figures of speech
Fiona Somerset (university of connecticut) and Katherine Breen (Northwestern University)

  

What can personification teach us about personhood? Personification has deep roots as a mode of character-making in premodern narrative, performative, and visual arts. The rhetorical trope of prosopopoeia, from the Greek prosopon (face, mask, person) + poiein (to make), treats personification as an ongoing process, one that can be arrested, contested, or rescinded. We might suppose that only nonhumans (things, animals, abstract concepts, social groups) can be personified by attributing human traits and capacities to them (speech, embodiment, agency, gender), while humans have personhood by default. Yet once we see how personifications can be raveled and unraveled, it is easier to see how personhood too is far from stable. It can be partial, composite, corporate; it can allow participation or representation; it can be granted and denied. Redistributing personhood, whether playfully or in deadly earnest, is a potent means of reimagining the world.

In our own moment as in the Middle Ages, attributing or denying capacities regarded as special to humans is a means of conferring or taking away legal and social status, powers, and rights. Examples can be proliferated. The U.S. Constitution infamously attributed fractional personhood to enslaved Black Americans, while in 2010 the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision granted First Amendment rights to corporate persons. More recently, lawmakers have assigned personhood to bodies of water in an effort to protect them from environmental degradation and district attorneys have used laws attributing personhood to fetuses to prosecute women for drug use during pregnancy. Actors and writers are currently on strike to restrict the roles of virtual persons in the entertainment industry. Twenty-first century debates about legal and moral personhood have been a vital preoccupation of environmental and animal studies, disability studies, indigenous studies, and critical race theory, among other fields.  

This thread invites proposals for individual papers and full panels that attend to the literary/visual/performative strategies by which personhood is represented, as well as the historical situations of its contestation. We are especially interested in papers that invite reflection on how engaging with medieval culture can inform present- and future-oriented work, and vice versa, and we encourage dialogue with work in more recent history up to the present.

 

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