IMC 2022: Sessions
Session 1309: Borders of Human Nature, Boundaries of the Imagination
Wednesday 6 July 2022, 16.30-18.00
Sponsor: | Medieval Ecocriticisms / Oecologies Research Group |
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Organiser: | Kellie Robertson, Department of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison |
Moderator/Chair: | Heide Estes, Department of English, Monmouth University, New York |
Paper 1309-a | Allegorical Gimmicks and Financial Monsters: Border-Fantasies of the Self in Late Medieval Literature (Language: English) Index terms: Economics - Urban, Language and Literature - Middle English |
Paper 1309-b | The Mind-Machine: Psychology, Poetry, and the Crafted World in 12th-Century Neoplatonist Allegory (Language: English) Index terms: Language and Literature - French or Occitan, Science |
Paper 1309-c | The Weathered Self (Language: English) Index terms: Gender Studies, Language and Literature - Middle English |
Paper 1309-d | Human Nature: Rational and Mortal (Language: English) Index terms: Language and Literature - Middle English, Science |
Abstract | The literary critic Barbara Johnson offers us a provocation: 'One of the most obvious assumptions we make is that the human 'self' is a person, not a thing. But might this assumption be more problematic than it appears?' This panel explores limit cases that test how human nature is constructed in relation to the experiential world. What pressures - material or metaphysical - are brought to bear on what we imagine to be a distinctively human nature? What strategies - allegorical, poetic, natural philosophical, or mathematical - make medieval selves legible? |