scholarly journals Astronomy, Literary Criticism, and Medieval Literature: An Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 7-13
Author(s):  
Dale Kedwards
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Medieval Literature

Dale Kedwards introduces Cluster 1 of Interfaces 8, on the topic of The Astronomical Imagination in Literature through the Ages.

Authority

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Steiner
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Medieval Literature ◽  
Piers Plowman ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Textual Production ◽  
Textual Authority ◽  
Cycle Plays ◽  
Crucial Information ◽  
Literary Innovation

Authority can refer to a person, a quality that one possesses, a governing institution a text containing crucial information or founding principles, or a exemplary event. In other words, authority is never properly one thing. An integral part of authority is recognition, insofar as the signs of power or status are encoded or displayed. During the medieval period, authority was an important subject for writers. In medieval theories of authorship, authorship was consistently identified with authority. Modern critics of medieval literature consider authority to be perhaps the most persuasive connection between art and context. This article examines authority, with emphasis on textual authority and how it extends the purview of medievalist literary criticism, in part by historicizing textual production. It also discusses the use of textual authority by both medievals and medievalists to understand literary innovation. In addition, it analyzes two sets of texts that offer complex investigations into the nature of lordship: the fifteenth-century biblical cycle plays and William Langland’s alliterative poem Piers Plowman.

Literature in Our Time, or, Loving Literature to Bits

CounterText ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 232-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivan Callus
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Anthony Trollope ◽  
Don Quixote ◽  
Time Machine ◽  
Paul Auster ◽  
Anne Michaels

In this essay Ivan Callus provides some reflections on literature in the present. He considers the tenability of the post-literary label and looks at works that might be posited as having some degree of countertextual affinity. The essay, while not setting itself up as a creative piece, deliberately structures itself unconventionally. It frames its argument within twenty-one sections that are self-contained but that also echo each other in their attempt to develop an overarching argument which draws out some of the challenges that lie before the countertextual and the post-literary. Punctuating the essay and contributing to its unconventional take on the practice of literary criticism is a series of exercises for the reader to complete, if so wished; the essay makes no attempt, however, to suggest that a countertextual criticism ought to make a routine of such devices. The separate sections contain reflections on a number of texts and writers, among them, and in order of appearance, Hamlet, Anthony Trollope, Jacques Derrida, The Time Machine, Don Quixote, Mark Z. Danielewski, Mark B. N. Hansen, Gunter Kress, Scott's Reliquiae Trotcosienses, W. B. Yeats, Kate Tempest, David Jones, Anne Michaels, Bernice Eisenstein, Paul Auster, J. M. Coetzee, Billy Collins, Deidre Shauna Lynch, Tim Parks, Tom McCarthy – and Hamlet again. The essay's length fulfils a performative function but also facilitates as extensive a catalogue of aspects of the countertextual in literature and elsewhere as is feasible or as might be dared at this stage.

On the origin of khutū

2008 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 306-318 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. LAVERS ◽  
M. KNAPP
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Medieval Literature ◽  
Ice Age ◽  
New Hypothesis

Khutū was a material derived from an animal used by Medieval Asian peoples in the manufacture of knife handles and as an alexipharmic. Al-Bīrūnī (973–1048) made extensive enquiries into the origin of khutū but reached no definite conclusion. Literary scholars in the first half of the twentieth century identified the walrus and narwhal as probable sources, but in ignoring aspects of the literature on khutū’s appearance and provenance left a number of questions unanswered. We clarify and extend this research and identify further clues to the identity of khutū. We concur that walrus ivory was one source of khutū, suggest that the remains of “Ice Age” mammals may have influenced development of the medieval literature on khutū more than previous investigators realized, and offer a new hypothesis of khutū’s origin.

From Deleuze and Guattari's Words to a Deleuzian Theory of Reading

2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 529-557
Author(s):  
Daniel Haines
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
Transcendental Empiricism ◽  
Theory Of Reading ◽  
Open Question

While Deleuze and Guattari's passion for certain literature is well known, the nature of a ‘Deleuzian’ literary criticism remains an open question. However, most critics appear to agree that Deleuze and Guattari's comments on meaning and interpretation offer an ontological alternative to the textual focus of deconstruction. Through an interrogation of the difficult style of their books in relation to Plato, Nietzsche and Derrida, this paper offers a different reading of Deleuze and Guattari in relation to literary criticism. Despite appearances, transcendental empiricism and the project of ‘overturning Platonism’ provide a Deleuzian theory of reading that attends to textuality.

Un/Becoming Claude Cahun: Zigzagging in a Pack

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
renée c. hoogland
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Art History ◽  
Gender Politics ◽  
High Modernism ◽  
Claude Cahun

Considered odd, obscene, a genius nonetheless, at the time she created her best-known works, French photographer and writer Claude Cahun (1894-1950) cuts a particularly unruly figure in literary criticism and art history. Her recalcitrant faux autobiography Aveux non avenus, [Disavowals, or, Cancelled Confessions] (1930), a book of essays and recorded dreams illustrated with photomontages, have encouraged the artist’s association with High Modernism and Surrealism while her photographic self-portraits have been claimed for an affirmative (feminist) gender politics. However, the proliferous and mercurial nature of Cahun’s disavowed confessions and self-stagings defy easy “domestication.” Instead she constructs a continuously shifting configuration of fragments and collages: assemblages of singularities that are always in a multiplicity, in a pack. Escaping dominant forms of expression, Cahun’s work has nothing to do with recognition or imitation, nor does it constitute a relation of representation. The chapter argues instead that Cahun presents us in both her writing and in her photographic work with the successful experience of becoming in the absence of any final term or form. A becoming-animal that moves beyond destruction into the zone of indiscernibility where a work, or, perhaps, an oeuvre comes into view—an oeuvre that nonetheless remains decidedly outlandish.

Outlaws and Misfits: The Identities of Modernist Criticism

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 337-356
Author(s):  
Ben Knights
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Industrial Capitalism ◽  
Emotional Maturity ◽  
English Departments ◽  
Emotional Autonomy ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Implicit Identity ◽  
The University ◽  
Cultural Positioning

The images of the writer as exile and outlaw were central to modernism's cultural positioning. As the Scrutiny circle's ‘literary criticism’ became the dominant way of reading in the University English departments and then in the grammar-schools, it took over these outsider images as models for the apprentice-critic. English pedagogy offered students not only an approach to texts, but an implicit identity and affective stance, which combined alert resistance to the pervasive effects of mechanised society with a rhetoric of emotional ‘maturity’, belied by a chilly judgementalism and gender anxiety. In exchanges over the close reading of intransigent, difficult texts, criticism's seminars sought a stimulus to develop the emotional autonomy of its participants against the ‘stock response’ promulgated by industrial capitalism. But refusal to reflect on its own method meant such pedagogy remained unconscious of the imitative pressures that its own reading was placing on its participants.

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