World Philologies Seminar

Thursday, 7 November 2013, 4 - 6 pm
Friedrich Schlegel Graduiertenschule für literaturwissenschaftliche Studien,
Habelschwerdter Allee 45, 14195 Berlin, Raum J24/122d

The Postcolonial Middle Ages: Problems and Perspectives

Andrew James Johnston
(Freie Universität Berlin)

Chair: Islam Dayeh
(Zukunftsphilologie/Freie Universität Berlin)


Abstract:
For nearly two decades, the postcolonial Middle Ages has been one of the fasted growing industries in medieval studies. While, in its early days, the postcolonial Middle Ages was primarily concerned with expanding the medievalist's gaze to the experience of communities that had not hitherto been privileged as the main actors in the grands récits that shaped the Western concept of the medieval, postcolonial ideas, methods and theories are now increasingly being brought into medieval studies in order to re-conceptualize the very idea of the 'Middle Ages' itself, and to question the role that the Middle Ages has played in the identity-formation of the colonizing West as a temporal Other that could be projected onto or reinforced by the colonial Other. This session seeks to explore the potential of the postcolonial Middle Ages to help us re-think the notions of temporality which have contributed to stabilizing Western regimes of power.

Seminar Text:

• Davis, Kathleen: "The Sense of an Epoch. Periodization, Sovereignity and the Limits of Secularization" in Cole, Andrew and D. Vance Smith (eds.), The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages. On the unwritten History of Theory, Duke University Press 2010, pp. 39-69

Andrew James Johnston is Professor of Medieval and Early Modern English Literature at the Free University of Berlin. He studied at the Free University of Berlin and at Yale University and did his PhD in Berlin in 1998. He is the author of Clerks and Courtiers: Chaucer, Middle English Literature and the State Formation Process (Heidelberg 2001) and co-editor of Anglo-Romanische Kulturkontakte von Humanismus bis Postkolonialismus (Berlin: Dahlem UP, 2002), Language and Text: Current Perspectives on English and Germanic Historical Linguistics and Philology (Heidelberg: Winter, 2006) and Clerks, Wives and Historians: Essays on Medieval English Language and Literature (Berne: Peter Lang, 2007). His latest book in English, Performing the Middle Ages from Beowulf to Othello, appeared with Brepols (Turhhout, Belgium) in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Series in 2009. Though his research focuses mainly on medieval and Renaissance literature he has also written essays on Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Bertolt Brecht, J. R. R. Tolkien, and film-makers David Fincher and Lars von Trier. He is the deputy speaker of the Collaborative Research Centre Episteme in Motion and has recently contributed the chapter on 'Postcolonial Beowulf' to the MLA's Teaching Beowulf volume.