Persons beyond personhood
Shoshana Adler (Vanderbilt University) and Mariah Min (Brown University)

 

What do we lose by subordinating “persons” to notions of “personhood”? This thread is  interested in exploring the numerous ways the depiction of persons (or entities that otherwise  read as characters) in medieval literature troubles, exceeds, or falls short of what we might  associate with the achievement or promise of “personhood.” 

One objection against subordinating “persons” to “personhood” arises from the friction between  what qualities modernity has often privileged as markers of personhood, and actual persons.  There is no shortage of contemporary critiques against assumptions that wholeness,  cohesiveness, consistency, depth, agency, etc, inhere in the human; we might think of Anne  Cheng on ornamentalism, Hortense Spillers on pornotroping, José Muñoz on disidentification,  Jacques Lacan on jouissance, or Hélène Cixous on the impossibility of character. That is, no one  – at least in this sense – has ever achieved “personhood,” whole, cohesive, full subjectivity.  Further, the granting of personhood in both the legal and symbolic sense has often been extended  or denied along racist lines, so that personhood becomes both cudgel and gift. What fictions and  frictions of full personhood animate the representations of persons in the medieval corpus? 

We are also invested in taking seriously a second difficulty on the relation between “person” and  “personhood,” one that arises from the tension between 1. persons, and 2. literary character.  Literature does something other than scrape the historical real into a collecting jar for future  investigation. What are the uses of literature beyond documenting the historical real? How can  we think about medieval literature as something other than a representational record of medieval  society, and what are the stakes of doing so? What can we read for, when we do not read for  history? Put another way, how is the tension between lived persons and notions of personhood  reflected in the formal realities of medieval literature, in its strategies, techniques, and  investments? 

 

We invite paper and panel proposals that consider these questions from a range of frameworks,  including the relation between race and literary character; legal fictions of personhood; medieval  literary conceptions of representation and the real; thin, flat, objectified, shattered, or  stereotypical versions of personhood; and interrogations of the historicist desire to reconstruct  the past. 

 

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