CANCELED Narrating Violence in the Global Middle Ages (A Roundtable)
Description
A roundtable discussion that seeks to encourage a conversation by medievalists working in the east and the west about the representations and uses of violence in medieval texts. Many medieval narratives, be they European courtly romances or Japanese heroic epics or others, used graphic violence to demonstrate the need for containment and to show the catastrophic results of unrestrained violence. However, these were not only cautionary tales. They also explores how and where order might be found amidst the chaos of war. They sought to create meaning out of the seemingly senseless. Chivalry and warrior ethics may not have been much more than literary inventions, but they served the purpose of consoling their audiences that the protagonists were imbued with inherent restraints that could control the destruction of war and other kinds of collective violence. In this roundtable we will consider the many uses of narrativizing violence from a “global” perspective and we will compare how representations of violence could serve to explore and even control chaos in different cultural settings.
Morten Oxenboell
CANCELED Narrating Violence in the Global Middle Ages (A Roundtable)
Schneider 1235
A roundtable discussion that seeks to encourage a conversation by medievalists working in the east and the west about the representations and uses of violence in medieval texts. Many medieval narratives, be they European courtly romances or Japanese heroic epics or others, used graphic violence to demonstrate the need for containment and to show the catastrophic results of unrestrained violence. However, these were not only cautionary tales. They also explores how and where order might be found amidst the chaos of war. They sought to create meaning out of the seemingly senseless. Chivalry and warrior ethics may not have been much more than literary inventions, but they served the purpose of consoling their audiences that the protagonists were imbued with inherent restraints that could control the destruction of war and other kinds of collective violence. In this roundtable we will consider the many uses of narrativizing violence from a “global” perspective and we will compare how representations of violence could serve to explore and even control chaos in different cultural settings.
Morten Oxenboell