CONGRESS CANCELED Middle Grounds: The Politics and Aesthetics of Medieval Mediocrity
Description
What can we learn from unexceptional texts and artifacts in the Middle Ages? How can we critically assess the metrics by which we evaluate quality? How can medieval studies reconcile, or recover from, the history of Orientalism in its estimation of non-European medieval traditions? This panel builds on conversations during the 2019 Medievalists @ Penn Conference on Mediocrity (middling-ages.tumblr.com), which we seek to carry in more explicitly transcultural directions. By revisiting definitions of “middleness,” we hope to foster a rigorous approach to challenging the literary and artistic canons of the Western Middle Ages, to explore organic connections between politics and art within and across European and non-European traditions, and to consider how developing an aesthetics of mediocrity invites new discussions about the ethics of criticism. Anne V. Aylin Malcolm
CONGRESS CANCELED Middle Grounds: The Politics and Aesthetics of Medieval Mediocrity
Schneider 1125
What can we learn from unexceptional texts and artifacts in the Middle Ages? How can we critically assess the metrics by which we evaluate quality? How can medieval studies reconcile, or recover from, the history of Orientalism in its estimation of non-European medieval traditions? This panel builds on conversations during the 2019 Medievalists @ Penn Conference on Mediocrity (middling-ages.tumblr.com), which we seek to carry in more explicitly transcultural directions. By revisiting definitions of “middleness,” we hope to foster a rigorous approach to challenging the literary and artistic canons of the Western Middle Ages, to explore organic connections between politics and art within and across European and non-European traditions, and to consider how developing an aesthetics of mediocrity invites new discussions about the ethics of criticism. Anne V. Aylin Malcolm