Gillian R. Overing

Cynthia L. Caywood

This anthology explores the relationship between feminism and writing theory. The chapters cover the major issues: basic pedagogical theory and philosophical approaches to the teaching of writing, studies of problems encountered by female writers and writing instructors, and useful how-to essays on classroom technique. The authors also address important, provocative questions about power in the classroom--its use, abuse, and distribution. The book is based on the concept of equity, which the editors define: "Equity does not mean to us the abolition of differences among individuals, nor does it imply a blanket imposition of an Orwellian homogeneity. It does not mean stifling some voices so that others may be heard; it does not demand the compromising of academic standards in the name of egalitarianism. Equity, as we understand it, creates new standards which accommodate and nurture differences. Equity fosters the individual voice in the classroom, investing students with confidence in their own authority. Equity unleashes the creative potential of heterogeneity. this definition of equity is at the heart of this anthology, and our attempts as teachers to model our pedagogy on this principle provided the impetus for assembling it." -- from the Introduction

Pedagogy, Gender, and Equity

Teaching Writing

Clare A. Lees

The five hundred years of Anglo-Saxon England are most often ignored in current studies of gender, culture, and sexuality in Western Europe; this book repairs that neglect and illustrates how social history can be glimpsed in the cracks of the limited fragmentary evidence that survives.--Roberta Frank, Yale University

Women and Clerical Culture in Anglo-Saxon England

Double Agents

Contemporary arts, both practice and methods, offer medieval scholars innovative ways to examine, explore, and reframe the past. Medievalists offer contemporary studies insights into cultural works of the past that have been made or reworked in the present. Creative-critical writing invites the adaptation of scholarly style using forms such as the dialogue, short essay, and the poem; these are, the authors argue, appropriate ways to explore innovative pathways from the contemporary to the medieval, and vice versa. Speculative and non-traditional, The Contemporary Medieval in Practice adapts the conventional scholarly essay to reflect its cross-disciplinary, creative subject. This book ‘does’ Medieval Studies differently by bringing it into relation with the field of contemporary arts and by making ‘practice’, in the sense used by contemporary arts and by creative-critical writing, central to it. Intersecting with a number of urgent critical discourses and cultural practices, such as the study of the environment and the ethics of understanding bodies, identities, and histories, this short, accessible book offers medievalists a distinctive voice in multi-disciplinary, trans-chronological, collaborative conversations about the Humanities. Its subject is early medieval British culture, often termed Anglo-Saxon Studies (c. 500–1100), and its relation with, use of, and re-working in contemporary visual, poetic, and material culture (after 1950). ‘The Contemporary Medieval in Practice is both wise and unafraid to take risks. Fully embedded in scholarship yet reaching into unmapped territory, the authors move across disciplines and forge surprising links. Thought-provoking and evocative, this is a book that will have an impact that far belies its modest length.’ – Linda Anderson, Newcastle University

The Contemporary Medieval in Practice

Ulrike Wiethaus

This volume offers a dialogue with and through the medieval informed by cultural categories of performativity and simultaneity in on-line media, architecture, film, poetry, and social formations. The articles depart from Medievalism Studies and attempt to answer questions such as: How do medievalists, artists, writers, and entertainment industries communicate, replicate, and evoke medieval formations? How do national and transnational discursive fields relate to understandings of the medieval in its many unstable states? Where are the communal memory sites and what functions do they serve for those who are associated with them? Where are the medieval disjunctions and conjunctions of race, ethnicity and time in a settler society? And what do place, nature, and landscape have to do with it?

Nature and Mind in Cultural Transfer

American/Medieval

Not a book about what Beowulf means but how it means, and how the reader participates in the process of meaning construction. Overing’s primary aim is to address the poem on its own terms, to trace and develop an interpretive strategy consonant with the extent of its difference. Beowulf’s arcane structure describes cyclical repetitions and patterned intersections of themes which baffle a linear perspective, and suggest instead the irresolution and dynamism of the deconstructionist free play of textual elements. Chapter 1 posits the self/reader as a function of the text/language, examining the ways in which the text "speaks" the reader. Chapter 2 develops an interactive semiotic strategy in an attempt to describe an isomorphic relation between poem and reader, between text and self. Chapter 3 addresses the notions of text and self as more complex functions or formulations of desire, and thus complicates and expands the arguments of the two preceding chapters. The final chapter examines the issue of desire in the poem, and, to a lesser extent, desire in the reader (insofar as these may legitimately be viewed as distinct from each other).

Gillian R. Overing

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