Thursday, September 19, 2013

20130919.2140

I received a bit of good news, thanks to one of my international colleagues of renown, Helen Young: I will be returning to Kalamazoo, Michigan, in May 2014, so that I may present a paper on the Tales after Tolkien session of the International Congress on Medieval Studies.  It will be my fourth paper at the conference and my second with Tales after Tolkien.  I am excited to be partaking of a decades-long tradition and working to develop a new one.

I will not discuss the paper overly much here, at least not yet.  If nothing else, it needs a lot of work, so that it is not ready to be put on display.  But I will say that it is one that does work directly to address some of the interactions between the cultures represented in fantasy literatures and the medieval Western Europe from which the overwhelming majority take their form--and in some of the most prominent features of the medieval.

The ability of such a paper as I conceive to be speaks to one of the reasons that I study what I study, why I spend my time in and among the older works of English literature instead of immersing myself wholly in entrepreneurship or in whatever is on TV right now (I got internet and phone service hooked up today, but I think I will not get television; I really do not need it).  We are still doing the things that were done in the medieval period, still telling the stories our centuries-distant cultural ancestors told (and if you speak English as a native language, they are your cultural forebears if not your genetic ones)--and not only in fantasy fiction, which is still enjoying a rare amount of social cachet due to the efforts of Peter Jackson and Blizzard.  The (romanticized) idea of the cowboy ethic, one prevalent in Texas and in Stillwater, Oklahoma (in some measure, at least), is very much medieval in many ways, as is the increasingly caste-bound corporate system, with its overreliance on "just in time" labor practices.  Because these things are parallel, it is possible--or even likely--that what we know of then can inform our understanding of now, that how matters were resolved then can offer models for how to fix things now.

And there are always the jokes to consider...

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