Reconsidering Form and the Literary (A Roundtable)
Sponsoring Organization(s)
Special Session
Organizer Name
Robert J. Meyer-Lee, Catherine Sanok
Organizer Affiliation
Indiana Univ.-South Bend, Univ. of Michigan-Ann Arbor
Presider Name
Robert J. Meyer-Lee
Paper Title 1
Remembering Chaucer's Lion
Presenter 1 Name
Arthur Bahr
Presenter 1 Affiliation
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Paper Title 2
Beyond Form: The Case of Medieval English Lyric
Presenter 2 Name
Ardis Butterfield
Presenter 2 Affiliation
Yale Univ.
Paper Title 3
The Make-Shift Form of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
Presenter 3 Name
Alexandra Gillespie
Presenter 3 Affiliation
Univ. of Toronto
Paper Title 4
Informalism: Slang Theology in Middle English
Presenter 4 Name
Eleanor Johnson
Presenter 4 Affiliation
Columbia Univ.
Paper Title 5
Archaizing Genre? Reading Gawain in Its Manuscript Context
Presenter 5 Name
Kathryn Kerby-Fulton
Presenter 5 Affiliation
Univ. of Notre Dame
Paper Title 6
Form and Practice: What a French Grammar Teaches Us about English Lyric
Presenter 6 Name
Ingrid Nelson
Presenter 6 Affiliation
Amherst College
Paper Title 7
What's the Use? Forma, Usus, and the Workings of the Literary
Presenter 7 Name
Claire M. Waters
Presenter 7 Affiliation
Univ. of California-Davis
Start Date
15-5-2015 10:00 AM
Session Location
Bernhard 204
Description
This roundtable session seeks to rethink the axiomatic relationship form is often thought to have with the literary through the varied evidence presented by medieval textual traditions. Over the last decade or so, scholars of medieval literature have been at the forefront of the reassessment of the place of the aesthetic in the field of literary study, a place that had been demoted if not simply abandoned in much of the historicist and cultural studies work of the 1980s and 1990s. Like scholars of other periods, for medievalists the crucial category in this reassessment has been form: “To raise the specificity of literature and the uniqueness of the literary work,” Derek Attridge observed in 2004, “is to raise the issue of form”; and in the same year Maura Nolan turned medievalists’ attention to “the logic of form” which will “open up the possibility of seeing medieval art more clearly, of better understanding its distinctive ‘functionlessness’ and its relation to the present.”
In a period in which the humanities in general and literary study in particular remain on the defensive in regard to funding, student enrollments, and public perception, this “aesthetic turn” has laudably refocused the field’s energies on the distinctiveness of its object of study. Yet the near unanimity of this scholarship’s identification of form as the defining category of this distinctiveness (despite the diverse manners in which it has treated form) risks obscuring a fuller appreciation for what may constitute this distinctiveness. With this session, therefore, we seek to extend, complicate, critique, or indeed further defend the arguments for a literary defined especially in relationship to form.
Robert J. Meyer-Lee
Reconsidering Form and the Literary (A Roundtable)
Bernhard 204
This roundtable session seeks to rethink the axiomatic relationship form is often thought to have with the literary through the varied evidence presented by medieval textual traditions. Over the last decade or so, scholars of medieval literature have been at the forefront of the reassessment of the place of the aesthetic in the field of literary study, a place that had been demoted if not simply abandoned in much of the historicist and cultural studies work of the 1980s and 1990s. Like scholars of other periods, for medievalists the crucial category in this reassessment has been form: “To raise the specificity of literature and the uniqueness of the literary work,” Derek Attridge observed in 2004, “is to raise the issue of form”; and in the same year Maura Nolan turned medievalists’ attention to “the logic of form” which will “open up the possibility of seeing medieval art more clearly, of better understanding its distinctive ‘functionlessness’ and its relation to the present.”
In a period in which the humanities in general and literary study in particular remain on the defensive in regard to funding, student enrollments, and public perception, this “aesthetic turn” has laudably refocused the field’s energies on the distinctiveness of its object of study. Yet the near unanimity of this scholarship’s identification of form as the defining category of this distinctiveness (despite the diverse manners in which it has treated form) risks obscuring a fuller appreciation for what may constitute this distinctiveness. With this session, therefore, we seek to extend, complicate, critique, or indeed further defend the arguments for a literary defined especially in relationship to form.
Robert J. Meyer-Lee