CALL FOR PAPERS
"In Praise of Folie: The Uses of Madness in Medieval French Literature"
Special Session, 48th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI
May 9-12, 2013
Existing
scholarship on madness in medieval (mostly English) literature is
dedicated predominantly to typological schematization or to clinical
descriptions of medieval madness, either in terms of medieval theories
of insanity or from a more modern, often Lacanian, perspective. More
properly literary accounts, notably Sylvia Huot's excellent Madness in Medieval French Literature (2003),
tend to privilege the ways in which madness constructs, deconstructs,
and problematizes individual and collective identities and their
articulation with each other. Without excluding these issues, this
panel seeks to build on such readings by paying closer attention to the
function of madness--or madnesses, for they are strikingly
heterogeneous--as a narrative device, or, better, as a mechanism for
creating and managing avenues of narrative and discursive possibility in
all domains of Old French and Provençal fiction and lyric poetry.
Of
particular interest is the connection between insanity as gender
trouble (a much-emphasized dimension of medieval literary madness) and
insanity as genre trouble. Does the "liminal" state marked by madness
permit, while also perhaps concealing and legitimating, textual forays
into the ambiguous borderlands where generic conventions and
possibilities mingle and interact with generative results? Does the
madman's or madwoman's discursive and embodied performance enable
passages, either temporary or permanent, between overdetermined systems
of representation and ethical evaluation, that is, between various ways
of reading and being read? How do characters, readers, and texts
register and respond to such mad play? Pushing this line of inquiry to
its limits, can madness be a formal or ontological as well as a
psychological phenomenon? Might texts themselves be read as "mad", or,
like Shakespeare's Hamlet, "mad in craft"?
Please send abstracts of approx. 250 words to Lucas Wood (lucasw@sas.upenn.edu) as soon as possible. Official deadline is Sept. 15, but participation in the session is limited.
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