The Spring term is finally over, grades are in, and it's time to turn our thoughts to the Diplomacy and Diplomats e-session associated with next month's New Chaucer Society's Congress in Siena, Italy.
If you've had a chance to look at the NCS program, you'll have noted that Session 32 (Group 6, 4:00-5:30, Friday, 16 July) features papers by Elizabeth Capdevielle, Susan Yager, and John Sebastian. Then, Session 43 (Group 8, 2:00-3:30, Saturday, 17 July), an E-session, with responses and expansions to papers from Session 32, features Lynn Arner, William Askins, and Elizabeth Martin.
After fretting extensively about the best way to link the two sessions, I'd like to propose the following:
1. That we use the next six weeks to communicate our ideas about the topic of Chaucer, Diplomats, and Diplomacy, especially in regard to our particular interests (as reflected in each of the paper proposals). Ideally, our shared ideas will help each presenter refine arguments and develop more sophisticated arguments as final drafts of papers are prepared.
2. To initiate this discussion, I ask each of you to post a short blog entry sharing the current status of your project. For some, that might simply entail posting the proposal you submitted last summer. For others, it might involve a precis of a paper that's evolved considerably from the original proposal.
3. Then, at the end of your "status report," please include a question that provides an entry point into which the rest of the group can interact with your work. This question might refer to a stumbling block you've encountered. Or it might ask for response to a particular aspect of your argument. In short, your question can take any form; simply see it as an efficient way to solicit the generous feedback we so often need and so often have difficulty finding.
4. As participants post their short entries and followup question, others can use the "Comments" section below each post to reflect on the status report and question. (It goes without saying--but I'll say it anyway--feedback should be both respectful and useful.)
5. At some point, participants may want to share their entire papers with the group. If so, the papers can be shared by email while the comments can remain on the blog.
6. Finally, because our group has remained small, I see no reason why all six papers cannot be presented. I do want, however, to ensure that we have time to reflect on the e-session process. Therefore, I ask that the papers in Session 32 fall between 20 and 22 minutes apiece, while the papers in Session 43 fall between 15 and 18 minutes apiece. I also ask that all six presenters attend Session 43, so we can then conclude the session with a round-table discussion.
I look forward to a fruitful discussion as we prepare to wend our way to Siena.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Thanks much for getting this started. I am a reader of blogs but not usually a contributor to them.
ReplyDeleteI look forward to seeing you (and everyone) next month!
Hello, Everyone. Here is an abstract of my paper, which is an excerpt from the book I am currently completing, *Remembrances of Things to Come: Chaucer, Gower, and the Beginnings of English Literature*. Best, Lynn P. Arner
ReplyDeleteHeir to Innocence: Gender and the *Legend of Good Women*
This study argues that a central concern of Chaucer's *Legend of Good Women* is the issue of art and social responsibility, a discussion instigated narratively by Cupid's complaint. In what could be viewed as a Chaucerian treatise on poetics, the *Legend* launches a full-blown investigation of the problem of poetry and accountability and conducts this investigation primarily at the site of gender. The *Legend* examines the conundrum of where culpability for suspicious gendered practices in, and surrounding, poetic production lies. The legends and the dialogue among Cupid, Alceste, and Chaucer's persona raise multiple possible sites to locate accountability for inscriptions of gender in Chaucer's poetry and in his Greco-Roman and medieval antecedents. The individual poet, the textual tradition in which he writes, social praxes surrounding literature, and structural forces are all scrutinized as potential contributors to gender inequities in the field of cultural production. Through its investigation of the culpability of these various loci, the *Legend* helped to establish the terms for which conversations about literature could occur in late fourteenth-century England and in the subsequent history of English letters. Producing poetry that later anchored the English literary canon, in the *Legend* Chaucer deployed contestations surrounding gender as a means of laying out the terrain of debate for appropriate responses to poetry and acceptable categories of analysis through which to understand and assess literature. This article maps out this ideological terrain and the sophisticated mechanisms through which Chaucer's *Legend* worked to construct the parameters of debate.