What a (virtual) World!

I just made my first virtual appearance at a conference, and was so grateful to have been able to listen in on the session I organized for this year's Kalamazoo. Having just given birth a few weeks ago, there was no way to make my annual pilgrimage this year, so I decided to take a note from Petrarch and attend virtually!

I posted the description of the session a while back, and it was such a delight to see how well all of the speakers' papers intersected with one another. Due to connection issues, I missed a portion of the session but -- thanks to Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and the wonders of live-tweeting -- was able to get brought back into the room! The connection issues made my ability to comment somewhat limited during the QA, but I greatly enjoyed getting to listen to all of the questions and comments that cropped up during the discussion. I was struck in particular by a question about how we might define "world" and "earth" against/alongside one another in light of the papers presented today, and I think that this session raised some compelling ideas about such definitions. The papers tended to emphasize how world-building is born out of various kinds of desires/impulses and, with that in mind, perhaps we could say that in contrast with "earth" (which could suggest concreteness, reality, etc.), "worlds" and "world-building" encompass a vast -- even infinite -- array of imaginary realms born out of desired alternatives. As Asa said at the beginning of his talk, for instance, Christendom itself is a deeply imagined, and deeply desired, world, but it is hardly real. And so, perhaps one of the main questions both raised and addressed by the session is how and why worlds are created in medieval literature. Moreover, what kinds of new understandings can we reach about medieval literature by considering the engendered worlds that appear within them, most of which are so very different from the earthly cultures that produce the texts in question?

This is a discussion I hope to see continue in the near future (more on that later!).

But for now, I'll simply express my gratitude for having been able to transport myself (however briefly) to Kalamazoo in order to see this session (engendered over pints at Bell's Brewery last year) come to fruition.

Thanks to Edith Burney Donnell for the photo! 

What a World!: Or, an invitation to BABEL along with me at K'zoo 2014

Good news! My proposed session, sponsored by the BABEL working group, has been given the green light for Congress next year. It springs in equal parts out of work on my book and from a lively conversation at Bell's brewery at this year's gathering in sunny Kalamazoo. The fine details: it will be a roundtable, hopefully comprised of seven participants. We're encouraging papers that veer towards the experimental, the playful, even the avant-garde, but given the wideness of the topic, there's plenty of room in which to maneuver and plenty of space for a variety of approaches; multimedia presentations are greatly encouraged.

Title: What a World! (A Roundtable)

Description:

“Oh what a world, what a world! Who would have thought a good little girl like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness?!” So screams the Wicked Witch of the West after Dorothy splashes water on her in the film The Wizard of Oz. The entire film reflects upon matters of perspective and thwarted/exceeded expectations, of not quite believing your eyes or trusting what you see, of creating contexts for experiences you never could have anticipated. The witch melts, in the end, because of her failure to imagine a world in which both she Dorothy could exist. While the gist of this line accords with the final words the Witch speaks in the book version, the phrase “What a World!” (original to the film) encourages meta-commentary. We are called, as viewers and as readers, to wonder along with the witch how this world — and such a vivid one at that — could have been engendered. In this sense, the phrase “What a World!” becomes as much an invitation to engage critically as it becomes a statement of wonder.

The issues inherent in fictionalized worlds, so beautifully encapsulated in this scene from The Wizard of Oz film, have much to offer studies of medieval literature. This session invites papers that consider all aspects of engendered worlds, but is especially invested in exploring how contemporary notions of “worldbuilding” — so often associated with high fantasy and science fiction— as well as Heiddeger’s “worlding” (in all its various theoretical manifestations and adaptations) can be appropriated to discuss the creation of fictive worlds in medieval literature. The session seeks to explore worlds built through varying states of incredulity, wonder, a desire to control and contextualize, or even built out of nostalgia and/or a desire to escape (however briefly) one’s own circumstances — from the translocated Holy Land of the mystery cycle plays, to the worlds encountered through chronicles, histories, and travel narratives, to the landscapes and cultures of Arthurian romance. How might the concept of “worldbuilding” invite fresh considerations and interrogations of medieval literature? How does it simultaneously reflect the desires authors have to create something new even as they (or their texts) admit the impossibilities of such projects? To what extent do engendered worlds allow and invite contemplation upon the many ways in which humans, as readers and receivers of texts, ineffably participate in this process of creation?