I started this blog as a way to think out loud (and whinge) about my Master’s thesis, which I defended in 2007. Then it became a place to store a thought or two and have a “base” from which to comment on other people’s blogs (as well as a place to freak out about the PhD program application process, and then the PhD program in general).
Now I’m looking at a PhD exam in the Spring, and I find that I have nothing to say in this blog. It’s not that I’m not writing (since I’m not actually done with coursework, argh, I am writing, but I happen to be writing about Disraeli and Thomas Carlyle right now, I’m not deeply invested in what I’m writing, and none of it is very good). I suppose I could be putting some reading notes towards my exam here, but in all honesty I’m not doing a hell of a lot of reading and note taking toward the exam. I’m ashamed to admit this, especially when I get into the fatal “compare yourself to the progress of other people in your cohort” trap at which point I feel like a complete failure who is very far behind the curve on such things), but seriously – I have been learning Latin, teaching, and finishing required coursework. I have not been sitting on my butt. This is the best I can do, and it’s going to be ok. (I hope.) It just means that right now I am not actually researching and writing about anything I am particularly invested in.
However, one of the things my advisor wants to see is some articulation of how my exam lists will help me get to a dissertation project. Since another thing my committee wants to see is that I have any claim to present myself as qualified to teach medieval literature, my lists have to do rather a lot, sort of acting like comps while they’re also sort of acting like a prelim to a prospectus. All of this has me feeling a bit schizophrenic, and finding that the lists, experience, and advice of other people in my cohort aren’t so helpful. Where my friend might have a primary 19th century list, and a secondary 19th-century-women-novelists list, and a tertiary “theory” list encompassing, say, Marxism, or feminist theory, my primary lists go from Aelfric to Hoccleve, and my tertiary list has work on monsters, gift exchange, and art history as well as non-English stuff from Plato to Snorri Sturlusson to Chretien de Troyes with many bizarre stops in between.
In a very real way which has a very real impact on my time and anxiety level, my lists “act” a lot more like comps than they do like diss prep. One might actually say “I’m working on 19th century women novelists” and have a list that has something to do with that project. My lists can’t (and shouldn’t, I guess) do any such thing.
All a long way of saying my thinking isn’t going in any particular direction right now, and I feel a bit at loose ends.
In any case, I have decided not to lose sleep over this exam. I know a lot of the stuff on it, and I don’t know a lot more of the stuff on it, but I’ve negotiated it to where it is as best I could, and now I just have to keep reading, even if it’s in trickles and not bounds. I have found that I really resent the exams and coursework because I find myself spending entire weekends reading (fill in the blank) when what I really want to do is learn more about Appolonius of Tyre or MS Bologna 1576. I really can’t wait until this hoop-jumping is over so I can *Get to Work.* I think this, at least, is a good sign. I feel like there is some work I want to do.
I hope, then, that when these exams are over and I have passed them (I refuse to acknowledge the alternative), I will have something to say again. I begin to despair that I will ever have more time — for blogging, reading others’ blogs, having a social life, vacuuming my car, or much else — but as I squeeze in diss thinking around the edges of all this other stuff I have to do, I’m remembering how helpful it was to use this blog as a place to “think out loud” about things. This is especially important since, as was the case in my MA program, I’m the only student here doing primary medieval anything, and I’m the only one doing anything remotely associated with anything Anglo-Saxon.
And at some point I have to work on that Chretien project. Eh. After March and before Leeds, somewhere in there!
funny of the day
From Douglas Moffat’s The Old English Soul and Body: “Levi argues that the idea of a respite from hell was borrowed from fourth-century Christian writers from an older Jewish tradition in which the respite from hell is sabbatical, as some would argue that it still is in modern universities” (33).
Leeds 2010
Because I didn’t have enough on my plate this Spring and Summer with potential paleography, the impending PhD exam, and a prospectus defense, I decided to return to the question of those curious angels in Chretien de Troyes’ La Conte du Graal. For other monstrous MEARCSTAPA offerings for Leeds 2010, visit the MEARCSTAPA blog. (Yes, we have t-shirts.)
“The Angels Men Complain Of”: Monstrous Masculinity in La Conte du Graal
While traveling through a forest one day, Chretien de Troyes’ young hero, Perceval, encounters a group of knights for the first time, and is nearly overwhelmed by the sight of their shining, armored bodies. He recounts the experience to his horrified mother, who exclaims, “Tu as veu, si com je croi, / Les enges don la gent se plaignent, / Qui ocient quan qu’il ataignent” [You have seen, I believe, the angels men complain of, who kill whatever they come upon].
In examining Chretien de Troyes’ elusive and previously unexplored reference to “the angels men complain of,” this paper will argue that the romance diverges from the dominant chivalric narrative to imagine a masculinity susceptible to the ravages of affect. Critics such as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Leo Braudy have suggested that the chivalric body in medieval romance is built from the outside in; in this articulation, the armor really does make the man. When Perceval sets out on his journey towards knighthood, it is this construction which drives him. Spurred on by a vision of the shining and beautiful knights he at first takes to be angels and filled with a burning desire to possess the armor and other accoutrements of knighthood, Perceval conceives of knightly identity as entirely composed of surfaces. He pursues a construction of chivalric masculinity in which the knight’s body is seamless, static, immune to affect, and impenetrable. But this ideal melding of body and armor, of identity and accoutrement, removes the knight from the category of what is recognizably human. The courtly violence of death-dealing knights renders them as beautiful, cold, and deadly as “the angels men complain of, who kill whatever they come upon.” In figuring the angel-knight as physically and morally monstrous, La Conte du Graal suggests a new masculine subject position emerging from the paradoxes of twelfth-century chivalric romance, and creates a heroic trajectory which dismantles the traditional hero/monster binary.
Staffordshire Hoard
Photos of the Staffordshire hoard on flickr, courtesy of the Portable Antiquities Scheme.
reading notes – The Once and Future King
In lieu of real content, I have reading notes. In addition to reading for the PhD exam right now, I’m also doing a directed reading on medievalism in literature. And taking Latin. So this is kind of representative of where my head is these days. (See how I sneakily sneak in some Old English like a sneaky person?)
Timor mortis conturbat me
As part of the Wart’s education, he is sent to the mews to spend the night with the hawks. The solemn formality, and indeed the real danger, of his ritual ordeal with these birds is clearly meant to contrast with the silliness of the human knights in White’s story. Where Pellinore and Grummore fight like schoolboys during their joust – Pellinore mumbling “non” under his breath while Grummore calls him a cad (65) – the birds of prey converse a mid a “silver silence” with an air of restrained dignity (75). Where Kay’s knightly vigil will result in not much more than taking a bath, having his spurs popped into the soup, and receiving a lecture on ideals from Grummore and Pellinore (183), the ordeal in the mews is overseen by hawks and falcons as “motionless” as a “statue of a knight in armor” (74), in a mews described with the solemnity of a chapel, amidst a congregation of birds described as the “rapt nobility of the air” keeping “their knight’s vigil with knightly patience” (74). However, through White’s treatment of their nocturnal rituals, their seemingly dignified traditions only serve to further emphasize the novel’s focus on the problems of Fort Mayne.
The hawks’ ordeal song evokes a sense of ancient traditions of hereditary nobility and knighthood. The peregrine refers to the ordeal song as the “Ancient but not Modern No. 23,” or the “Ordeal Hymn” (78), and indeed even its vocabu lary conjures an air of ancient formality. [1] Its refrain is taken from the solemn tradition of the medieval meditation on the inevitability of death. Timor mortis conturbat me [Fear of death troubles me] appears in several medieval lyrics, such as this anonymous 15th century lyric in which a weeping bird explains her tears: “I am a musket both fair and gent; / For dread of death I am all shent: Timor mortis conturbat me” (Morley 231). The Latin line is taken from the office of Matins, traditionally recited at midnight: “Peccantem me quotidie, et non me poenitentem, timor mortis conturbat me: Quia in inferno nulla est redemptio, miserere mei Deus, et salva me” [The fear of death doth trouble me, sinning daily, and not repenting: for that in hell there is no redemption, have mercy upon me O God, and save me] (Gunhouse). But to the birds, timor mortis conturbat me is a “lie” which is “proffered” to “beasts of chase” (79): the birds of prey sing a different hymn, in which they are excited by their prey’s fear of death, which is a fear of the predator: “Timor mortis exultat me” (79). By virtue of their talons, their strength, and their noble bloodlines, the hawks turn a meditation of humility and memento mori into a service of slaughter. Whether White meant to contrast this hymn with the meditative context of the Book of Hours, or perhaps Anglican hymn No. 23 (“Through the day Thy love hath spared us, / Now we lay us down to rest”), or even Psalm 23 (“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil”), the hawks’ hymn of dignified formality and hereditary knighthood contains another critique of Fort Mayne, against which the Wart will continuously struggle as he grows into kingship.
[1] See, for instance, line 2, “dree,” derived from the OE dreogan, to suffer, and the Gothic driugan, to do military service; line 6, “bruckle,” from the OE brucol, fragile; and line 6, “slee,” from the ON slægr, able to strike; sly, cunning, skilful (OED).
Works Cited
Gunhouse, Glenn, ed. “Matins, Third Nocturne.” Hypertext Book of Hours. The Primer, or Office of the Blessed Virgin Marie, in Latin and English. Antwerp: Arnold Conings, 1599. Available http://www.medievalist.net/hourstxt/deadmatd.htm
Kelly, Thomas. “Through the Day Thy Love hath Spared Us.” The Lutheran Hymnal.
St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1941. No. 553.
“Matins.” The Catholic Encyclopedia. Available http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10050a.htm
Morley, Henry and William Hall Griffin. English Writers VI: From Chaucer to Caxton. London: Cassell and Company, 1890.
Oxford English Dictionary. Available www.oed.com
Singleton, Robert and Edwin George Monk. “Through the Day Thy Love Hath Spared Us.” The Anglican Hymn Book. London: James Parker and Co., 1871. No. 23.
White, T.H. The Once and Future King. New York: Ace Books, 1996.
The bad news: my Anglo Saxon directed reading got called off.
The good news: I got the go-ahead on teaching “monster lit” next semester. Given the state of the market and economy, this may very well be the only time I ever get to teach Beowulf, so I’m going to make the most of it.
My Latin teacher is scary.
That is all.
reading notes
Apparently West Virginia University Press was trying to save on publishing costs by scrimping on eths and thorns when they printed Naked Before God: Uncovering the Body in Anglo-Saxon England. But you can pencil in your own! It’s exciting! It’s interactive! (It’s annoying as hell.)
CiteULike
I’m trying Springer’s CiteULike, or at least toying with it today. I have been using Zotero on my laptop, but a friend just lost a lot of data and research by storing everything on her hard drive, which then crashed. So I’m scared of losing exam list material, which in theory should be progress toward dissertation. Anybody used this and have any comments?
I may wander off in my typical short-attention-span mode and not fully explore it, at least not ’til the semester is in full swing again next month, but right now it’s a fun new toy that is keeping me from falling asleep. Who knew a double espresso at 4:30 would have absolutely zero impact on me? Oh, well, I guess I did actually. But hope springs eternal.
ETA: Ooh, look, you can link to your library…
radio silence
Been putting together my exam list and reading, reading, reading. I no longer think taking it in the fall is going to be possible, especially since a whole Early Modern component has had to be added to it, but nothing will blow up if I take it in the spring instead.
At this point I’m just trying to get through these next two semesters and read as quickly as possible, so I’m not doing much in the way of reading notes that are worth reading. I’m feeling fairly “behind” already, but I suppose that might be par for the course. (I’m also feeling a teeny bit resentful of the breadth and length of my list as compared to non-medievalists, but I shouldn’t whine – I knew what I was getting into going into this. Well, except I didn’t think I’d have an Early Modern list and I didn’t think Shakespeare would be on my list. I haven’t read Shakespeare with any seriousness since the mid-90s.)
Due to a singularly bone-crunching Spring semester and my attendance at both SEMA and K’zoo (much of which I had to pay for out of pocket), I’m not conferencing this year. I’m going to focus on getting something published, teaching, getting my languages into better shape, figuring out how to afford my daughter’s braces, and getting to ABD in a timely manner. I’m also feeling curiously unmoored and slightly deflated, though I’m by no means done with coursework, having come into all this without the necessary languages and in possession of a few more debts and responsibilities than many. But I think a lot of that is just *summer.* It’s one of those “too much to do and much of it ornerous” modes combined with “no summer funding omgwtf am I going to do about needing brakes” plus a dash of “can’t write worth a damn and have nothing to say and what the hell am I doing in a PhD program” stretches. So in a weird sort of way, I’m thinking I’ll feel better when the semester starts.
I really need a new bookshelf.
That is all.
more on the spancel
Thanks to Eamonn Kelly, some more info on the spancel has finally come ’round to this blog. Thanks so much, Eamonn!
