Posthuman Piers

Sponsoring Organization(s)

International Piers Plowman Society; Medieval Ecocriticisms

Organizer Name

William Rhodes

Organizer Affiliation

Univ. of Pittsburgh

Presider Name

William Rhodes

Paper Title 1

How Should a Personification Be

Presenter 1 Name

Alexis Kellner Becker

Presenter 1 Affiliation

Univ. of Chicago

Paper Title 2

Edible Characters in Piers Plowman

Presenter 2 Name

Sarah Wood, Michael Calabrese

Presenter 2 Affiliation

Univ. of Warwick, California State Univ.-Los Angeles

Paper Title 3

The Will, The Flesh, and Langland's Biopolitics

Presenter 3 Name

Matthew Brown

Presenter 3 Affiliation

Texas Woman's Univ.

Start Date

12-5-2017 3:30 PM

Session Location

Bernhard 204

Description

This panel responds to the growing influence of posthumanist theory, which challenges scholars to attend to the ways that the category of the human is formed in relation to the non-human. Various strands of posthumanist theory – from ecocriticism to actor-network theory to object-oriented approaches to animal studies – have had a significant impact on literary scholarship, especially among medievalists, perhaps because, as one of its prominent theorists once remarked, “We have never been modern.” Medieval modes of thinking about the human, of which Piers Plowman is a stunning example, have a great deal to tell contemporary posthumanisms about the long history of writing about exta-human agencies and interactions, while posthumanist theory challenges stable modernist divisions of “human” and “nature” in a way that asks us to reconsider the specific ways human and non-human relations are construed in medieval texts. William Rhodes, wmr9@pitt.edu