Speech, Self, and identity: Voicing as subjectivity
Barbara Zimbalist (university of texas at el paso) and Megan E. Murton (The Catholic University of America)

 

Recent work by Sarah McNamer on "intimate scripts" and David Lawton on "public interiorities" has drawn attention to the ways in which certain late-medieval texts offer ways to reshape identity and speak new selves into being. Such texts ask not to be read but to be used, performed, and/or inhabited; they purport to shape affective and imaginative experience and indeed to effect transformation in their users. This type of transformation revises public as well as private subjectivities both individually and collaboratively, in regulatory, liberatory, and aspirational ways, and thus draws from particular historical and textual communities even as it participates in  their construction. Speaking a self can be undertaken in the devotional contexts of prayer, confession, and meditative practice, as well as within secular courtly discourses of erotic desire and complaint. We propose to organize two panels on this sub-theme, one focusing on each of these two overarching contexts. Specific topics that might be considered include texts that model or include instructions for their own use/performance; texts that destabilize the reading/performance distinction; the relevance of gender to the act of speaking a self; the function of "intimate scripts" within diverse generic and narrative structures such as The Book of Margery Kempe or Troilus and Criseyde; the role of onlookers or eavesdroppers on this performative act; the social, political, and religious contexts within which such “performance texts” are produced; and manuscript evidence of the use and circulation of texts designed as scripts. 

 

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