Exilic spaces, part II
Apr. 23rd, 2021 01:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12Today, I am bouncing around in anticipation of tonight's TV viewing:
The season finale of Falcon and the Winter Soldier — I don't think I fell in love with this show as much as some other people (Captain America and adjacent characters were always my least favourite parts of the MCU), but I've been enjoying it a lot and look forward to seeing the conclusion.
The first episode of the Shadow and Bone adaptation — I'm only really in this for the Dregs, and for Darklina content, and the whole Grishaverse is deeply silly, but it's my kind of silly, and that's enough.
The season (and series) finale of Deutschland 89 — probably one of my top ten TV series of all time, and I'm feeling unexpectedly emotional about the whole thing ending.
I'm also bookmarking this link to an episode of a podcast by the Globe Theatre about the second-greatest movie ever made, Ten Things I Hate About You. Podcasts and video essays are not my favourite way to absorb information (I'm always like, 'why couldn't you have just written this as a blog post or essay?'), but given the subject matter, I'll make an exception for this one!
Onwards to the books meme:
23. A book that made you bleed
My answer today is not so much a book as a group of texts. By this I mean that although we have copies of them in a bunch of different manuscripts, each manuscript version varies significantly from the others, and none of the extant copies necessarily represents the original written versions. Medieval literature is messy like that.
My PhD was about representations of authority and dispossession in medieval Irish literature, and looked specifically at several texts which had a theme of (pseudo)history, onomastics (placename etymology), and the geographical features of Ireland (and to a lesser extent, Britain). In a lot of these texts, claiming authority is equated to claiming an ancestral connection to important historical figures, and this is to a certain extent written into the land (placenames are imagined to reflect a person or group's historical connections, or the acts of semi-supernatural ancestors or Christian religious figures are written into the land, with lakes magically appearing, plains levelled, etc, etc). At the same time, these acts of claiming are sometimes explicitly (or implicitly) dispossessing others, by removing their connection to prominent geographical/topographical features, or asserting that one's ancestors defeated their ancestors in battle (or that they did something shameful). I'm obviously simplifying what ended up being nearly 100,000 words of research, but I hope you get the general idea.
The PhD focused on five different texts, all dating from around the eleventh to thirteenth centuries:
Lebor Gabála Érenn ('The Book of Invasions of Ireland', a pseudohistorical account of the supposed waves of invasion and settlement of Ireland, tying it into Biblical and world history as such things were understood at the time)
Dindshenchas Érenn ('The Lore of Notable Places of Ireland,' a collection of onomastic tales explaining the etymologies of the placenames of various locations in Ireland and Britain)
Buile Shuibhne ('The Frenzy of Suibne', a story about a mythological Irish king who insults a saint, who subsequently curses him with madness, which causes him to flee wildly around Ireland, spouting poetry about the island's natural features)
Immram Curaig Ua Corra ('The Voyage of the Coracle of the Uí Chorra', in which a group of brothers commit various crimes and are therefore forced to go on an exilic voyage around various semi-supernatural islands; their journey is meant to mirror a Christian understanding of the voyage of the soul towards God; if you've read The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, CS Lewis was drawing on this kind of medieval voyage tale when he wrote this book)
Acallam na Senórach ('The Colloquy of the Ancients', in which two ancient members of the Fianna (mythological semi-supernatural outlaw bands) have survived the deaths of all their companions, and have various conversations with St Patrick (who has arrived in Ireland to convert the island to Christianity) about the history and landscape of Ireland; the emphasis is very much on forging Patrick's connection with the land, and the text is in a sense bringing the island's supposed pre-Christian history into a Christian orbit).
So, why did these texts 'make me bleed', as the prompt asks? Simply because writing a PhD is very hard work, and for four years large portions of my brain, intellectual and emotional energy and day-to-day life were taken up with wrestling with these texts, thinking about them, holding them up to the light to see what was revealed, and trying to turn all that into a well-written original contribution to the intellectual landscape in my particular discipline. For much of the time, this went fairly smoothly — I went into the PhD already feeling warmly towards these texts, and spending so much time with them was, for the most part, pleasant — but there were dark and difficult days, as well. And anyone who knows anything about medieval Irish literature will be looking at me in shock at the texts I chose, most of which are written in tricky Middle Irish, with woefully inadequate modern editions and translations, and with a complex, convoluted textual transmission and manuscript history. Doing a PhD on any one of those (particularly Lebor Gabála and Dindshenchas Érenn) was considered wildly masochistic, but I guess I was just a glutton for punishment.
I think, looking back with hindsight, I should have chosen just one of them (probably Dindshenchas), as I think my PhD suffered from a lack of depth, but I don't regret my choices, and I still find all of the texts I studied deeply moving, and psychologically complex in ways that people don't typically associate with medieval literature. They have a sense of fragility and melancholy that really speak to me, and I still love the way they interweave history, identity, and the landscape.
24. A book that asked a question you've never had an answer to
25. A book that answered a question you never asked
26. A book you recommend but cannot love
27. A book you love but cannot recommend
28. A book you adore that people are surprised by
29. A book that led you home
30. A book you detest that people are surprised by
I'm also bookmarking this link to an episode of a podcast by the Globe Theatre about the second-greatest movie ever made, Ten Things I Hate About You. Podcasts and video essays are not my favourite way to absorb information (I'm always like, 'why couldn't you have just written this as a blog post or essay?'), but given the subject matter, I'll make an exception for this one!
Onwards to the books meme:
23. A book that made you bleed
My answer today is not so much a book as a group of texts. By this I mean that although we have copies of them in a bunch of different manuscripts, each manuscript version varies significantly from the others, and none of the extant copies necessarily represents the original written versions. Medieval literature is messy like that.
My PhD was about representations of authority and dispossession in medieval Irish literature, and looked specifically at several texts which had a theme of (pseudo)history, onomastics (placename etymology), and the geographical features of Ireland (and to a lesser extent, Britain). In a lot of these texts, claiming authority is equated to claiming an ancestral connection to important historical figures, and this is to a certain extent written into the land (placenames are imagined to reflect a person or group's historical connections, or the acts of semi-supernatural ancestors or Christian religious figures are written into the land, with lakes magically appearing, plains levelled, etc, etc). At the same time, these acts of claiming are sometimes explicitly (or implicitly) dispossessing others, by removing their connection to prominent geographical/topographical features, or asserting that one's ancestors defeated their ancestors in battle (or that they did something shameful). I'm obviously simplifying what ended up being nearly 100,000 words of research, but I hope you get the general idea.
The PhD focused on five different texts, all dating from around the eleventh to thirteenth centuries:
So, why did these texts 'make me bleed', as the prompt asks? Simply because writing a PhD is very hard work, and for four years large portions of my brain, intellectual and emotional energy and day-to-day life were taken up with wrestling with these texts, thinking about them, holding them up to the light to see what was revealed, and trying to turn all that into a well-written original contribution to the intellectual landscape in my particular discipline. For much of the time, this went fairly smoothly — I went into the PhD already feeling warmly towards these texts, and spending so much time with them was, for the most part, pleasant — but there were dark and difficult days, as well. And anyone who knows anything about medieval Irish literature will be looking at me in shock at the texts I chose, most of which are written in tricky Middle Irish, with woefully inadequate modern editions and translations, and with a complex, convoluted textual transmission and manuscript history. Doing a PhD on any one of those (particularly Lebor Gabála and Dindshenchas Érenn) was considered wildly masochistic, but I guess I was just a glutton for punishment.
I think, looking back with hindsight, I should have chosen just one of them (probably Dindshenchas), as I think my PhD suffered from a lack of depth, but I don't regret my choices, and I still find all of the texts I studied deeply moving, and psychologically complex in ways that people don't typically associate with medieval literature. They have a sense of fragility and melancholy that really speak to me, and I still love the way they interweave history, identity, and the landscape.
24. A book that asked a question you've never had an answer to
25. A book that answered a question you never asked
26. A book you recommend but cannot love
27. A book you love but cannot recommend
28. A book you adore that people are surprised by
29. A book that led you home
30. A book you detest that people are surprised by
no subject
Date: 2021-04-23 08:51 pm (UTC)This does NOT compute. :D
no subject
Date: 2021-04-24 11:07 am (UTC)(The greatest movie of all time is Mad Max: Fury Road.)
no subject
Date: 2021-04-24 06:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-04-24 11:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-05-01 09:30 am (UTC)Last year I read "Rocks of Nation" which is all about how Cornwall's rocks become a symbol of its difference from the rest of England, its Celtic-ness, and the idea of ghosts, rocks, and belonging all tied up together.
no subject
Date: 2021-05-02 12:05 pm (UTC)Oooh, this sounds really really interesting!