Medieval and New Materialisms: Definitions and Methodologies
Sponsoring Organization(s)
Special Session
Organizer Name
Shannon Meyer
Organizer Affiliation
Univ. of California-Santa Barbara
Presider Name
Shannon Meyer
Paper Title 1
Poetic Matters: Thomas Usk and Newgate Prison
Presenter 1 Name
Corey Sparks
Presenter 1 Affiliation
Indiana Univ.-Bloomington
Paper Title 2
The Wood for the Trees in the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer
Presenter 2 Name
Valerie B. Johnson
Presenter 2 Affiliation
Univ. of Rochester
Paper Title 3
Imperial Hauntings: Ælla of Northumbria, Anglo-Saxon Historicism, and Fantasy Fiction
Presenter 3 Name
Donna Beth Ellard
Presenter 3 Affiliation
Rice Univ.
Start Date
9-5-2013 3:30 PM
Session Location
Schneider 1275
Description
Very recently, a number of volumes, ranging from interdisciplinary essay collections to special issues of medieval literary journals, have addressed an emerging field of "new materialisms." In Medieval Studies, recent work on materiality has primarily conceived of the material in terms of objects, their agential capacities and tendencies to elude mastery by willful human subjects in medieval narratives, and the philosophies of object ontology current in the Middle Ages. But, as the title of this session and a recent essay collection, "New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics," suggest, these new materialisms are, in fact, highly varied in their definitions of the material and in the intellectual genealogies upon which they draw. The sometimes productive, sometimes highly incompatible, multiple definitions of materiality in use at the moment are being recognized in the fields of anthropology, sociology, and political science, but have yet to make their way into Medieval Studies. This session is being proposed in order to bring together scholars who are working on matters of the material as conceived in any number of ways: dialectical materialism, embodiment, cognitive studies, phenomenology, and vitalism, to name only a few. Through papers representing a range of perspectives, disciplines, and objects of study, this session hopes to test the limits and possibilities of these new discourses of materiality, in how they speak to each other as well as to the Middle Ages, that is, in how we might engage them in thinking about the Middle Ages.
Shannon Meyer
Medieval and New Materialisms: Definitions and Methodologies
Schneider 1275
Very recently, a number of volumes, ranging from interdisciplinary essay collections to special issues of medieval literary journals, have addressed an emerging field of "new materialisms." In Medieval Studies, recent work on materiality has primarily conceived of the material in terms of objects, their agential capacities and tendencies to elude mastery by willful human subjects in medieval narratives, and the philosophies of object ontology current in the Middle Ages. But, as the title of this session and a recent essay collection, "New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics," suggest, these new materialisms are, in fact, highly varied in their definitions of the material and in the intellectual genealogies upon which they draw. The sometimes productive, sometimes highly incompatible, multiple definitions of materiality in use at the moment are being recognized in the fields of anthropology, sociology, and political science, but have yet to make their way into Medieval Studies. This session is being proposed in order to bring together scholars who are working on matters of the material as conceived in any number of ways: dialectical materialism, embodiment, cognitive studies, phenomenology, and vitalism, to name only a few. Through papers representing a range of perspectives, disciplines, and objects of study, this session hopes to test the limits and possibilities of these new discourses of materiality, in how they speak to each other as well as to the Middle Ages, that is, in how we might engage them in thinking about the Middle Ages.
Shannon Meyer