PhD exams behind me, diss prospectus ahead
I passed the damned exams, and I don’t really want to analyze any of that. I still sort of get vertigo thinking about it.
Now I have to take all these scattered notes, even more scattered thoughts and ideas, and cartloads of books and articles and come up with a dissertation prospectus. I haven’t used this blog as a “writing sandbox” much lately but that is probably about to change, given that my current articulation of where I’m going is incoherent and the project as I’ve been able to mutter about it so far is sprawling and un-doable. It’s likely to take me a lot of false starts to get going if history is any indication. I had every intention of putting some thoughts down tonight but I suddenly find myself too tired to confront the mess. Maybe tomorrow.
CFP Leeds ’11: Economies of Monstrosity and Monstrous Gifts
Calls for papers for two Leeds ’11 sessions sponsored by MEARCSTAPA (Monsters: the Experimental Association for the Research of Cryptozoology through Scholarly Theory And Practical Application).
CFP for Leeds 2011: Rich and Poor
SESSION I: “The Economy of Monstrosity: Slaves, Human Traffickers, Bankers and Thieves”
Throughout the Middle Ages, certain groups have been associated with the exchange of money and the exchange of people for money. This panel welcomes submissions that deal with the monstrosity associated with both the buyers and the bought, with monstrous depictions of ethnic groups associated with economic exchange and/or the stigma attached to enslaved groups in medieval literature, history, art history or archaeology.
Please send abstracts of 250 words, with contact details and affiliation to
Dr. Larissa Tracy, kattracy@comcast.net by September 27th.
SESSION II: “Monstrous Gifts”
As the Havamal states, friends should give gifts, and “gifts with gifts requite.” But, as the Durham Proverbs caution, “every gift looks over its shoulder.” When gift-giving creates bonds, maintains relationships, and redefines or adjusts status and power in relationships, the gift is anything but a simple object, anything but gratuitous. As William Ian Miller’s study of gift exchange in medieval Iceland discusses, the gift often contains, transmits, and encodes something of the spirit and intention of its giver, for better and for worse. The deeply symbolic nature of much medieval gift exchange makes it a rich field for examining the messages which gifts encode — the spurs with which Chretien de Troyes’ knight is given his identity, the Anglo-Saxon sword with its own genealogy, the saints’ relic bestowed upon a cathedral, or the reliquary given by a petitioner to a patron saint. Anthropologists and poets alike have mused on how gift exchange sometimes blurs the distinction between subject and object, between giver, gift, and recipient, particularly when the item of exchange is animate (a bride circulating between households) or a body part (an enemy’s head as a trophy presented to the king). As Debra Higgs Strickland has recently noted, when the gift is itself a sentient being, such as Herzog Ernst’s “sartorial monsters,” simultaneously his close companions but also possessions which he might give as pilgrim’s offerings or gifts to emperors, distinctions between subject and object are especially troubled – and the messages encoded in the gifts especially complex. Papers in this session might explore poisonous gifts, monsters as gifts, perilous exchanges, the role of gifts in the formation of the subject or at critical life-cycle rituals, power roles and imbalances in gift exchange, media of exchange (and consumption) defining monstrosity, gifts of the body (blood, hair, relics), bodies as gifts, monstrous communicants, the theft of relics and saints’ bodies, or other examinations of sites where gifts or gift exchange figure as monstrous, poisonous, combative, transcendent, or abject.
Please send abstracts of 250 words, with contact details and affiliation to
Karma deGruy <karma.degruy@gmail.com> by September 27th.
13th century Anglo-English/African cultural exchange
A colleague of mine is entertaining a project tracing Anglo-English/African aesthetic exchange through 1200s-1700s using both “high” and popular culture materials (e.g., a thirteenth-century African oral epic, oral-traditional “history” songs from thirteenth-century Mali and Ghana). He’s found that scholarship regarding African-European contact beyond the Islamic world usually starts with the fifteenth century. I know zilch about what primary sources are out there for him, but he’s getting some input from folks working with African literature and with early modern English literature. Surely “medieval studies” has something to offer him here – any ideas?
Slouching Towards Extimacy 