All About Flowendegieddum:
It has truly been FOREVER since I updated -- 2006, actually! I have not really lived up to my handle, I suppose :-) Back when I began this blog, I envisioned it as a place in which to bask in the pleasures and vent at the frustrations of life in academia. And also to showcase some of the work I'm doing in which I'm particularly interested. But right away, that work took center stage and pushed the blogosphere so far out of my mind as to place it in the back row of the orchestra pit. Now, on this beautiful early spring day when I should be outside catching rays, I'm back in cyberland again.
At the time I began my blog, inthemiddle, which makes a point of getting to know all the medieval bloggers of note, requested more information about me. Since there's nothing I like better than to talk about myself, I am happy to oblige:
About me:
M.A. Thesis on the Wife of Bath and the 1381 Rising: looked at how marginalized groups (i.e. women and the clamoring mob) get their messages across when their speech is marginalized. Both women's and the rebels' speech were compared to animal noise rather than signifying speech, and both the Wife and the rebels used nonverbal symbolic performance (specifically, document destruction) to communicate their message.
Orals Fields: Secrecy and disclosure in OE poetry and hagiography
Arthurian Lit
Chaucer
Still in nascent stage.
Abiding interests: performance theory, narratology, feminist theory, oppression and strategies of resistance, indigenous literatures (particularly American and South/Central American), Pablo Neruda, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Loves: chocolate, purple, travel, trying new cuisines, reading, my cat (Star), medievalists, watching movies (of pretty much any genre), Montana, and once upon a time before grad school, playing the clarinet
Hates: long lines, waiting of any kind, water chestnuts, the actor John Malkovich (not personally, I just can't stand him in movies) and _Pulp Fiction_
Saturday, March 31, 2007
Monday, December 18, 2006
End of Semester Musings:
Well, my semester is finally, officially, over. I finished writing my paper yesterday, after pulling an all-day library knock-down-drag-out session that was an attempt to combat the worst writer's block I have ever had. Correction: the only writer's block I have ever had. I usually sit down and write papers start to finish at the rate of one hour per single-spaced page. But for some reason, this week, when confronted with the thickness of Piers Plowman and the pressure of that blinking cursor, my synapses completely failed me. Each page took about three hours. And the final product was less than stellar. Medievalist Friend B was telling me that she's heard Piers Plowman is notoriously difficult to write on. I think it's because it contradicts itself at every turn. You finally think you're starting to get a grasp on what it's really all about when Langland (or the narrator, or some allegorical figure) pulls the rug out from underneath you. So that when you're writing, it's impossible to keep from second-guessing yourself. You keep thinking, "Am I forgetting some important episode which would completely defeat my argument?" It completely kills your confidence, and that's it, you're shot. The sad part is that I really loved the seminar, and the professor, and wanted to write a killer paper for her. Oh well. We can't all be geniuses.
I've also officially finished my first teaching assignment as a grad student. I've learned some useful stuff; and namely, that I must be firmer and meaner than I am naturally inclined to be. Otherwise, I run the risk of being walked over. I've also learned that it is definitely not worth it to spend 40 minutes on every ten-page paper I have to grade. At that rate, I will never earn my degree.
So I'm finished with my semester; older, wiser, having written a few decent papers and one truly horrendous one, and, as usual, broke. It's time to go home and mooch off the parents for a few weeks. (They're doing a service to mankind by financially supporting a future Bastion of Arcane Knowledge.)
Well, my semester is finally, officially, over. I finished writing my paper yesterday, after pulling an all-day library knock-down-drag-out session that was an attempt to combat the worst writer's block I have ever had. Correction: the only writer's block I have ever had. I usually sit down and write papers start to finish at the rate of one hour per single-spaced page. But for some reason, this week, when confronted with the thickness of Piers Plowman and the pressure of that blinking cursor, my synapses completely failed me. Each page took about three hours. And the final product was less than stellar. Medievalist Friend B was telling me that she's heard Piers Plowman is notoriously difficult to write on. I think it's because it contradicts itself at every turn. You finally think you're starting to get a grasp on what it's really all about when Langland (or the narrator, or some allegorical figure) pulls the rug out from underneath you. So that when you're writing, it's impossible to keep from second-guessing yourself. You keep thinking, "Am I forgetting some important episode which would completely defeat my argument?" It completely kills your confidence, and that's it, you're shot. The sad part is that I really loved the seminar, and the professor, and wanted to write a killer paper for her. Oh well. We can't all be geniuses.
I've also officially finished my first teaching assignment as a grad student. I've learned some useful stuff; and namely, that I must be firmer and meaner than I am naturally inclined to be. Otherwise, I run the risk of being walked over. I've also learned that it is definitely not worth it to spend 40 minutes on every ten-page paper I have to grade. At that rate, I will never earn my degree.
So I'm finished with my semester; older, wiser, having written a few decent papers and one truly horrendous one, and, as usual, broke. It's time to go home and mooch off the parents for a few weeks. (They're doing a service to mankind by financially supporting a future Bastion of Arcane Knowledge.)
Thursday, October 26, 2006
Words and Needs and Langland, oh my! :
Our needs are made of words. They come to us in speech, and they can die for lack of expression. Without a public language to help us find our own words, our needs will dry up in silence. It is words only, the common meanings they bear, which give me the right to speak in the name of the strangers at my door. --Michael Ignatieff, The Needs of Strangers
I've been thinking about this a lot because I'm writing a paper on a passage in C Passus IX in Piers Plowman that's unlike anything I've encountered before in all my reading in medieval lit. In it, the narrative focuses on the life of a poor woman who lives in a cot, who, with spinning to spare "spenen hit on hous-huyre, / Bothe in mylke and in mele, to make with papelotes / To agloyte with here gurles that greden aftur fode" (C.IX.79-101). What struck me about this passage, and made me want to write about it, was something one of my illustrious colleagues brought up in class: the way that Langland, in his intense focus on the intimate details of a life of need, shows how poverty changes someone's perception of not only their sensory landscape, but of language. So that spinning is not just spinning anymore, it's hous-huyre, mylke and mele, papelotes, and finally, sustenance for a child.
Langland is constantly ready, in PP, to speak in the name of strangers at his door (if, by strangers, one means Christian "neyhebores"), but how can he do this if he evacuates words of the common meanings they bear? Or is that really what he's doing?
And what does it mean, finally, when Ignatieff says that only the common meanings of words give me the right to speak in the name of the strangers at my door? Elsewhere he speaks of the "dangerous licence" afforded one by appropriating for oneself the right to speak for the needs of others: how can we ever know what another really needs when, sometimes, we don't even know what we need ourselves, and when the others we so sanctimoniously speak for can't articulate their needs at all? Is it that somewhere, in the interference between our semantic fields, we can read something true, or at least useful?
Our needs are made of words. They come to us in speech, and they can die for lack of expression. Without a public language to help us find our own words, our needs will dry up in silence. It is words only, the common meanings they bear, which give me the right to speak in the name of the strangers at my door. --Michael Ignatieff, The Needs of Strangers
I've been thinking about this a lot because I'm writing a paper on a passage in C Passus IX in Piers Plowman that's unlike anything I've encountered before in all my reading in medieval lit. In it, the narrative focuses on the life of a poor woman who lives in a cot, who, with spinning to spare "spenen hit on hous-huyre, / Bothe in mylke and in mele, to make with papelotes / To agloyte with here gurles that greden aftur fode" (C.IX.79-101). What struck me about this passage, and made me want to write about it, was something one of my illustrious colleagues brought up in class: the way that Langland, in his intense focus on the intimate details of a life of need, shows how poverty changes someone's perception of not only their sensory landscape, but of language. So that spinning is not just spinning anymore, it's hous-huyre, mylke and mele, papelotes, and finally, sustenance for a child.
Langland is constantly ready, in PP, to speak in the name of strangers at his door (if, by strangers, one means Christian "neyhebores"), but how can he do this if he evacuates words of the common meanings they bear? Or is that really what he's doing?
And what does it mean, finally, when Ignatieff says that only the common meanings of words give me the right to speak in the name of the strangers at my door? Elsewhere he speaks of the "dangerous licence" afforded one by appropriating for oneself the right to speak for the needs of others: how can we ever know what another really needs when, sometimes, we don't even know what we need ourselves, and when the others we so sanctimoniously speak for can't articulate their needs at all? Is it that somewhere, in the interference between our semantic fields, we can read something true, or at least useful?
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