Session 1: Recovery and Cultures of Care in Middle English Literature
This paper panel proposes to examine connections between ideas of recovery in Middle English literature, broadly speaking, and our current cultural moment. The Middle English term “recoverie” has a complex meaning that might encompass legal, medical, spiritual, and even martial meanings. Middle English literature contains some striking examples of narratives of recovery, whether the startling portrait of mental breakdown in the autobiographical poetry of Thomas Hoccleve, the extended confessional struggles in the works of John Gower, or meditations on illness and longing in the writings of Julian of Norwich. What forms, narrative modes, and tropes are associated with recovery? How might recovery entail spiritual transformation or social change? What are the agents of recovery and what expectations does one have of them? How do these narratives address vulnerability and the marginalized positions—isolation, exclusion, quarantine, deprivation of social connections, then and now—that are often associated with expressions of vulnerability? We invite papers (ca. 15 minutes in length) that consider how medieval narratives of recovery can inform our understanding of the complexities of recovery as well as perceptions of healing and vulnerability. As the world at large deals with the after-effects of the Covid pandemic, concerns about recovery have become a recurring topic of public attention. An ever-evolving contagion, mental health repercussions, supply and labor shortages, and inflation are among the many topics that have been focal points of discourse, affecting how we approach cultures of care and healing in the post-covid era. What are we recovering from—physical illness, trauma, loss, grief, disruption of norms, economic downturn, etc.—and how do we recognize indications of and paths to recovery? How do we respond to the need and desire for recovery, especially when they reveal underlying tensions, vulnerabilities, and marginalized positions? How is recovery both an individual and a social process? Please send paper proposals to Ruen-chuan Ma, RMa@uvu.edu, and Nicole Rice, ricen@stjohns.edu, by 18 March 2024.
Session 2: Unauthoring Middle English Studies
Recent critical attention to new life records, holograph identification, and scribe-sleuthing has often put the category of the historically specific author/writer near the center of Middle English literary criticism. Indisputably, such scholarship has contributed greatly to the study of medieval English literature. Yet the relationship between a historical, specific maker and the meaning and significance of a literary text remains, as it always has been, fraught, intractably indeterminate, and susceptible to facile ideological reasoning. This paper session invites considerations of the critical utility of setting aside the category of the historically specific author or scribe and considering medieval texts from the perspective of anonymous manuscript presentation (Seaman), “transpersonal subjectivity” (Nelson), a “public corpus” (Butterfield), or other author-decentering approaches. Without relapsing into New Critical dogma, death-of-the-author structuralism, or Foucauldian author-functionalism, how might critical analysis of intention, voice, historicity, value, and form be enriched by deferring recourse to the figure of the identifiable author (or the imagined substitute for one)? How might the absence of an identifiable author affect considerations of ethics, materialism, gender, sexuality, race, and class, or other areas when authorial attribution can provide crucial critical context? Please send paper proposals to Bobby Meyer-Lee, meyerlee@aya.yale.edu, and Claire Waters, cmwaters@ucdavis.edu, by 18 March 2024.
