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Reading Old English Texts
Reading Old English Texts focuses on the critical methods currently being used and developed for reading and analyzing writings in Old English. It is the first collection of its kind in the field and is a timely book, given the explosion of interest in the theory, method and practice of critical reading in recent years. Each chapter engages with current work on Old English texts from a particular methodological stance. The authors are all expert, but are also concerned with explaining their method and its application to a broad undergraduate and graduate readership.
244 pages, Paperback
First published August 28, 1997
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
November 8, 2020
I wanted to understand a little of how Saxons read Vergil, so I downloaded a handful of books that were easy to find from libgen and ctrl+f'd "Vergil". There is a helpful book, a collection of articles similar to this one, covering that and similar subjects, called Latin Learning and English Lore. An interesting article titled Three 'Cups' and a Funeral in Beowulf, by Roberta Frank, briefly treats the possibily of Vergillian influence in Beowulf and in a footnote promises further discussion in three texts. Two are by Theodore M. Andersson, one being the chapter on Beowulf in his book Early Epic Scenery, where he makes a convincing argument based on the framing of enviornmental descriptions, as well as a fascinating asymmetrical exchange of gazes that plays out in the Aenid and in a handful of Latin and Old English epic poems.
The third was the Comparative Approach by Michael Lapidge, collected in this volume. In it he makes a new and compelling comparison between a moment in the Aenid and one in Beowulf, in which the combat turns against the hero's fierce assailaint and they become aware of their danger. In both cases the perspective abruptly turns from an impersonal narrator to the enemy's own viewpoint, so that we can understand their terror from their own interior perspective. It's a great point.
While it's a meaningful, original contribution to the literature on Beowulf, it also serves to demonstrate a type of analysis: the comparitive method. Every article in this collection works that way. The contributor first describes a method of approaching texts, and then models that approach by actually analyzing a text using it. Lapidge's article is the first and emphasizes the accessability of the comparative method. No special training or theoretical word-hoard is needed, and the method is as old as the study of literature itself. In summarizing the history of this method he gives a nice little history of the whole discipline of Old English studies. His perspective differs a little than what we might have come to expect. Normally we only hear about its 19th century origins in the form of barbs and disavowals of its nationalism and parochialism (which, my god, were there!). But for Lapidge these academics had one advantage in that they also spoke and discussed Latin, Greek and other European languages and perceived Anglo-Saxon literature as participating in a larger, closely connected literary tradition. They studied not just Anglo-Saxon literature but all European literature, and by the end extended it out beyond Europe to much of the world. Whats more, he articulates the Wesen of this stage via a quote from the Russian marxist Viktor Zhirmunsky. The villains, the post-war New Critics, thwart this academic tendency towards holism; rather than a progressive step out of the imbecility of liberal humanism they appear as forces of reaction, restoring an insular Englishness to the discipline.
My favourite essay in the collection, Clare A. Lee's At a Crossroads, covers feminist approaches to Old English literature. As a militant I tend to regard academic feminism with suspicion and read it with a little ressentiment, but in this case Lee shares my weariness. She takes a deflationary attitude towards earlier feminist approaches and while summarizing them, criticizes them. What interests her is not the powerful female protagonists or hints of female agency that you will indeed find, but the evidence for the function of historical patriarchy and, more abstractly, the semiotic role that womanhood plays in poetry. The latter is tested in an extraordinary analysis of Cynewulf's Elene which picks apart Elene's uncomfortable relationship to the various female stock characters and formulas; she bulges out of each on all sides, never really becoming a character we can say anything about. In the end what impresses us about the poem is that her womanhood is not surprising, not a significant or interesting element of the poem; the focus is squarely on the ethnic outcaste Jew named Judas - his torture, his visions, and his forced conversion. The lesson is almost cautionary - against taking gendered discourses for granted, not 'Normanizing' the Saxon (so to speak) - but we still deploy feminist categories to get there.
Carol Braun Pasternack's essay, Post-structuralist theories: the subject and the text, struggles. I don't think I'd like to have learned about Derrida and Lacan this way. In my opinion the introduction, par excellance, to this approach is Beginning Theory, a short and very readable textbook that I'd urge students towards instead. And Pasternack, covering so much already has to produce several different original applications, none of which get adequate time to develop and remain a little trivial. Nonetheless the second reading she gives (pg. 186) is fascinating. She talks about how various Old English words are used to represent both enemy and hero, and only those two, and a handful of passages in Beowulf which are ambiguous about whether they refer to Beowulf or the monster he's fighting. Taken all together, "the exile and the hero [...] are dangerously close to being the same thing".
So far I've only read these three, but the selection was fortuitious. Together they paint a picture of a literature that contains deep ambiguities; it's a corpus that is always rethinking things and talking back to itself. In all three cases, formulas confronts their limits and become their inverse; bad guys become protagonists and feminists decenter women...! Anglo-Saxon poetry has a singular intensity and it often challenges our theoretical apparatuses; by 1997, at least, it seems that there wasn't really a consensus on how we should be talking about it. I appreciated this little collection on the state of the literature.
The third was the Comparative Approach by Michael Lapidge, collected in this volume. In it he makes a new and compelling comparison between a moment in the Aenid and one in Beowulf, in which the combat turns against the hero's fierce assailaint and they become aware of their danger. In both cases the perspective abruptly turns from an impersonal narrator to the enemy's own viewpoint, so that we can understand their terror from their own interior perspective. It's a great point.
While it's a meaningful, original contribution to the literature on Beowulf, it also serves to demonstrate a type of analysis: the comparitive method. Every article in this collection works that way. The contributor first describes a method of approaching texts, and then models that approach by actually analyzing a text using it. Lapidge's article is the first and emphasizes the accessability of the comparative method. No special training or theoretical word-hoard is needed, and the method is as old as the study of literature itself. In summarizing the history of this method he gives a nice little history of the whole discipline of Old English studies. His perspective differs a little than what we might have come to expect. Normally we only hear about its 19th century origins in the form of barbs and disavowals of its nationalism and parochialism (which, my god, were there!). But for Lapidge these academics had one advantage in that they also spoke and discussed Latin, Greek and other European languages and perceived Anglo-Saxon literature as participating in a larger, closely connected literary tradition. They studied not just Anglo-Saxon literature but all European literature, and by the end extended it out beyond Europe to much of the world. Whats more, he articulates the Wesen of this stage via a quote from the Russian marxist Viktor Zhirmunsky. The villains, the post-war New Critics, thwart this academic tendency towards holism; rather than a progressive step out of the imbecility of liberal humanism they appear as forces of reaction, restoring an insular Englishness to the discipline.
My favourite essay in the collection, Clare A. Lee's At a Crossroads, covers feminist approaches to Old English literature. As a militant I tend to regard academic feminism with suspicion and read it with a little ressentiment, but in this case Lee shares my weariness. She takes a deflationary attitude towards earlier feminist approaches and while summarizing them, criticizes them. What interests her is not the powerful female protagonists or hints of female agency that you will indeed find, but the evidence for the function of historical patriarchy and, more abstractly, the semiotic role that womanhood plays in poetry. The latter is tested in an extraordinary analysis of Cynewulf's Elene which picks apart Elene's uncomfortable relationship to the various female stock characters and formulas; she bulges out of each on all sides, never really becoming a character we can say anything about. In the end what impresses us about the poem is that her womanhood is not surprising, not a significant or interesting element of the poem; the focus is squarely on the ethnic outcaste Jew named Judas - his torture, his visions, and his forced conversion. The lesson is almost cautionary - against taking gendered discourses for granted, not 'Normanizing' the Saxon (so to speak) - but we still deploy feminist categories to get there.
Carol Braun Pasternack's essay, Post-structuralist theories: the subject and the text, struggles. I don't think I'd like to have learned about Derrida and Lacan this way. In my opinion the introduction, par excellance, to this approach is Beginning Theory, a short and very readable textbook that I'd urge students towards instead. And Pasternack, covering so much already has to produce several different original applications, none of which get adequate time to develop and remain a little trivial. Nonetheless the second reading she gives (pg. 186) is fascinating. She talks about how various Old English words are used to represent both enemy and hero, and only those two, and a handful of passages in Beowulf which are ambiguous about whether they refer to Beowulf or the monster he's fighting. Taken all together, "the exile and the hero [...] are dangerously close to being the same thing".
So far I've only read these three, but the selection was fortuitious. Together they paint a picture of a literature that contains deep ambiguities; it's a corpus that is always rethinking things and talking back to itself. In all three cases, formulas confronts their limits and become their inverse; bad guys become protagonists and feminists decenter women...! Anglo-Saxon poetry has a singular intensity and it often challenges our theoretical apparatuses; by 1997, at least, it seems that there wasn't really a consensus on how we should be talking about it. I appreciated this little collection on the state of the literature.
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January 18, 2008I've skimmed portions of this book, and it seems like a nice intro to the various approaches to studying not just OE lit, but medieval, or any older body of literature. Unfortunately it's just been recalled by the library, so I'll post this here to hopefully remind me to get back to it again some time! Includes a chapter by the late Nick Howe, whom I took a Beowulf class with, on historicist approaches-- and as Berkeley is the home (or a home) of New Historicism, well, I may have to try and get through that before I return it.
October 4, 2008
This was a bit painful to get through-had to force myself.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews