IMC 2026: Sessions
Session 1732: Reading Repetition, III: Non-Linear Temporalities and Layered Meaning as an Affirmation of Identity
Thursday 9 July 2026, 14:15-15:45
| Organisers: | Brooklyn Arnot, Faculty of English, University of Oxford Marie Sophie Besson, Íslensku- og menningardeild, Háskóli Íslands, Reykjavík / Mondes Germaniques et Nord-Européens (UR 1341), Université de Strasbourg |
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| Moderator/Chair: | Brooklyn Arnot, Faculty of English, University of Oxford |
| Paper 1732-a | The Serpent's Echo: Reading Lilith and Manasa as Repetitions of the Rebel Archetype from Medieval Myth to Modern Poetry (Language: English) Index terms: Gender Studies, Hebrew and Jewish Studies, Historiography - Modern Scholarship, Language and Literature - Comparative |
| Paper 1732-b | Icelandic Revisionist Mythmaking, for a Medievalist Phenomenology of Imagination (Language: English) Index terms: Gender Studies, Language and Literature - Scandinavian, Medievalism and Antiquarianism, Women's Studies |
| Abstract | This strand explores repetitions that echo through time within stories and across texts. Using reoccurring motifs, events, and characters, medieval stories are able to make certain events thick with semantic layers as each iteration reconceptualises the same motif, often spiralling and crescendoing into a climax. Later rewritings bring back these dynamics: intertextuality then becomes a mode of interpretation, while it reanimates medieval temporalities, and uses them to question modern conceptions - or vice versa. In this dialogue through time, returns and loops break the linearity and offer a new relationship to medieval materials. The third session studies such reinterpretations. From the 18th to the 21st century, artists have been reanimating this medieval logic of resonance and creating new layers of meaning as a way to take part in socio-political discussions. The papers engage with varied art forms (poetry, music, carving, moviemaking, narrative literature) to show how medieval non-linear temporalities are established as counter-powers towards a self-definition. Gendered, national, and social identities will be particularly discussed. This session includes medieval and reception studies, and practice-as-research approaches in which the researcher-artist embodies these non-linear temporalities by becoming a part of this creative repetition spiral. |