Saturday, May 23, 2015

20150523.0803

It seems that I cannot stop writing about the 50th International Congress on Medieval Studies in this webspace, even as I await the information I need to do more about it on the Tales after Tolkien Society blog (submissions to which and comments about extant posts on which are welcome). Today, I discuss a panel I went to for purely personal reasons: Papers by Undergraduates II. One of my now-former students (he has graduated) presented on the panel, using a paper written for my class and workshopped with me for a year afterwards to try to get it in shape. How could I not sit to hear his talk? And how, then, could I not sit for the other papers on the panel?

The first offering was Kiana Gonzalez's "Staying True to Tradition," which asserted a reason for Egyptian puppet-show writer Ibn Daniyal to adhere to traditional Greek models. In effect, as I understood from Gonzalez, he does so to remain in accord with the Turkish underpinnings of his work with the trickster figures Aragouz/Karagoz and Hacivat. As she approached the topic from an art history perspective, much was made of the craft of the puppet shows, citing visual and recorded performative features rather than texts to make the argument. I found it fascinating, actually, and I found myself asking her for her bibliography, as one of the long-standing research projects I have going may well benefit from it. (I do not go in for puppet shows themselves as a research topic, but they do crop up in the milieu described in one of the series which I do treat regularly.)

Jonathan T. Garner followed with "The Samurai of Leinster: The Heroic Diarmuid in Gen Urobuchi's Fate/Zero." His was the paper that grew from my class, and since his introductory notes announced it to the session, I feel free to discuss it here.* It argues--which I know from having worked with the paper for some time and having a copy of it--that the presentation of Diarmuid in Fate/Zero is calculated to address prevailing audience understandings and needs not only for its original Japanese audiences, but also for Western audiences who are likely to have it only or primarily in translation. Reliance on the shared features of formalized codes of conduct, artificial as they may actually be, does much to bridge the two audiences, as does particular components of the physical depiction of Diarmuid. I imagine that Garner will be doing more with the paper; I hope to see it come out in a more extended form, more developed than the constraints of conference work allow.

The panel concluded with Dylan Matthews's "Intimacy and the Monarch in Thomas Hoccleve's Address to Sir John Oldcastle." Matthews, a student of RF Yeager, argued that Hoccleve's piece must be read in terms of Oldcastle's relationships with his king as well as of Hoccleve's own involvement in the affairs discussed. (My graduate advisor, who focuses on Hoccleve in his own work, would likely be able to say more on the matter than I.) The deployment of Lancelot in the work is telling; he is either a negative example or a parallel, invited to return to his former allegiance because much valued and ultimately undone because the invitation was refused. (The thought occurs that Hoccleve might be making a tacit accusation of adultery, given Lancelot's character history.)

Again, there is more to say about the 'zoo. While most of the rest of what I did has to do with the Tales after Tolkien Society, and so will be discussed elsewhere, there was at least one other event I attended that bears discussion here. Too, there are some ideas that need unpacking, and this will be a good place to attend to them--later on.

*One of the interesting things that will require untangling noted in an earlier post is just how much a conference presentation counts as a "public" event. This is not the place to treat it directly, but I rather think that such a post is coming.

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