algeria lol... )

Or am I misunderstanding your point?

[k_navit]

Re angels, I just have an awful lot of shit in this dissertation. I simply don't know how to explain the link in an abstract. Basically I start out with showing that OE concepts of soul and body were like so (that takes 80 pages), and one of the big recurring things is this kinship metaphor, that soul and body are in a relationship characterized by kinship, not master/slave or anything like that. Angels are also described in these kinship terms, in relation to the soul itself in places, and in relation to humanity itself in others (which is not especially remarkable since human beings were created to fill a void left by the fallen angels), and they play a central role in humanity's understanding of itself for a really, really, really long time. Gradually, the metaphorical and conceptual categories and characterizations change - the soul becomes immortal and immaterial and rational, the other half of the physical body. The role of angels in relation to the human soul or self also changes as rational conscience emerges as a concept and takes center stage, in fact taking over a lot of the job that angels did in a lot of OE poetry (to put it WAY broadly and probably not too clearly, but I am def. claiming that conscience in the sense of "God's umpire" as it's used in Paradise Lost, as this divine spark of indwelling ethical wisdom that was part of the human self or soul, does NOT exist in OE). Milton happens to have written a poem that sort of crystallizes what's at stake with some of these changes. But I do NOT mean to imply cause and effect or an unbroken uninterrupted line of "influence" - Milton was not trying to explain Old and Middle English kinship metaphors! and all I'm really doing is claiming that we can read these conceptual shifts in the literatures of their eras, which is really a pretty "duh" claim - but PL happens to "put a bow" on some of these shifts and issues I'm tracing, happens to engage a lot of them and help me illustrate where these ideas "end up"... or at least the discussion of PL also serves to bring all this dusty old obscure stuff nobody has heard of "up" to a point that is "common ground" for pretty much any reader. It brings the discussion up to a point we're back into the "light" of well-studied, well-documented, thoroughly discussed stuff. Early medieval religious literature is treated like it's prehistoric, and I'm just trying to fill in some blanks of some actual ideas that people had, in England, between Augustine and Aquinas, really. They had ideas and wrote them down, though if you read standard histories of medieval philosophy of being, you could easily get the impression that nobody had any new ideas between the 4th century in Hippo and the 13th in Paris - at least nobody in England who wrote them down in English :-)

[k_navit]

Then again, the problem could be that this sprawling project doesn't hang together too well, and the reason I can't really explain how the angel stuff ties in to the soul-body stuff in a clear sentence or two is because there's way too much going on. But it's pretty much too late to do anything about that.

I suppose I could leave the angels out. It's just that they are at the center of the fifth chapter, which became my first article and which is my writing sample, and most of my third chapter is about what angels are up to in OE literature and exegesis, so it seemed important to mention them, as they take up about 2/5ths of my dissertation. But when I try to explain why *briefly,* I end up with what I posted, and that is not doing the job too well, apparently :/

[rabswom]

I think it's probably too late for my comments at this point -- I'm sorry if I caused you stress by not answering in a timely fashion!

I think that, most likely, for literature people, pegging it as 'medieval English literature' is fine -- I suspect that my own questions come from the fact that I work on the Middle East where definitions of 'medieval' can be more contentious.