Feb 5
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (George Washington University)
“The Weight of the Past”
Reception at 6.00 pm
Lecture at 6.30 pm
13 University Place, Room 222
at New York University
Co-sponsored with the NYU English Medieval Forum
Feb 20
Fifth Annual Graduate Student Conference
at the University of Connecticut
Schedule
9:45-10:30 Breakfast
UConn Student Union room 304 C
10:30-12:00 Session 1: Material Spaces, Places of Value
Jeremy DeAngelo (University of Connecticut):
“Things of Real Value: The Dragon, the Hoard, and Society”
Joseph Ackley (New York University):
“Once Feminine, Now Masculine: Treasured Spaces in the Encomium Emmae Reginae“
Michael Bintley (University College London):
“Buildings, Burrows, and Barrows: Wood and Stone in the Landscapes of Beowulf“
Respondent: Andrew Pfrenger (University of Connecticut)
12:00-1:00 Poetry Reading: Lytton Smith
UConn Co-op
1:00-2:00 Lunch
UConn Student Union room 304 B
2:15-3:45 Session 2: Travellers in the Landscape
Lytton Smith (Columbia University):
“‘Þu mid rihte rædan scealdest’ (“you ought, by right, to read”): The Interpretation of Travelers in Beowulf“
Christopher Riedel (Boston College):
“Manipulating Miracles: Instructing Pilgrims with St Swithun”
Respondent: Jordan Zweck (Yale University)
4:00-5:30 Session 3: Spaces of Individuality and Collectivity
Daniel Remein (New York University):
“Where Wisps of Being Mingle: Theorizing The Space of the Wræclast in Christ and Satan“
Mary Kate Hurley (Columbia University):
“Beowulf‘s Collectivities”
Mo Pareles (New York University):
“The Devil Inside: Mapping Self-Mutilation and Exorcism in the Old English Gospel of Mark”
Respondent: Britt Rothauser (University of Connecticut)
6:30 Dinner at the house of Robert Hasenfratz
Click here for Conference Registration form
April 20
Stephen Harris (University of Massachussets)
“Did the Anglo-Saxons Understand Beauty?”
Seamus Heaney obliquely observed of North Germanic poetry its tendency to “trust the feel of what nubbed treasure/ your hands have known.” With few exceptions, the poetic vocabulary of Old English shies from explicit abstraction. There is no mention of the True or the Good, let alone of physical beauty–descriptions of people and landscapes are exceedingly rare, for example. As a consequence, post-Enlightenment critics trying to recover an Anglo-Saxon Weltanschauung are faced with methodological difficulties that become increasingly pronounced as we come to search for literary reflexes of identity, ethnicity, gender, and so forth. What form did their abstract world take? How was it manifested in material form? How did their poetry relate to ideas of the Beautiful—if it did at all? And if we are to answer such questions, what would our answers look like? In this talk, I discuss Hebrew, Latin, Greek, and Anglo-Saxon ideas of the Beautiful and how one might go about looking for Beauty in Old English poetry.
6.00 PM Lecture
302 Murray Hall
at Rutgers University
April 21
Workshops at Columbia University
Workshop One: “Beautiful Materialities”
401 Hamilton Hall
1 pm to 2.30 pm
Workshop Two: “Community”
501 International Affairs Building (SIPA)
4.10 pm to 5.30 pm
