tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22992265.post114842548684915215..comments2023-11-02T09:18:44.063-04:00Comments on Old English in New York: Old English Poetry and Translation (part one)Mary Kate Hurleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14892991966276345782noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22992265.post-1148745843125645862006-05-27T12:04:00.000-04:002006-05-27T12:04:00.000-04:00Anhaga--my dissertation was a monstrous behemoth w...Anhaga--my dissertation was a monstrous behemoth which has since been parceled out into various articles and the fourth chapter of which is being developed into a monograph, the description of which, chapter-by-chapter, you can access here:<BR/><BR/>http://ww2.coastal.edu/ejoy/MonographPrecis.htm<BR/><BR/>A portion of one of the chapters, "On The Hither Side of Time: Tony Kushner's 'Homebody/Kabul' and the Old English 'Ruin'," is forthcoming in "Medieval Perspectives" [a proceedings journal of the Southeastern Medieval Association], but I have also posted that online at:<BR/><BR/>http://ww2.coastal.edu/ejoy/HomebodyRuinArticle.htm<BR/><BR/>I can understand, with how busy you are as a graduate student, that expanding your thoughts on Hamer and Forster into a more full essay could be daunting at present, but do keep it in mind. "Heroic Age" has a "Forum" section in which they publish shorter, 5,000-word-ish type scholarly "meditations," for which your idea/piece could be perfect, I think. I published something there myself, along those lines, titled: "James Earl's 'Thinking About Beowulf': Ten Years Later," which will also give you more insight into my thinking about scholarship as an "artistic intervention into history" (an idea I have partly pilfered from Terence Hawkes' book, "Shakespeare in the Present." Here is the "Heroic Age" piece:<BR/><BR/>http://www.heroicage.org/issues/8/forum.html<BR/><BR/>Okay, that's one [or two] too many shameless links to myself in one blog post! But I think the way *you* obviously think about Old English literature, modern texts, the conjunctures between "present" and "past" moments/modes of expression & thinking, is so rare in our field, that I just want to encourage, encourage, encourage you! Of course, understanding the past "on its own terms" [whatever that may ultimately mean--it is endlessly debatable] is a worthwhile endeavor, but while we're at that task [as we often are] we also have to understand where we are *right now* and the ways in which these medieval texts exist alongside us in the present. We need a criticism that is inventive, that understands texts, as Edward Said wrote in "The World, the Text, and the Critic" as significant forms in which “worldliness, circumstantiality, the text’s status as an event having sensuous particularity as well as historical contingency, are. . .part of its capacity for conveying and producing meaning.”<BR/><BR/>Cheers, EileenAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22992265.post-1148584379068338552006-05-25T15:12:00.000-04:002006-05-25T15:12:00.000-04:00Eileen -- Your comments are thought-provoking, and...Eileen -- Your comments are thought-provoking, and I’m glad you enjoyed my post. As a grad student, there's always this weird tension between the present and the past -- what's applicable, after all, to reading medieval literature? The life of literature is, as you say, that meaning is precisely not fixed -- as you put it, "It cannot be "seen" because it has to be invented, over and over again, by "us," here, and now." <BR/><BR/>It's funny you should bring up The Believer -- a magazine I only just heard about recently from a friend who wrote something for it -- and particularly that article. It fits nicely with something I've been thinking a lot about lately. I was just having a conversation with one of my friends about Eco's <I>Foucault's Pendulum</I>. Both of the books of his that I’ve read have that moment that you know he was writing for all along -- that stark statement that completely floors you the first time you read it. My friend still has the book, but I remember a part of that moment from the book by heart -- "Invent, invent the plan, Casaubon. That's what everyone has done, to explain the dinosaurs and the peaches." It’s clearly not the same situation – but it seems to be another side of the same coin. Some things have a life of their own -- and the "bigger picture," if there could ever be one, isn't really something we can see. <BR/><BR/>You had a line over at <A HREF="http://jjcohen.blogspot.com" REL="nofollow"> JJC's blog</A> that I thought was particularly compelling -- "Scholarship has to be practiced as a kind of art form--it is an artistic intervention into history." I realized when I read that sentence that the scholarly work I’ve always enjoyed most has been just that -- artistic, in some way. Your dissertation sounds compelling– are there pieces of it available in article form? <BR/><BR/>As for the article on Forster and Hamer – I will give it some serious consideration. I appreciate your encouragement – I’m not sure how it will work time-wise, but I certainly would love to write more about this, and seriously pursue some of these thoughts further. And I must also say – I was at one of the “Is Beowulf Postmodern Yet?” sessions, and found it to be one of the best panels I’d seen in awhile. I’m still actively thinking about the discussion that started there, and I’m excited to see the work BABEL will be doing!<BR/><BR/>Derek – Thanks, glad you enjoyed it. As for ubi-sunt passages…I was totally going to add one, but then I couldn’t figure out what to put in it…or what to be lamenting!MKHhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11773335756057041042noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22992265.post-1148477712050518582006-05-24T09:35:00.000-04:002006-05-24T09:35:00.000-04:00Great post. Evocative of "the Ruins"...you probabl...Great post. Evocative of "the Ruins"...you probably could have fit a great ubi sunt passage in there somewhere... ;-)Derek the Ænglicanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11625110461660458291noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22992265.post-1148470893140436082006-05-24T07:41:00.000-04:002006-05-24T07:41:00.000-04:00Hello "Old English in New York" from "Old English ...Hello "Old English in New York" from "Old English in South Carolina but soon to be Old English in Illinois Again" and used to be "Old English in Tennessee" and also the author of the BABEL website and the organizer of the "Is Beowulf Postmodern Yet?" sessions at Kalamazoo--<BR/><BR/>Your meditation on Forster's novel and the always-fragmentary and "lost" corpus of Old English literature is very moving. It is exactly what you are feeling that led me to my dissertation topic a few years back, "Beowulf and the Floating Wreck of History," which was an attempt, on my part, to write an intellectual history of "Beowulf" studies that would focus on the accidents, chaos, and randomness [as well as the nostalgia, despair, loss, etc.] in that history. I am a shameless propoent of doing presentist-minded medieval scholarship, and I think your rumination on Hamer viz. Forster's "Passage to India" would make a lovely essay, and since I am a reader for the online journal "Heroic Age," perhaps you'd like to write such an essay and submit it? I encourage it.<BR/><BR/>But trying to think symbiotically "in the now" about your comments, I offer you some quotes from an interview I was reading as you likely typed your post, between the two documentary filmmakers Errol Morris ["The Fog of War"] and Adam Curtis ["The Power of Nightmares"], in the excellent magazine "The Believer" [April 2006 issue]. They were discussing the Vietnam War and 9/11 [the subjects of their respective most recent films] and trying to collectively make the argument that there are no real conspiracies [and for academic studies, let's replace "conspiracy" with "ideology"] because history is always more random than that. Morris asked, "Is history primarily a history of conspiracy? Or is it just a series of blunders, one after the other? Confusions, self-deceptions, idiocies of one kind or another?" To which Curtis replied, "History is a series of unintended consequences resulting from confused actions, some of which are committed by people who think they may be taking part in a conspiracy, but it never works out the way they intended." And then, of course, there is your "vagaries of Wyrd" and Forster's caves that destroy language [and hence, understanding, or "meaning"]. Our problem is we think, as you say, that we can construct the proper apparatus, or methodology, that "meaning' [whatever that is] can more properly be "seen." It cannot be "seen" because it has to be invented, over and over again, by "us," here, and now.<BR/><BR/>Cheers, EileenAnonymousnoreply@blogger.com