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IMC 2018: Sessions

Session 720: Mortes, Memory, and Retraction

Tuesday 3 July 2018, 14.15-15.45

Organiser:Karen Cherewatuk, Department of English, St Olaf College, Minnesota
Moderator/Chair:Karen Cherewatuk, Department of English, St Olaf College, Minnesota
Paper 720-aForgetting to Remember in Malory's Morte
(Language: English)
Catherine J. Batt, Institute for Medieval Studies, University of Leeds
Index terms: Language and Literature - Middle English, Language and Literature - French or Occitan
Paper 720-bMourning and Memory in Malory
(Language: English)
Karen Cherewatuk, Department of English, St Olaf College, Minnesota
Index terms: Language and Literature - Middle English, Mentalities, Social History
Paper 720-cTricks of Memory: Malory and the Stock Phrase
(Language: English)
Joyce Coleman, Department of English, University of Oklahoma
Index terms: Language and Literature - Middle English, Literacy and Orality
Paper 720-dMemories of War: Retracting the Dominant Reading of the Alliterative Morte Arthure
(Language: English)
Kevin S. Whetter, Department of English, Acadia University, Nova Scotia
Fiona Tolhurst, Department of Language & Literature, Florida Gulf Coast University
Index terms: Language and Literature - Middle English
Abstract

This panel explores the way memory functions within and without two Middle English Arthurian texts, Malory's Morte Darthur and the Alliterative Morte Arthure. Within the texts memory is related by character and narrator. Outside the texts, the audiences (readers and hearers) employ memory to create meaning from repeated formula (Joyce Coleman), a reshaped plot (Catherine Batt), or the emotions evidenced by the characters (Karen Cherewatuk). Memory of contemporary experience can also lead a generation of scholars to misread the ethos of a medieval work (Fiona Tolhurst and Kevin Whetter). Memory is thus the cross-over process by which authors, audiences, and scholars make meaningful these two mortes.