Tolkien's representation of women in his fiction has generated a number of controversies since it... more Tolkien's representation of women in his fiction has generated a number of controversies since its original publication. This essay examines two major issues: an evasiveness in Tolkien's treatment of sexual violence against women that is not disconnected from a gendered terror that underlies several moments in his works and functions to link women's sexuality and desiring with death. Specifically, we read the author's depiction of Shelob and her appetitive, arachnoid monstrosity as at once displacing sexual violence onto the monstrous feminine and evoking a revulsion at the aging female body. We next explore the consequences of the author's depictions of women and his handling of sexual violence in close connection with his own 1939 public performance of Chaucer's Reeve's Tale, a comic narrative turning on two rapes that Tolkien nevertheless conceals in a comparable fashion to his elision of sexual violence in Middle-earth.
A distinctly feminist and distinctly Asian-American response to the Blade Runner tradition in sf ... more A distinctly feminist and distinctly Asian-American response to the Blade Runner tradition in sf cinema, Jennifer Phang's 2015 film Advantageous juxtaposes an ages-old narrative of maternal sacrifice with the futuristic premise of a consciousness-transfer procedure. The film imagines a techno-capitalist dystopia in which early twenty-first-century forebodings about the acceleration of income inequality, economic precarity among skilled professionals and the potential abolition of human labour have only intensified. Phang invites us to find a quiet but radical hope in both new forms of kinship and non-competitive play, forces that may counter the dehumanisation and, indeed, despair depicted as accompanying the technological supplantation of the human body as both economic engine and autonomous moral agent.
The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 23.3 (2012): 460-479
"This article argues for a specifically Darwinian etiology of the image of the monstrous plant, s... more "This article argues for a specifically Darwinian etiology of the image of the monstrous plant, so ubiquitous in the modern genres of speculative fiction. In the profusion of such narratives in the late 19th century, we can identify a collective anxiety about the implications of universal common descent: acknowledging a shared evolutionary heritage for plants and animals threatens the boundary between the two kingdoms that had always permitted the purely instrumentalist and exploitative relationship between humans and plants. Evolutionary anxiety projected onto the figure of the man-eating plant only multiplied in the early pulp magazines, and continued on through John Wyndham's triffids and beyond. Considering the many monstrous plants of early speculative fiction in this way can help expand the purview of the critical formation known as animal studies: while this paper does not advocate for the development of a "plant studies," it invites further thinking about the implications of taking the word "species" in animal studies a little more literally, as the word so often seems to mean “mammal species" or "animal species."
In his Middle English translation of the De proprietatibus rerum, John Trevisa elaborates on Bart... more In his Middle English translation of the De proprietatibus rerum, John Trevisa elaborates on Bartholomeus Anglicus' original explanation of the vegetable soul with the phrase "For in plauntes lyf is yhud." So too have the lives of plants in medieval literature remained hidden from us: not entirely absent from these texts or our scholarship, but out of view, relegated to the background or some subordinate role. As part of a larger effort to uncover the hidden life of plants in the Middle Ages, this paper examines how Middle English literature regularly translates botanical science into sophisticated botanical metaphors, some of which show the potential to trouble the otherwise rigid Aristotelian boundaries between plant and animal life. The argument draws on both medieval scientific material like the botanical expositions of the De proprietatibus rerum or the Latin verse herbal known as the Anglicanus Ortus, as well as recent developments in the offshoot of critical animal studies sometimes known as "critical plant studies" (see, for example, the work of Michael Marder, Karen Houle, and Matthew Hall). It will become clear that any discussion of plant science in the Middle Ages must open up into a broader discussion of how botanical discourse shaped other forms of knowledge. Indeed, centuries before Deleuze and Guattari launched their assault on the arborescent shape of Western epistemologies ("We are tired of trees"), medieval authors found in the tree a powerful tool for organizing and representing knowledge, whether as a structure for recording genealogy or in a simple mnemonic for the calendar: "I wot a tree xii bowes betake: / LII nestes bethe that up imad; / In ever nest beth brides VII (DIMEV 2327). Chaucer's Parson similarly invokes the tree to explain a theological concept -- "Penitence, that may be likned unto a tree" (The Parson's Tale 112) -- and Langland famously describes love as "the plante of pees" (Piers Plowman B 1.152). What is the relationship of such a figurative plant, a cognitive heuristic for use in the human sphere, to the real living plants that medieval scientific texts presumed to catalogue and describe? We see that these conceptual metaphors often work to bridge the human and the plant, even in the unlikeliest of places. For example, many of the artistic renderings of the popular "Tree of Jesse" motif threaten to hybridize plant and human, depicting the tree as emerging directly from Jesse's body, and sometimes further entangled with the physical features of his descendants (among many other examples, see MS Harley 1892, f. 31v; Yates Thompson 41, f. 451v; or Royal 15 D III, f. 432r); what plant and human share -- growth, reproduction -- becomes clearer when a tree structures the human concept of the generation. In the end, despite the scholarly attention lavished on neighboring subjects like the animal or Nature, the plants of medieval literature have received scant consideration in themselves, perhaps because, unlike the animals that prove so loquacious in Middle English poetry -- birds, foxes, and yet more birds -- the plant remains infans, that which cannot vocalize: "And she, for sorwe, as doumb stant as a tree" (The Man of Law's Tale 1055). Reading the appearances of plants across several Middle English literary texts -- from works as canonical as Chaucer's to several anonymous lyrics -- will demonstrate their enmeshment in various human discourses, and perhaps help recover their own voice.
This essay examines the relationship between Junot Díaz's 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel /The ... more This essay examines the relationship between Junot Díaz's 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel /The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao/ and the genres of science fiction and fantasy, which number among this decidedly mainstream novel's most important subjects. In the end, Oscar Wao’s greatest debt to genre fiction lies not in the narrator's presentation of ambiguously supernatural explanations for certain plot events, but in his incessant use of metaphors from sf—such as the Watcher and the Lensman—to describe and understand his own position as narrator-author of the sprawling family saga he relates. The ubiquity and complexity of other genre allusions in the novel prove them to be more than throwaway pop-culture references, testifying to the narrator’s deep engagement with the genre as a legitimate "lens" by which to understand human experience. The essay concludes with an attempt to situate this perspective on science fiction in relation to the current trends within the genre, with particular reference to other contemporary "literary" authors such as Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem.
"Chaucer’s three major dream visions all follow their respective narrator-dreamers as they move t... more "Chaucer’s three major dream visions all follow their respective narrator-dreamers as they move through various interior spaces, on one level reproducing the mise-en-abyme effect of the framed dream narrative. This paper examines the series of three interiors structuring the narrative of the House of Fame, and specifically how these spaces are constructed through a technique of accumulative description, in which the contents of a given room are catalogued at great length but rarely placed in precise spatial relation to one another. To employ the catalogue as the primary tool of spatial description may seem capable of leading only to a jumbled, a-perspectival representation of an interior, but the strategy aligns with the narrator’s difficult task of organizing into narrative description the luxuriant confusion of the spaces he perceives. In the House of Fame, the narrator turns to the catalogue because he finds the corridors of dreams filled with objects of high signifying power, including statues and other images that serve as windows out of one interior and into other narrative spaces. The accumulative catalogue becomes at once a way to narrate an otherwise un-narratable profusion of objects and associations, and a way to limit that profusion to the catalogue’s conclusion.
We also find in the poem moments of more perspectival description linking these catalogues, as in the House of Fame itself, in which the narrator at first perceives only a formless crowd of heralds impossible to describe due to both their number and the semiotic complexity of their garments. After relegating their regalia to a short catalogue, the narrator can then move past the press and look up to observe a rising dais with the goddess Fame enthroned on it. Only after spatially locating arbitrary Fame as the principle governing the crowd in the room does the narrator notice and describe the pillar-lined corridor leading down to the hall’s wide doors. Since, upon closer examination, these pillars are seen to bear up the fame of ancient authors, they generate further descriptive catalogues. Throughout the poem we find this same sort of telescoping between the purposively cluttered catalogue and more perspectival articulations of space, presenting a challenge to spatial theories of narrative that would dismiss pre-modern narrative as crudely and/or flatly a-perspectival. Indeed, we will be unable to describe medieval literature as uninterested in perspective when we finally compare the navigation of space in House of Fame to the medieval and classical technique of the “memory palace,” in which memories are recalled based on their precise spatial relationships inside a mentally constructed building: Chaucer’s poem is at once such an edifice of memory and a challenge to the practice."
This essay examines two films that have been compared only superficially, Jim Henson's /Labyrinth... more This essay examines two films that have been compared only superficially, Jim Henson's /Labyrinth/ and Guillermo del Toro's /El laberinto del fauno/ (/Pan's Labyrinth/), as key examples of recent works of fantasy that have treated seriously the notorious charge of "escapism." Both films first dramatize how fantastic narrative can pose a potential danger in its inherent disengagement from reality, yet each works out a defense of fantasy on film and in print that parallels certain trends in the wider critical conversation about the value of "escape literature." Labyrinth presents a modest argument in favor of moderation and against mass-market commoditization, while del Toro offers a more ambitious complication or at least de-Christianization of Tolkien's touchstone defense of "fairy-stories."
Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 20.3 (2009): 385-405
This essay positions Brad Bird’s animated film The Iron Giant as an overlooked adaptation of the ... more This essay positions Brad Bird’s animated film The Iron Giant as an overlooked adaptation of the Frankenstein story, with reference to its multiple intertexts in both Shelley’s novel and the tradition of film adaptations. The Iron Giant tells the tale of an artificial being that, unlike Frankenstein’s monster, receives the “proper” nurturing and moral education from a surrogate parent; accordingly, Bird’s giant learns to reject the destructive impulses that turn Frankenstein into a tragedy. Although Bird’s rereading of this foundational text obviously includes children among its audience, it is not simplistically optimistic, and its real innovation lies in the absence of the giant’s creator
from the plot: we see a being truly abandoned by its maker, yet one whose capacities for self-determination and regenerative “self-creation” win out over alienation.
Tolkien's representation of women in his fiction has generated a number of controversies since it... more Tolkien's representation of women in his fiction has generated a number of controversies since its original publication. This essay examines two major issues: an evasiveness in Tolkien's treatment of sexual violence against women that is not disconnected from a gendered terror that underlies several moments in his works and functions to link women's sexuality and desiring with death. Specifically, we read the author's depiction of Shelob and her appetitive, arachnoid monstrosity as at once displacing sexual violence onto the monstrous feminine and evoking a revulsion at the aging female body. We next explore the consequences of the author's depictions of women and his handling of sexual violence in close connection with his own 1939 public performance of Chaucer's Reeve's Tale, a comic narrative turning on two rapes that Tolkien nevertheless conceals in a comparable fashion to his elision of sexual violence in Middle-earth.
A distinctly feminist and distinctly Asian-American response to the Blade Runner tradition in sf ... more A distinctly feminist and distinctly Asian-American response to the Blade Runner tradition in sf cinema, Jennifer Phang's 2015 film Advantageous juxtaposes an ages-old narrative of maternal sacrifice with the futuristic premise of a consciousness-transfer procedure. The film imagines a techno-capitalist dystopia in which early twenty-first-century forebodings about the acceleration of income inequality, economic precarity among skilled professionals and the potential abolition of human labour have only intensified. Phang invites us to find a quiet but radical hope in both new forms of kinship and non-competitive play, forces that may counter the dehumanisation and, indeed, despair depicted as accompanying the technological supplantation of the human body as both economic engine and autonomous moral agent.
The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 23.3 (2012): 460-479
"This article argues for a specifically Darwinian etiology of the image of the monstrous plant, s... more "This article argues for a specifically Darwinian etiology of the image of the monstrous plant, so ubiquitous in the modern genres of speculative fiction. In the profusion of such narratives in the late 19th century, we can identify a collective anxiety about the implications of universal common descent: acknowledging a shared evolutionary heritage for plants and animals threatens the boundary between the two kingdoms that had always permitted the purely instrumentalist and exploitative relationship between humans and plants. Evolutionary anxiety projected onto the figure of the man-eating plant only multiplied in the early pulp magazines, and continued on through John Wyndham's triffids and beyond. Considering the many monstrous plants of early speculative fiction in this way can help expand the purview of the critical formation known as animal studies: while this paper does not advocate for the development of a "plant studies," it invites further thinking about the implications of taking the word "species" in animal studies a little more literally, as the word so often seems to mean “mammal species" or "animal species."
In his Middle English translation of the De proprietatibus rerum, John Trevisa elaborates on Bart... more In his Middle English translation of the De proprietatibus rerum, John Trevisa elaborates on Bartholomeus Anglicus' original explanation of the vegetable soul with the phrase "For in plauntes lyf is yhud." So too have the lives of plants in medieval literature remained hidden from us: not entirely absent from these texts or our scholarship, but out of view, relegated to the background or some subordinate role. As part of a larger effort to uncover the hidden life of plants in the Middle Ages, this paper examines how Middle English literature regularly translates botanical science into sophisticated botanical metaphors, some of which show the potential to trouble the otherwise rigid Aristotelian boundaries between plant and animal life. The argument draws on both medieval scientific material like the botanical expositions of the De proprietatibus rerum or the Latin verse herbal known as the Anglicanus Ortus, as well as recent developments in the offshoot of critical animal studies sometimes known as "critical plant studies" (see, for example, the work of Michael Marder, Karen Houle, and Matthew Hall). It will become clear that any discussion of plant science in the Middle Ages must open up into a broader discussion of how botanical discourse shaped other forms of knowledge. Indeed, centuries before Deleuze and Guattari launched their assault on the arborescent shape of Western epistemologies ("We are tired of trees"), medieval authors found in the tree a powerful tool for organizing and representing knowledge, whether as a structure for recording genealogy or in a simple mnemonic for the calendar: "I wot a tree xii bowes betake: / LII nestes bethe that up imad; / In ever nest beth brides VII (DIMEV 2327). Chaucer's Parson similarly invokes the tree to explain a theological concept -- "Penitence, that may be likned unto a tree" (The Parson's Tale 112) -- and Langland famously describes love as "the plante of pees" (Piers Plowman B 1.152). What is the relationship of such a figurative plant, a cognitive heuristic for use in the human sphere, to the real living plants that medieval scientific texts presumed to catalogue and describe? We see that these conceptual metaphors often work to bridge the human and the plant, even in the unlikeliest of places. For example, many of the artistic renderings of the popular "Tree of Jesse" motif threaten to hybridize plant and human, depicting the tree as emerging directly from Jesse's body, and sometimes further entangled with the physical features of his descendants (among many other examples, see MS Harley 1892, f. 31v; Yates Thompson 41, f. 451v; or Royal 15 D III, f. 432r); what plant and human share -- growth, reproduction -- becomes clearer when a tree structures the human concept of the generation. In the end, despite the scholarly attention lavished on neighboring subjects like the animal or Nature, the plants of medieval literature have received scant consideration in themselves, perhaps because, unlike the animals that prove so loquacious in Middle English poetry -- birds, foxes, and yet more birds -- the plant remains infans, that which cannot vocalize: "And she, for sorwe, as doumb stant as a tree" (The Man of Law's Tale 1055). Reading the appearances of plants across several Middle English literary texts -- from works as canonical as Chaucer's to several anonymous lyrics -- will demonstrate their enmeshment in various human discourses, and perhaps help recover their own voice.
This essay examines the relationship between Junot Díaz's 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel /The ... more This essay examines the relationship between Junot Díaz's 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel /The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao/ and the genres of science fiction and fantasy, which number among this decidedly mainstream novel's most important subjects. In the end, Oscar Wao’s greatest debt to genre fiction lies not in the narrator's presentation of ambiguously supernatural explanations for certain plot events, but in his incessant use of metaphors from sf—such as the Watcher and the Lensman—to describe and understand his own position as narrator-author of the sprawling family saga he relates. The ubiquity and complexity of other genre allusions in the novel prove them to be more than throwaway pop-culture references, testifying to the narrator’s deep engagement with the genre as a legitimate "lens" by which to understand human experience. The essay concludes with an attempt to situate this perspective on science fiction in relation to the current trends within the genre, with particular reference to other contemporary "literary" authors such as Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem.
"Chaucer’s three major dream visions all follow their respective narrator-dreamers as they move t... more "Chaucer’s three major dream visions all follow their respective narrator-dreamers as they move through various interior spaces, on one level reproducing the mise-en-abyme effect of the framed dream narrative. This paper examines the series of three interiors structuring the narrative of the House of Fame, and specifically how these spaces are constructed through a technique of accumulative description, in which the contents of a given room are catalogued at great length but rarely placed in precise spatial relation to one another. To employ the catalogue as the primary tool of spatial description may seem capable of leading only to a jumbled, a-perspectival representation of an interior, but the strategy aligns with the narrator’s difficult task of organizing into narrative description the luxuriant confusion of the spaces he perceives. In the House of Fame, the narrator turns to the catalogue because he finds the corridors of dreams filled with objects of high signifying power, including statues and other images that serve as windows out of one interior and into other narrative spaces. The accumulative catalogue becomes at once a way to narrate an otherwise un-narratable profusion of objects and associations, and a way to limit that profusion to the catalogue’s conclusion.
We also find in the poem moments of more perspectival description linking these catalogues, as in the House of Fame itself, in which the narrator at first perceives only a formless crowd of heralds impossible to describe due to both their number and the semiotic complexity of their garments. After relegating their regalia to a short catalogue, the narrator can then move past the press and look up to observe a rising dais with the goddess Fame enthroned on it. Only after spatially locating arbitrary Fame as the principle governing the crowd in the room does the narrator notice and describe the pillar-lined corridor leading down to the hall’s wide doors. Since, upon closer examination, these pillars are seen to bear up the fame of ancient authors, they generate further descriptive catalogues. Throughout the poem we find this same sort of telescoping between the purposively cluttered catalogue and more perspectival articulations of space, presenting a challenge to spatial theories of narrative that would dismiss pre-modern narrative as crudely and/or flatly a-perspectival. Indeed, we will be unable to describe medieval literature as uninterested in perspective when we finally compare the navigation of space in House of Fame to the medieval and classical technique of the “memory palace,” in which memories are recalled based on their precise spatial relationships inside a mentally constructed building: Chaucer’s poem is at once such an edifice of memory and a challenge to the practice."
This essay examines two films that have been compared only superficially, Jim Henson's /Labyrinth... more This essay examines two films that have been compared only superficially, Jim Henson's /Labyrinth/ and Guillermo del Toro's /El laberinto del fauno/ (/Pan's Labyrinth/), as key examples of recent works of fantasy that have treated seriously the notorious charge of "escapism." Both films first dramatize how fantastic narrative can pose a potential danger in its inherent disengagement from reality, yet each works out a defense of fantasy on film and in print that parallels certain trends in the wider critical conversation about the value of "escape literature." Labyrinth presents a modest argument in favor of moderation and against mass-market commoditization, while del Toro offers a more ambitious complication or at least de-Christianization of Tolkien's touchstone defense of "fairy-stories."
Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 20.3 (2009): 385-405
This essay positions Brad Bird’s animated film The Iron Giant as an overlooked adaptation of the ... more This essay positions Brad Bird’s animated film The Iron Giant as an overlooked adaptation of the Frankenstein story, with reference to its multiple intertexts in both Shelley’s novel and the tradition of film adaptations. The Iron Giant tells the tale of an artificial being that, unlike Frankenstein’s monster, receives the “proper” nurturing and moral education from a surrogate parent; accordingly, Bird’s giant learns to reject the destructive impulses that turn Frankenstein into a tragedy. Although Bird’s rereading of this foundational text obviously includes children among its audience, it is not simplistically optimistic, and its real innovation lies in the absence of the giant’s creator
from the plot: we see a being truly abandoned by its maker, yet one whose capacities for self-determination and regenerative “self-creation” win out over alienation.
Course Description:
Science fiction studies boasts a long tradition of engaging with and contrib... more Course Description:
Science fiction studies boasts a long tradition of engaging with and contributing to contemporary literary theory. Fantasy studies, by contrast, has seen comparative neglect within the same range of theoretical approaches, despite the potentially broader remit of the fantastic itself. This course will introduce you to some of the major works of fantasy theory from the second half of the 20th century and the early 21st, as we interrogate this history of neglect and begin to pursue our own theorizations of the fantastic. Is fantasy really “under-theorized”? Do certain bodies of critical theory work with fantasy particularly well, or especially reward expansion of their own traditional scope to include more fantastic texts? What can fantasy studies learn from theory, and theory learn from fantasy studies? Fantasy novelists to be considered include Ursula K. Le Guin, J.R.R. Tolkien, Octavia Butler, China Miéville, and Nnedi Okorafor. We will also be reading the two most influential monographs theorizing genre fantasy itself, but, additionally, each student will deliver a class presentation on a chosen school or area of critical theory -- or perhaps major theorist -- that will speculate on some potential applications to fantasy studies.
Course Description:
In contrast to popular depictions of the Middle Ages as an era of drab and... more Course Description:
In contrast to popular depictions of the Middle Ages as an era of drab and dull suffering, games and other forms of play flourished across Western Europe. Contemporary games such as chess, backgammon, and playing cards began to develop into their modern forms during the Middle Ages, and the upper classes enjoyed numerous leisure activities including hunting, hawking, jousting, and more. In this course, we will study the place of games and gaming in medieval culture, but with particular emphasis on the intersection of those games with Middle English literature. Evidence exists of the oral performance of medieval literary texts alongside other types of entertainments, and the distinction between "game" and "literature" can sometimes become blurred in, for example, the audience-driven "demaunde d'amor" poem; formal contests of poetic composition; and ritualized insult exchanges -- these last the medieval analogue of the rap battle. Our primary readings will include some of the major works of medieval English literature, including Beowulf, the Arthurian romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and a selection of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. But we will read these texts paying particular attention to various issues related to games and gaming, contests, competitions, sport, entertainment, and play, for example the famous "beheading game" motif in Gawain and the exchange of boasts in Beowulf. Alongside these canonical literary narratives, we will also be reading some less familiar medieval texts, including the Lydgatean verse party game known as The Chance of the Dice; an allegorical poem on The Game and Play of the Chess; fortune-telling poems such as John Metham's Book of Destinies; and some Old English riddles and enigmas that influenced the riddling game in J.R.R. Tolkien's classic fantasy novel The Hobbit.
Note that there is a language component to the course, as more than half of the course readings will be in the original Middle English. In the final few weeks, we will examine some 20th and 21st-century games and literary texts that nevertheless bear many traces of the Middle Ages. A genericized version of the medieval West has become the default setting for a number of gaming genres, electronic and otherwise: there are video games based on particular medieval narratives and settings, but also innumerable fantasy role-playing games (Skyrim, World of Warcraft), as well as real-time strategy games (Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings) and even first-person shooters (Chivalry) and stealth games (Assassin's Creed). As we examine medieval games and their afterlives, we will take up several questions bearing on the epistemology of reading, writing, game-playing, and "game-making": what, for instance, might we learn from understanding literature itself as a kind of game?
Course Description:
In spite of our growing understanding of the intellectual sophistication of ... more Course Description:
In spite of our growing understanding of the intellectual sophistication of medieval science and technology, in popular culture the Middle Ages remains a period associated with darkness and ignorance, especially in scientific matters. But medieval science had ready answers to many of the ageless questions humans have asked about their physical environment. For instance, the Middle English "textbook" known as the Lucydarye poses and answers questions like the following: Why is the ocean salty? How can we explain the changing phases of the moon? "Howe far is it to walke frome hence unto paradyse and from hence unto hell?" This course will explore how some of the medieval precursors to modern experimental science appear in and otherwise influence medieval literature. In the process, we will see how mainstream medieval disciplines that modernity rejects as pseudoscience -- astrology, alchemy, dream theory, and so on -- in fact relied heavily on complex mathematical models and frequent experimentation and verification. As we read widely in the genres of the romance, dream vision, encyclopedia, bestiary, and more, we will discuss the possible differences between magic and science in the Middle Ages, and above all examine the metaphysical implications of what C. S. Lewis famously called the "discarded image" of the medieval cosmos as an elegant and ordered whole. The medieval model of the universe was a powerful tool for meaning-making, and deserves more attention than we usually grant to obsolete scientific theories. Reading medieval science and medieval literature together in this way can also give us a better understanding of the relationship between contemporary fiction and science. After all, given enough time, our own scientific paradigms are likely to be superseded by others, but they are no less significant now for our understanding of our place in the universe.
Draft of a course syllabus for an introduction to medieval literature and medievalism(s) through ... more Draft of a course syllabus for an introduction to medieval literature and medievalism(s) through the creative and critical works of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis
In part because I'm now teaching at the alma mater of James Tiptree, Jr., I've decided to try som... more In part because I'm now teaching at the alma mater of James Tiptree, Jr., I've decided to try something very different for me next semester. (...Also in part due to Chaucerian's Guilt?)
Course Description:
Some historians of science fiction would locate the beginnings of the modern genre in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, but the space that would later come to be called "science fiction" was for many decades dominated by male authors, readers, filmmakers, and fans. In the early 20th century, the first science fiction pulp magazines printed short stories written almost exclusively by men, and the typical narratives of the time catered to a readership at least perceived to be almost exclusively male as well, rarely featuring women as characters in any role except that of the damsel-in-distress or villainous temptress. Even when Sarah Lawrence alumna Alice Sheldon began publishing overtly feminist science fiction under the pen name "James Tiptree, Jr." in the 1960s and 70s, some readers refused to believe that a woman could be behind the pseudonym. Today the ranks of science fiction authors are filled with female authors who have found the genre a unique tool for exploring women's issues and, often, for developing feminist ideas in an imaginative space, for example by positing the possibility of radically different social structures in the far future, or by pondering more fluid alien bodies and gender identities or the consequences of new reproductive technologies. In spite -- and in defiance -- of the historical and to some extent continuing identification of science fiction as a predominantly masculine or even "macho" field, our syllabus will consist entirely of female authors writing within or otherwise in close proximity to genre science fiction: not only Shelley and other earlier authors of so-called proto science fiction, but also major figures of 20th and 21st-century literature such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood, Jeanette Winterson, and many more. We will also examine some of the perhaps unexpected convergences between feminist theory and science fiction, best exemplified in the works of Donna Haraway.
Uploads
Papers by T. S. Miller
We also find in the poem moments of more perspectival description linking these catalogues, as in the House of Fame itself, in which the narrator at first perceives only a formless crowd of heralds impossible to describe due to both their number and the semiotic complexity of their garments. After relegating their regalia to a short catalogue, the narrator can then move past the press and look up to observe a rising dais with the goddess Fame enthroned on it. Only after spatially locating arbitrary Fame as the principle governing the crowd in the room does the narrator notice and describe the pillar-lined corridor leading down to the hall’s wide doors. Since, upon closer examination, these pillars are seen to bear up the fame of ancient authors, they generate further descriptive catalogues. Throughout the poem we find this same sort of telescoping between the purposively cluttered catalogue and more perspectival articulations of space, presenting a challenge to spatial theories of narrative that would dismiss pre-modern narrative as crudely and/or flatly a-perspectival. Indeed, we will be unable to describe medieval literature as uninterested in perspective when we finally compare the navigation of space in House of Fame to the medieval and classical technique of the “memory palace,” in which memories are recalled based on their precise spatial relationships inside a mentally constructed building: Chaucer’s poem is at once such an edifice of memory and a challenge to the practice."
from the plot: we see a being truly abandoned by its maker, yet one whose capacities for self-determination and regenerative “self-creation” win out over alienation.
We also find in the poem moments of more perspectival description linking these catalogues, as in the House of Fame itself, in which the narrator at first perceives only a formless crowd of heralds impossible to describe due to both their number and the semiotic complexity of their garments. After relegating their regalia to a short catalogue, the narrator can then move past the press and look up to observe a rising dais with the goddess Fame enthroned on it. Only after spatially locating arbitrary Fame as the principle governing the crowd in the room does the narrator notice and describe the pillar-lined corridor leading down to the hall’s wide doors. Since, upon closer examination, these pillars are seen to bear up the fame of ancient authors, they generate further descriptive catalogues. Throughout the poem we find this same sort of telescoping between the purposively cluttered catalogue and more perspectival articulations of space, presenting a challenge to spatial theories of narrative that would dismiss pre-modern narrative as crudely and/or flatly a-perspectival. Indeed, we will be unable to describe medieval literature as uninterested in perspective when we finally compare the navigation of space in House of Fame to the medieval and classical technique of the “memory palace,” in which memories are recalled based on their precise spatial relationships inside a mentally constructed building: Chaucer’s poem is at once such an edifice of memory and a challenge to the practice."
from the plot: we see a being truly abandoned by its maker, yet one whose capacities for self-determination and regenerative “self-creation” win out over alienation.
Science fiction studies boasts a long tradition of engaging with and contributing to contemporary literary theory. Fantasy studies, by contrast, has seen comparative neglect within the same range of theoretical approaches, despite the potentially broader remit of the fantastic itself. This course will introduce you to some of the major works of fantasy theory from the second half of the 20th century and the early 21st, as we interrogate this history of neglect and begin to pursue our own theorizations of the fantastic. Is fantasy really “under-theorized”? Do certain bodies of critical theory work with fantasy particularly well, or especially reward expansion of their own traditional scope to include more fantastic texts? What can fantasy studies learn from theory, and theory learn from fantasy studies? Fantasy novelists to be considered include Ursula K. Le Guin, J.R.R. Tolkien, Octavia Butler, China Miéville, and Nnedi Okorafor. We will also be reading the two most influential monographs theorizing genre fantasy itself, but, additionally, each student will deliver a class presentation on a chosen school or area of critical theory -- or perhaps major theorist -- that will speculate on some potential applications to fantasy studies.
In contrast to popular depictions of the Middle Ages as an era of drab and dull suffering, games and other forms of play flourished across Western Europe. Contemporary games such as chess, backgammon, and playing cards began to develop into their modern forms during the Middle Ages, and the upper classes enjoyed numerous leisure activities including hunting, hawking, jousting, and more. In this course, we will study the place of games and gaming in medieval culture, but with particular emphasis on the intersection of those games with Middle English literature. Evidence exists of the oral performance of medieval literary texts alongside other types of entertainments, and the distinction between "game" and "literature" can sometimes become blurred in, for example, the audience-driven "demaunde d'amor" poem; formal contests of poetic composition; and ritualized insult exchanges -- these last the medieval analogue of the rap battle. Our primary readings will include some of the major works of medieval English literature, including Beowulf, the Arthurian romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and a selection of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. But we will read these texts paying particular attention to various issues related to games and gaming, contests, competitions, sport, entertainment, and play, for example the famous "beheading game" motif in Gawain and the exchange of boasts in Beowulf. Alongside these canonical literary narratives, we will also be reading some less familiar medieval texts, including the Lydgatean verse party game known as The Chance of the Dice; an allegorical poem on The Game and Play of the Chess; fortune-telling poems such as John Metham's Book of Destinies; and some Old English riddles and enigmas that influenced the riddling game in J.R.R. Tolkien's classic fantasy novel The Hobbit.
Note that there is a language component to the course, as more than half of the course readings will be in the original Middle English. In the final few weeks, we will examine some 20th and 21st-century games and literary texts that nevertheless bear many traces of the Middle Ages. A genericized version of the medieval West has become the default setting for a number of gaming genres, electronic and otherwise: there are video games based on particular medieval narratives and settings, but also innumerable fantasy role-playing games (Skyrim, World of Warcraft), as well as real-time strategy games (Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings) and even first-person shooters (Chivalry) and stealth games (Assassin's Creed). As we examine medieval games and their afterlives, we will take up several questions bearing on the epistemology of reading, writing, game-playing, and "game-making": what, for instance, might we learn from understanding literature itself as a kind of game?
In spite of our growing understanding of the intellectual sophistication of medieval science and technology, in popular culture the Middle Ages remains a period associated with darkness and ignorance, especially in scientific matters. But medieval science had ready answers to many of the ageless questions humans have asked about their physical environment. For instance, the Middle English "textbook" known as the Lucydarye poses and answers questions like the following: Why is the ocean salty? How can we explain the changing phases of the moon? "Howe far is it to walke frome hence unto paradyse and from hence unto hell?" This course will explore how some of the medieval precursors to modern experimental science appear in and otherwise influence medieval literature. In the process, we will see how mainstream medieval disciplines that modernity rejects as pseudoscience -- astrology, alchemy, dream theory, and so on -- in fact relied heavily on complex mathematical models and frequent experimentation and verification. As we read widely in the genres of the romance, dream vision, encyclopedia, bestiary, and more, we will discuss the possible differences between magic and science in the Middle Ages, and above all examine the metaphysical implications of what C. S. Lewis famously called the "discarded image" of the medieval cosmos as an elegant and ordered whole. The medieval model of the universe was a powerful tool for meaning-making, and deserves more attention than we usually grant to obsolete scientific theories. Reading medieval science and medieval literature together in this way can also give us a better understanding of the relationship between contemporary fiction and science. After all, given enough time, our own scientific paradigms are likely to be superseded by others, but they are no less significant now for our understanding of our place in the universe.
Course Description:
Some historians of science fiction would locate the beginnings of the modern genre in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, but the space that would later come to be called "science fiction" was for many decades dominated by male authors, readers, filmmakers, and fans. In the early 20th century, the first science fiction pulp magazines printed short stories written almost exclusively by men, and the typical narratives of the time catered to a readership at least perceived to be almost exclusively male as well, rarely featuring women as characters in any role except that of the damsel-in-distress or villainous temptress. Even when Sarah Lawrence alumna Alice Sheldon began publishing overtly feminist science fiction under the pen name "James Tiptree, Jr." in the 1960s and 70s, some readers refused to believe that a woman could be behind the pseudonym. Today the ranks of science fiction authors are filled with female authors who have found the genre a unique tool for exploring women's issues and, often, for developing feminist ideas in an imaginative space, for example by positing the possibility of radically different social structures in the far future, or by pondering more fluid alien bodies and gender identities or the consequences of new reproductive technologies. In spite -- and in defiance -- of the historical and to some extent continuing identification of science fiction as a predominantly masculine or even "macho" field, our syllabus will consist entirely of female authors writing within or otherwise in close proximity to genre science fiction: not only Shelley and other earlier authors of so-called proto science fiction, but also major figures of 20th and 21st-century literature such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood, Jeanette Winterson, and many more. We will also examine some of the perhaps unexpected convergences between feminist theory and science fiction, best exemplified in the works of Donna Haraway.