CONGRESS CANCELED Rediscovering Hoccleve
Description
This session proposes to explore Hocclevean discovery, broadly construed: what it means to discover and re-discover Thomas Hoccleve and his poetry, in all its anxieties, politics, and ethics. Recent scholarship has seen a fruitful upsurge in approaches to Hoccleve’s work, producing readings from such theoretical lenses as disability studies and affect theory as well as book-length studies of his poetics. Moreover, new discoveries about Hoccleve’s life and literary output continue to emerge from archival research, allowing us to revisit how we read Hoccleve’s work through an autobiographical lens, specifically the intersection of the historical scribe/bureaucrat with the narrating persona of his poetry.
This session therefore takes up new directions for Hoccleve studies, re-visiting Hoccleve’s poetics in light of new discoveries about the poet and his fifteenth-century environment and witnessing Hoccleve articulating discoveries of his own. What can emergent ideas from theoretical sites such as new and feminist materialisms or surface reading allow us to discover in Hoccleve? How might theories not often applied to Hoccleve, such as ecocriticism or postcolonial theory, engender new readings of this poetry? How does Hoccleve’s poetry itself engage with discovery and newness; how does Hoccleve make and manage his own discoveries in the literary and historical archive that situates him? And finally, how do readers and critics discover Hoccleve? How has he been read by succeeding generations leading up the present and rediscovered by scholars who have worked to rehabilitate him; how do we, in our own fraught political and ideological context, discover Hoccleve anew? Arwen Taylor
CONGRESS CANCELED Rediscovering Hoccleve
Schneider 1130
This session proposes to explore Hocclevean discovery, broadly construed: what it means to discover and re-discover Thomas Hoccleve and his poetry, in all its anxieties, politics, and ethics. Recent scholarship has seen a fruitful upsurge in approaches to Hoccleve’s work, producing readings from such theoretical lenses as disability studies and affect theory as well as book-length studies of his poetics. Moreover, new discoveries about Hoccleve’s life and literary output continue to emerge from archival research, allowing us to revisit how we read Hoccleve’s work through an autobiographical lens, specifically the intersection of the historical scribe/bureaucrat with the narrating persona of his poetry.
This session therefore takes up new directions for Hoccleve studies, re-visiting Hoccleve’s poetics in light of new discoveries about the poet and his fifteenth-century environment and witnessing Hoccleve articulating discoveries of his own. What can emergent ideas from theoretical sites such as new and feminist materialisms or surface reading allow us to discover in Hoccleve? How might theories not often applied to Hoccleve, such as ecocriticism or postcolonial theory, engender new readings of this poetry? How does Hoccleve’s poetry itself engage with discovery and newness; how does Hoccleve make and manage his own discoveries in the literary and historical archive that situates him? And finally, how do readers and critics discover Hoccleve? How has he been read by succeeding generations leading up the present and rediscovered by scholars who have worked to rehabilitate him; how do we, in our own fraught political and ideological context, discover Hoccleve anew? Arwen Taylor