Forming Character: Between Personhood and the Nonhuman (A Roundtable)
Sponsoring Organization(s)
Special Session
Organizer Name
Ingrid Nelson
Organizer Affiliation
Amherst College
Presider Name
Ingrid Nelson
Paper Title 1
Hawkyn and Inhumanity
Presenter 1 Name
Julie Orlemanski
Presenter 1 Affiliation
Univ. of Chicago
Paper Title 2
Forms and Functions of Character in Bernard Silvestris's Mathematicus
Presenter 2 Name
Marian Homans-Turnbull
Presenter 2 Affiliation
Univ. of California-Berkeley
Paper Title 3
Forgetting like a Falcon: Sir Orfeo's Silent Heurodis and the Form of the Lay
Presenter 3 Name
Sara Petrosillo
Presenter 3 Affiliation
Univ. of Evansville
Paper Title 4
Across from Where? Empire and Conversion in Cynewulf's Elene
Presenter 4 Name
Mariah Junglan Min
Presenter 4 Affiliation
Univ. of Pennsylvania
Paper Title 5
Personifying Social Relations: Radical Theater and Medieval Allegory
Presenter 5 Name
William Rhodes
Presenter 5 Affiliation
Univ. of Pittsburgh
Paper Title 6
What Hanne Darboven Can Tell Us about the Middle English "Names of a Hare in English"
Presenter 6 Name
Karl Steel
Presenter 6 Affiliation
Brooklyn College and Graduate Center, CUNY
Start Date
10-5-2019 10:00 AM
Session Location
Bernhard 209
Description
This panel investigates the interplay between literary form, fictional characters, and the nonhuman world in medieval writing. How do the formal, rhetorical, poetic, and narratological characteristics of a given work, or genre, contribute to the personae imagined and animated in the course of it? How do nonhuman agents in medieval literary writings elucidate or challenge ideas of character based on personhood, subjectivity, or consciousness? In recent years, books like Deidre Shauna Lynch’s The Economy of Character (1998), Alex Woloch’s One vs. the Many (2003), Elizabeth Fowler’s Literary Character (2003), Blakey Vermeule’s Why Do We Care About Literary Characters? (2010), and John Frow’s Character and Person (2014) have focused new literary-critical attention on how to interpret characters. Meanwhile, books like Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter (2010), Susan Crane’s Animal Encounters (2013), and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (2015) have expanded our sense of how nonhuman agents help to define and locate personhood in ontological and literary schemas. What can medieval literature contribute to this conversation? Ingrid Nelson
Forming Character: Between Personhood and the Nonhuman (A Roundtable)
Bernhard 209
This panel investigates the interplay between literary form, fictional characters, and the nonhuman world in medieval writing. How do the formal, rhetorical, poetic, and narratological characteristics of a given work, or genre, contribute to the personae imagined and animated in the course of it? How do nonhuman agents in medieval literary writings elucidate or challenge ideas of character based on personhood, subjectivity, or consciousness? In recent years, books like Deidre Shauna Lynch’s The Economy of Character (1998), Alex Woloch’s One vs. the Many (2003), Elizabeth Fowler’s Literary Character (2003), Blakey Vermeule’s Why Do We Care About Literary Characters? (2010), and John Frow’s Character and Person (2014) have focused new literary-critical attention on how to interpret characters. Meanwhile, books like Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter (2010), Susan Crane’s Animal Encounters (2013), and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (2015) have expanded our sense of how nonhuman agents help to define and locate personhood in ontological and literary schemas. What can medieval literature contribute to this conversation? Ingrid Nelson