The University of Chicago Medieval Studies Workshop at ICMS 2020 presents:
Affect and Exemplary Texts
This panel aims to bring the medieval affective turn to a decidedly broad textual stratum: exemplarity appears in medieval discourses beyond the European Middle Ages and allows for cross-cultural, comparative criticism in the realms of relation, emotion, and imagination. Examples serve as intermediaries between the reader and a broader value system or social group; to interrogate the broader phenomenon of exemplarity through themes and questions of affect is to ask how discourse and the transmission of knowledge or values occur in the body of a text between reader, writer, and society. By placing scholars from multiple subfields into conversation, this panel will investigate how exemplarity compares across religions, cultures, places, and times. We invite scholars to ask what medieval exemplarity offers to contemporary affect studies. How does the example capture the transition between the general and the particular? How does it trace the relation of text and audience? How does it reveal the disconnect between how a genre is theorized and how it is deployed? How might it reveal the conversations between the different textual homes of exemplarity, from legend to pastoral literature?
Please email your abstract (max 350 words) and the completed Participant Information Form by September 15, 2019 to Samantha Pellegrino ([email protected]) and Jo Nixon ([email protected]).
