Medieval Fictionality
Oct 20 2017
7:30 pm
CUNY Graduate Center7:30 pm
365 5th Ave (btw 34th and 35th Streets)
in the English Studies Conference Room (4406)
Inquiry into “medieval fictionality” foregrounds the limits of two dominant approaches to studying fictionality today – that of a “universalist” camp, which understands fiction to be almost co-extensive with the human, and, contrarily, that of a “modernist” camp, which yokes fiction’s emergence to the rise of the novel. This talk argues that fiction cannot be bound to the semantics of the realist novel, even as I insist on the historical precision that such periodizing arguments often marshal. I show that the historiography of fiction remains caught in the grand récit of the secularization thesis, and against this I argue for the needfulness, and difficulty, of a comparative study of fiction. One way that medievalists might contribute to such study is through the corpus of “medieval literary theory” – but, though I attend to this body of thought, my own approach is different. Medieval practices of fiction-writing, especially in the vernacular, often developed at a remove from their theorization. Building on the claims of Nicolette Zeeman’s 2007 essay “Imaginative Theory,” I explore how medieval texts themselves disposed their metaphysical, epistemic, institutional, and formal resources to cut distinctions between different modes of reference, to fashion distinctive and immanent fictionalities.
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