IMC 2020: Sessions
Session 520: Verging on Poetry
Tuesday 7 July 2020, 09.00-10.30
| Organisers: | Amanda Gerber, Department of English, University of California, Los Angeles Sarah Wood, Department of English & Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick |
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| Moderator/Chair: | Amanda Gerber, Department of English, University of California, Los Angeles |
| Paper 520-a | Marginalia and the Form of Piers Plowman (Language: English) Index terms: Language and Literature - Middle English, Manuscripts and Palaeography |
| Paper 520-b | Struck in the Head by a Chessboard: Games at the Margins of Dante's Commedia (Language: English) Index terms: Language and Literature - Comparative, Language and Literature - Italian |
| Paper 520-c | A (French) List of English Towns and the Boundaries of Poetry (Language: English) Index terms: Geography and Settlement Studies, Language and Literature - Middle English, Manuscripts and Palaeography |
| Abstract | Medieval poems were cumulative. They acquired quotations, interpretations, information, and styles from whatever their writers encountered. Literary critics have recently sought to redefine the encyclopaedic products of these writing methods by querying the boundaries between literature and information. However, not all information became subsumed under poems or encyclopaedias: that is to say, some interpretations, outlines, games, and other information remained marginal. This session focuses on these marginal materials to re-examine the liminal space between poetry and information, exploring the manuscript contents that verge on, without ever becoming part of, poetry. As a result, this panel aims to reinterpret the nature of medieval poems by exploring what lies just beyond their acquisitive reach. |