IMC 2019: Sessions
Session 125: Borrowed, Traded, Loaned, Repossessed?: Debt, Object Exchange, and the Fluid Nature of Material Culture, I
Monday 1 July 2019, 11.15-12.45
| Organisers: | Jenny Adams, Department of English, University of Massachusetts Susie Phillips, Department of English, Northwestern University |
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| Moderator/Chair: | Susie Phillips, Department of English, Northwestern University |
| Paper 125-a | Lady Bertilak and the Poetics of the Gift (Language: English) Index terms: Economics - General, Language and Literature - Middle English, Social History |
| Paper 125-b | Book Debt, Book Love: Appraising Richard de Bury's Philobiblon (Language: English) Index terms: Economics - General, Language and Literature - Latin |
| Abstract | The recent turn toward material culture has brought back into focus the objects that circulate through our literatures, histories, and archives. Less work has been done on the ways in which certain material and economic practices transform one object into another. Does the collateralization of an object change the status of the object itself? How do objects disappear under the impress of debt, and how do the documents of debt take on a new life as material objects? How might a culture of borrowing generate a new language - new vocabularies, metaphors, syntaxes, and images - that begins to circulate alongside objects themselves? This panel takes up the questions/problems surrounding the use of objects for borrowing and lending. It welcomes papers on many aspects of object exchange but particularly seeks ones that think through the language of debt, the cultural understanding of collateral, and/or lending as represented or imagined. |