IMC 2024: Sessions
Session 337: It's about Time?: Crisis and Temporality
Monday 1 July 2024, 16:30-18:00
| Organiser: | IMC Programming Committee, |
|---|---|
| Moderator/Chair: | Line Cecilie Engh, Institutt for filosofi, ide- og kunsthistorie og klassiske språk, Universitetet i Oslo |
| Paper 337-a | The Horoscope of Stephanus of Alexandria: An Astrological Response to the Historical Crises of the 7th Century (Language: English) Index terms: Byzantine Studies, Islamic and Arabic Studies, Local History and Religious Life |
| Paper 337-b | Gawain's Adventure Time: The Crisis of Ignorance and Presumption (Language: English) Index terms: Biblical Studies, Language and Literature - Middle English, Lay Piety and Theology |
| Abstract | This session has been grouped by the IMC Programming Committee from individually submitted paper proposals. Paper a: The Horoscope of Stephanus of Alexandria is an astrological treatise attributed to the famous Byzantine astrologer and philosopher, Stephanus of Alexandria (late 6th-early 7th cent. CE). It presents a horoscope of Islam as a ‘new nation’, describes several Muslim customs and beliefs and predicts Islam’s historical and political fate, including a cryptic list of 21 rulers. The paper will discuss how astrology is used from a historical perspective as a response to perceived historical and political crises and more specifically, in the context of early Byzantine receptions and reactions to the emergence and expansion of Islam. Furthermore, the paper will also discuss the relationship of this work to similar political horoscopes from the Abbasid period as a testimony to inter-cultural exchanges between Byzantine and Abbasid intellectuals. Paper b: This paper uses Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of ‘adventure time’ to analyse the Gawain-poet’s representations of the sin of presumption in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. For Bakhtin, adventure time is a chronotope specific to the romance genre in which temporality is characterised by ‘a sequence of adventure-fragments’ and by the expected unexpectedness in a miraculous world. I argue that the Gawain-poet juxtaposes adventure time, bound as it is to human crisis, malleability, and normalised ‘suddenly’, against God’s eternity and omnipresence in order to dramatise the fragility of spirituality within the human condition. Critics have touched on the subject of the chronotope in SGGK, but they have not fully explored its theological implications. I therefore explain how the poet plots the complexity of religious teaching in SGGK within the tension between adventure time and God’s time. By deploying two irreconcilable concepts of time simultaneously, the poet underlines the incompatibility between romance and biblical didacticism, destabilising the Christian instructions against presumption that the reader has absorbed from Pearl, Cleanness, and Patience, the homiletic poems that SGGK ultimately responds to with skepticism about its audience’s self-awareness concerning their presumptions against God. |