The Postmodern Beowulf: A Critical Casebook
(West Virginia University Press, Jan. 2007)
Preface: After Everything, The Postmodern Beowulf
Eileen A. Joy
It is the very fact that we cannot live in the present—that the present for us is always part of an unfinished project—which converts our lives from chronicles to narratives. . . . We cannot choose to live non-historically: history is quite as much our destiny as death. (Terry Eagleton, After Theory, p. 209)
Now that theory is supposedly irrelevant, “over,”
and “dead,” and has even inspired an “anthology of dissent,”
is the time finally propitious for the belated arrival of The Postmodern
Beowulf?[1] Are we really belated
and is theory even really dead? I would say, yes and no—to both questions.
As Allen Frantzen has remarked, scholars working in Old English studies who
engage contemporary, poststructuralist criticism often find themselves “challenged
as intruders, as strangers on the beach, not unlike the way Beowulf and his
retainers rouse the coastguard’s suspicion as they arrive in Denmark.”[2]
Scholars working in contemporary literary studies do not often look to the
field of Old English for enlightenment or direction on the subject of critical
theory, and within the field of Old English itself, the resistance to theory,
in general, has been strong, and occasionally mean-spirited. But here is not
the place to go over old debates, for as Gillian Overing stated more than
ten years ago at the 1991 convention of the Modern Language Association, “we
are changed by this new work,” which “has, indeed, arrived.”[3]
While Theory, with a capital “T,” already has a long history,
which some trace to Plato and others to 1966 when Jacques Derrida presented
a paper, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,”
at a conference at Johns Hopkins University, it has not, in fact, exhausted
itself and was never and can never be just “one thing” (or “empire,”
as recently argued) to be either embraced or rejected without equivocation.
As reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education, theory is not “a
unified kingdom,” but is rather “a loose federation of states
with permeable boundaries, no universally recognized constitution, and not
much in the way of a lingua franca. It looks less like a superpower . . .
and more like the fractious and ever-expanding European Union.”[4]
And whether conceived of as empire or fractious union, as Terry Eagleton reminds
us, “[w]e can never be ‘after theory,’ in the sense that
there can be no reflective human life without it. We can simply run out of
particular styles of thinking, as our situation changes.”[5]
Theory will always be with us, if we prefer the examined life (and how could
we not?), although some theories will, of historical necessity, eventually
become useless (except as chapters in our intellectual history).
Styles of thinking have, indeed, changed as particular
situations—social, cultural, political, historical, institutional, and
otherwise—have changed, and this is why, for example, we already have
first-, second-, and third-wave feminist critique, and even post-feminist
critique. A first-ever anthology of critical essays on Beowulf that
represents scholarship influenced by postmodern thought—which is what
we offer here—does, in fact, arrive somewhat belatedly to a set of discourses
long in session in the American university and already famous for pronouncing
their own enervation, but I would argue that it is precisely in its “after-ness”
that Beowulf scholarship of a certain postmodern bent is so timely,
and even needed. It is partly due to the fact that the reception of theory
in Old English studies has been less than welcoming that those scholars wanting
to carry the water to our field of newer analytical models have been so measured
and careful in their approaches that they almost never take foreknowledge
for granted and have thereby bequeathed to us a great gift—they have
taught us theory while also practicing and revising it, and they have not
neglected in the process what is generally understood to be the great strength
of traditional medieval studies: an attention to philology, history, and cross-disciplinary
contexts. Indeed, because of our focus on literature within its manuscript
context, we should hold open the question of our “after-ness”
to theory since, as Roy Liuzza writes, the “poststructural recognition
of the enigmatic contingency of the text, as well as the cultural critics’
attention to the social circumstances of literary production” already
has its parallel in Old English studies, where critics, for a while now, have
already been questioning “the authority of the text, the propriety of
stylistic criticism, the means and circumstances of reading and reception,
[and] the nature of literary creation and transmission.”[6]
Paul Strohm’s observation is correct: “Postmodern
theory has always needed us,” mainly as “a necessary foil to an
argument for an emergent modernity” and as a repository of a supposedly
socially “static” world, but “[o]ur retort must be that
our period, no less than any other, is the plagued and proud possessor of
motile signs, category confusions, representational swerves and slippages,
partial and competing and always irreconcilable narrations.” Strohm
is also correct in suggesting that postmodernism is ultimately involved in
a project in “which any good medievalist would describe himself or herself
as engaged: the attempt to restore complexity to our understanding of the
past.”[7] This is similar to Lee
Patterson’s argument some years ago that medieval scholarship has an
important role to play in instructing “postmodern criticism in the historical
complexity and concreteness of cultural forms.”[8]
And this means, too, I would argue, that medieval studies has a critical function
to perform in refashioning contemporary theoretical models, through a rigorous
historicism, that helps to extend and deepen the explanatory power of those
models.
The attempt to restore historical complexity
to our understanding of the past and its cultural forms, and to also show
how Old English studies both practice and reformulate theory, suffices as
a description of the project of The Postmodern Beowulf, which was
initially born out of a desire to provide for students an anthology of “the
best of” contemporary critical approaches to the poem and then later
developed into a “casebook” that we hope more than amply demonstrates
the ways in which Old English scholarship has debated, elucidated, practiced,
historicized, and even developed theory in relation to the critical analysis
of Beowulf. The book is divided into four sections—History/Historicism,
Ethnography/Psychoanalysis, Gender/Identity, and Text/Textuality—that
have been designed, not as much to represent specific movements within theory
(such as deconstruction, new historicism, post-colonialism, Lacanian analysis,
queer studies, and the like), as to offer broad contextual fields of inquiry
within which certain questions regarding history, culture, identity, and language
have perdured over time (and in response to which questions the more narrowly-defined
theoretical “schools” have arisen). This is not to say that specific
theoretical approaches are not purposefully highlighted in the volume, because
many of them are, but it was also our concern to select essays that took up
more than one narrowly-defined approach and that also combined approaches
(both traditional and more contemporary) in strikingly innovative ways. So,
for example, we selected James Earl’s “Beowulf and the
Origins of Civilization” because it utilizes Freudian analysis (especially
in relation to Freud’s ideas regarding identification and the superego),
but also because what is being psychoanalyzed is not what we might at first
expect (i.e., the characters in the poem), but rather, the readers of the
poem, both the present-day readers (ourselves) as well as one of the poem’s
probable Anglo-Saxon readers, Byrhtnoth, the “real life” hero
of the tenth-century Old English poem, Battle of Maldon. At the same
time, Earl also analyzes his own dreams about the poem, thereby drawing himself
(and more generally, the Old English scholar) under the rubric of his theoretical
model. And because his analysis of one of those dreams is also an attempt
to understand the ways in which the poem almost demands a certain kind of
masculine identification with a particular Anglo-Saxon heroic ethos, Earl’s
essay also investigates the tensions between gender and ethnography in relation
to the process of reading the poem in our present moment. Ultimately, Earl
creatively interweaves Freud with reader reception theory and even with an
imaginative new historicism (how might Byrhtnoth have read Beowulf?),
and he also provides a glimpse of what “the personal is theoretical”
might look like.
In addition to including essays on Beowulf
here that we feel represent the most innovative uses and refashionings of
multiple critical methodologies—both traditional and more theoretical—we
decided to also include within each section essays which address more broadly-ranging
theoretical issues (grouped under the heading “Critical Contexts”),
so that the Beowulf essays can be read and discussed in the classroom
in relation to, not only other essays on Beowulf (both within and
outside of this book), but also these broader arguments. These are essays
that represent a diverse spectrum of academic fields, from cultural criticism
(Edward Said, “The World, the Text, and the Critic”) to Old Norse
studies (Carol Clover, “Regardless of Sex: Men, Women, and Power in
Early Northern Europe”) to ethno-archaeology (John Moreland, “Ethnicity,
Power and the English”) to Continental philosophy (Michel Foucault,
“What Is an Author?”) to medieval studies more generally (the
essays by Claire Sponsler, Alfred Siewers, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Carol Braun
Pasternack, and Michelle Warren). Each section of the book contains five essays:
three essays that directly address Beowulf (arranged in chronological
order, by earlier to later publication date), preceded by two “Critical
Contexts” essays that were chosen either because they propose critical
paradigms that are reflected upon and articulated in the respective Beowulf
essays, or because they offer analyses and arguments that broaden the depth
of the critical field within which the Beowulf essays that follow
them can be evaluated (and it just so happens that two of these essays, Siewers's
and Cohen's, also address Beowulf in addition to other literary subjects).
The main objective in doing things this way is to both show the development
of certain theoretical lines of thinking within Beowulf scholarship,
and to also create areas of critical tension that would ideally lead to further
debate in the classroom. So, for example, in the History/Historicism section
of the book, we have included two “Critical Contexts” essays—Edward
Said, “The World, the Text, and the Critic” and Claire Sponsler,
“In Transit: Theorizing Cultural Appropriation in Medieval Europe”—that
both advocate (albeit in different ways) a criticism that would be attentive
to the ways in which a cultural text, whether a poem or symphony or painting,
performs in the particular world(s) in which it circulates, and also to the
manner in which cultural objects are always being “appropriated”
by different groups in different times and places, where meaning becomes as
much a question of the environment of the work’s reception as of what
might be called an “original” authorial intention.
The essays that follow Said and Sponsler—Nicholas
Howe, “Beowulf and the Ancestral Homeland,” Allen Frantzen,
“Writing the Unreadable Beowulf,” and John Niles, “Locating
Beowulf in Literary History”—all seek to understand what
Beowulf, as a cultural text, and also as a myth of “origins,”
might have meant in particular places to particular groups. For Howe, that
means exploring how the Anglo-Saxons might have composed the poem as a kind
of epic of a myth of ancestral migration from continent to island, which “gave
the English as a folc a common identity by teaching them that they
were descended from those who had made the exodus of the mid-fifth century,”
and therefore the poem might have had a critical function in an emerging “national”
identity. Niles’s essay (which explicitly acknowledges, as does Frantzen’s
essay, the influence of Said’s thought) argues for Beowulf’s
status as “a socially embedded poetic act” that “responded
to lively tensions, agreements, and disagreements in the society from which
it came.” More specifically, Niles sees the poem as responding to “a
mixed and somewhat turbulent [post-Viking invasions] Anglo-Scandinavian society,”
and he argues that the poem is ultimately “the projection of two great
desires: (1) for a distinguished ethnic origin that would serve to merge English
and Danish differences into a neutral and dignified pan-Germanism, and (2)
for an ethical origin that would ally this unified race with Christian spiritual
values.” Taking the idea of the poem’s social utility even further,
Frantzen’s essay looks at Beowulf’s role in nineteenth-century
positivist philology, in modern translations, and also in the twentieth-century
literary anthology and literature survey classroom, thereby giving us an invaluable
(if selective) reception history of the poem that also shows us how the multi-vocality
of the text has often been silenced in favor of supposedly authoritative and
authentically “historical” editions. Frantzen also helps us to
see, through a careful attention to the text of the manuscript itself and
its “cruces,” “not how Beowulf was created, but
how we have created it, making and remaking not just its literary meaning
but its language.” Because Frantzen undertakes a close analysis of the
intra-textuality and syllepsis of the Old English words writan (“to
write”) and forwritan (“to cut through,” or “to
carve”) in the poem, as they relate to the inscription (textual? runic?)
on the hilt of the magic sword that Beowulf retrieves from Grendel’s
underwater mere, and which Hrothgar “reads,” Frantzen’s
essay also practices a Foucauldian exploration of the linkages between writing
and death, while also demonstrating “that the illusive and allusive
nature of writing and reading in Beowulf discourages us from acts
of closure, and indeed prevents those acts of interpretation, of ‘cutting
through,’ sought by conventional criticism.” The Beowulf
essays in the first section of the volume, then, all explore in various fashions
how the story and text of Beowulf have been appropriated for various
historically-situated ideological and ontological ends, while Frantzen’s
essay also delineates how the text of the poem will always resist our desire
to read, translate, present, or interpret the poem in narrowly-defined, totalizing
ways.
Similar to the History/Historicism section, the
Text/Textuality section of the book begins with two “Critical Contexts”
essays—Michel Foucault, “What Is An Author?” and Carol Braun
Pasternack, “The Textuality of Old English Poetry”—that
together formulate a line of thinking clearly influential upon the Beowulf
essays that follow. Both Foucault and Pasternack call attention to the importance
of the structure of language, as well as of its gaps, omissions, and silences,
in determining “meaning” in any text, and they also urge a reading
of literary texts (what Foucault calls a “typology” or “historical
analysis” of discourse) that sets aside the idea of an “author,”
or what Pasternack calls a “poet-figure,” in order to understand
literature as a cultural “intertext” that is composed and recomposed
over time and is always open to multiple interpretations by readers who, more
so than authors, are the real “producers” of the text. The articulation
of texts within socio-historical relations is exactly the focus of the three
Beowulf essays in this section, although the essays are also markedly
different from each other (they do not share, in other words, a programmatic
approach or thesis, although all three are concerned with the ways in which
the language of the poem constructs and is constructed by social meanings
that are always, to a certain extent, in flux). In “Swords and Signs:
Dynamic Semeiosis in Beowulf,” Gillian Overing explores the
“nonteleological, nonhierarchical coexistence of the metaphoric and
metonymic modes” in the poem, specifically through the use of Charles
Sanders Peirce’s semiotic theory of the “triadic production of
meaning,” in order demonstrate how the poem “invites a challenge
to assumptions about the possibility and desirability of a structural overview”
and essentially resists any attempts on the part of the critic to limit or
totalize what is, ultimately, the text’s “infinitude.” For
Seth Lerer, in “Hrothgar’s Hilt and the Reader in Beowulf,”
the main objective is to analyze scenes of “reading” in Beowulf,
especially with reference to the engraved sword hilt Beowulf retrieves from
Grendel’s mere, as a means of reflecting upon “the reader’s
own relationship to texts, to authors, and to Christian culture generally,”
art as “a public and social act,” and also upon how Beowulf
“represents a move from presence to absence as it dramatizes differing
forms of literary communication and response.” With reference to “forms
of speaking” in Beowulf, as well as in ancient Greek and Arthurian
literature, and in Scandinavian runology, Lerer also ruminates on “[w]hat
may be called the ‘literacy’ of Beowulf . . . the way in which
it imagines its own reading public—the way in which it shows us that
to read the legends of the past is to read by ourselves.” In her essay,
“‘As I Once Did With Grendel’: Boasting and Nostalgia in
Beowulf,” Susan Kim “locates the poem’s representations
of linguistic performance in the context of early medieval linguistic theory”
and “treats the engagements with linguistic performance as negotiations
of concepts of personal identity.” Because, according to Kim, “language
works by difference, by alienation of the sign as thing and the sign as meaning,
but also of sign from sign, the very process of identification in language
inscribes alienation within human identity,” and on one level, “this
is the alienation of the self understood as the body and the self represented
in language.” More specifically, Kim looks at the ways in which this
alienation is “literalized” in Beowulf’s identification
with Grendel and in Grendel’s severed arm as a “sign” of
that identification, and she also looks at the ways in which nostalgia functions
in the poem as a source for “the potential for an identity not understood
as dislocated or alienated from itself.” Ultimately, all three of the
Beowulf essays in this section are interested in the questions posed
at the end of Foucault’s essay, “What are the modes of existence
of this discourse? Where has it been used, how can it circulate, and who can
appropriate it for himself? What are the places in it where there is room
for possible subjects? Who can assume these various subject-functions?”
Because there is no essay in the entire book that addresses, explicitly, a
postcolonial approach to Beowulf, perhaps because this is an area
that is just beginning to be explored in Old English studies,[9]
we have also included as a “postscript” essay to this section,
Michelle Warren’s “Post-Philology,” which calls for the
creation of a new alliance between philology, postmodern critique and post-colonial
studies, and we leave it to our readers to imagine how this might be accomplished,
along the lines Warren illustrates, in Beowulf studies.
Some of the “Critical Contexts” essays
also enlarge (and occasionally problematize) the critical dialectic of the
readings that follow them. In the Ethnography/Psychoanalysis section, John
Moreland’s “Ethnicity, Power, and the English” and Alfred
Siewers’s “Landscapes of Conversion: Guthlac’s Mound and
Grendel’s Mere as Expressions of Anglo-Saxon Nation-Building”
both attend to subjects that are not a direct concern of the essays that follow,
but which nevertheless create productive critical tension with some of the
cultural-historical assumptions of those essays, while also broadening the
theoretical horizons within which those essays can be read and appraised.
Moreland argues against the idea of the early English as a stable or “natural”
ethnographic category in his essay, where he provides a thorough overview
of the latest findings in archaeology, anthropology, and sociology, in order
to show that Migration Period groups, such as the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes
of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, were characterized more by
their fluidity, heterogeneity and overlapping identities than traditional
accounts would allow, while at the same time, Moreland admits that “it
would be a debilitating step to move from the rejection of a direct and inflexible
link between ethnic identity and material culture to argue that there is no
relationship.” Siewers’s essay combines eco-criticism, Augustinian
“sign theory,” and Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection
(as it applies to western medieval theology), in order to highlight a certain
“process of cultural differentiation” in Anglo-Saxon England,
where “constructions of nature relate to [the] development of a new
kind of performative subjectivity for cultures and people,” and this
is a subjectivity that, of political necessity, required “a defining
of the Welsh and other non-English cultures as Other” as well as a de-humanizing
of the native British landscape. Siewers’s and Moreland’s essays
are included in the Ethnography/Psychoanalysis section, partly because they
both attend to the archaeology and material culture of early England, which
is not fully addressed anywhere else in the volume and which we see as integral
to thinking about early English ethnography, and partly because they both
attend to the heterogeneous aspects of a so-called “Anglo-Saxon”
identity that are not always acknowledged in studies of Beowulf that
take an ethno-psychological approach, such as the essays here by Earl (“Beowulf
and the Origins of Civilization”), John Hill (“The Ethnopsychology
of In-Law Feud and the Remaking of Group Identity in Beowulf: The
Cases of Hengest and Ingeld,” which argues that the poem’s narratives
of feud, dismaying to some critics in their violence, are actually “socially
acute meditations on the prospects for settlement” and for “accomplished
and extended community”), and Janet Thormann (“Enjoyment of Violence
and Desire for History in Beowulf,” which analyzes, through
Lacan, the “crisis” of history occasioned by feud in the poem,
and also includes an analysis of Anglo-Saxon law codes in relation to that
crisis). Likewise, in the Gender/Identity section, the “Critical Contexts”
essays by Carol Clover (“Regardless of Sex: Men, Women and Power in
Early Northern Europe”) and Jeffrey Cohen (“The Ruins of Identity”)
raise important questions that are intimately related to (yet not always directly
addressed by) the essays that follow by Clare Lees (“Men and Beowulf”),
Mary Dockray-Miller (“Beowulf’s Tears of Fatherhood”),
and Shari Horner (“Voices From the Margins: Women and Textual Enclosure
in Beowulf”). For example, if the “principle of sex”
was not so “final or absolute” as we assume it was in early northern
Europe, and “gender” was not necessarily predicated upon “sex,”
as Clover argues (following Thomas Laqueur’s idea of the “one-sex”
or “one-flesh” model of sexual difference that he argues obtained
in the classical world and in premodern Europe), how does that affect our
ideas regarding how masculinity and violence (Lees) or homosociality (Dockray-Miller,
whose essay actually responds directly to Clover’s) or women’s
spaces (Horner) are constructed in Beowulf? And if, as Cohen argues,
“to be fully human is to disavow the strange space that the inhuman,
the monstrous, occupies within every speaking subject,” how does this
affect our ideas regarding how identity—gendered or otherwise—is
represented in the poem? This is a question which Susan Kim actually addresses
in great depth in her essay (described above) in the Text/Textuality section
of the book, which brings us to: how to read this book in the classroom, exactly?
The Postmodern Beowulf may well be used
in the classroom—where we believe it can be used to introduce students
to theory, as well as to teach Beowulf. The four sections of the
book—again—represent broad contextual fields of inquiry to which
certain, more narrowly-defined questions and theories of history, culture,
identity, and language pertain. The first section, History/Historicism, covers
“cultural history” most broadly, and more narrowly, new historicism,
cultural appropriations theory, Foucault’s archaeological method, reading
reception theory, Said’s “worldly criticism,” deconstruction,
and in the case of Frantzen’s essay, the intellectual history of Beowulf
scholarship. The second section, Ethnography/Psychoanalysis, attends to anthropology,
archaeology, sociology, eco-criticism, Freudian, Lacanian and Kristevan analysis,
and what can be called, following the work of Georges Devereux, ethnopsychoanalysis.[10]
Gender/Identity, the third section, comprises sexuality and gender studies,
feminist critique (of both the Anglo-American and French varieties), psychoanalysis
(Freud and Lacan), and queer studies. Finally, the Text/Textuality section
of the book includes philology most broadly (in its more traditional and more
poststructural conceptions), sign theory (or, semiotics), deconstruction,
Lacanian anaylsis, Kristeva’s theory of intertextuality, and orality
studies. In addition, we have added, as “bookends,” an Introduction,
Eileen Joy and Mary Ramsey’s “Liquid Beowulf,”
and an Afterword, James Earl’s “Reading Beowulf with
Original Eyes,” that both take up the question, in different ways, of
the poem’s relevance to our current historical moment (and to modernity
and postmodernity more generally).
Merely “listing” the theoretical
concerns (or, approaches) for each section runs the risk of oversimplifying
the diverse hybridity of critical approaches represented in each essay and
also obscures somewhat the very rich connections that are present—both
explicitly and implicitly—among the different sections of the book.
So, while it may be useful to teach the contents of the book section by section,
there are many ways in which the contents can be reassembled to create new
and critically productive groupings. For example, since Frantzen’s essay
engages in a close analysis of the “text” of the “giant”
sword hilt in the poem, it can be read alongside the essays by Overing and
Lerer, which take that same sword hilt and its inscribed “text”
as one of the primary focuses of their essays. Likewise, since Kim’s
essays takes up the question of how monstrosity functions in the construction
of Beowulf’s identity, her essay can be read alongside Cohen’s
(whose essay Kim explicitly addresses) in the Gender/Identity section. Thormann’s
essay, because it addresses not just a Lacanian analysis of violence in the
poem, but also looks at how the poem attempts to foreclose, through language,
a particular kind of violent history, could easily be read within the History/Historicism
or the Text/Textuality section. Because Earl’s essay directly addresses
the issue of how the poem requires a certain gendered identification, and
because Lees’s essay directly confronts his argument, as does Dockray-Miller’s,
these three essays could form a grouping unto themselves—one could also
add to this group Earl’s Afterword, “Reading Beowulf
With Original Eyes,” since he provides there a linguistic analysis of
Hrothgar’s emotions upon Beowulf’s leaving of Daneland that is
strikingly different (yet connected to) the reading that Dockray-Miller provides
for the same scene. Certain essays that concentrate on the issue of violence—Thormann’s,
Hill’s, Cohen’s, and Lees’s—could form another grouping.
Essays that center upon the poem’s role in constructing a specific cultural
(or, “national”) identity—Howe’s, Niles’s, Siewers’s,
Cohen’s, and Lees’s—form yet another possible arrangement.
How the poem figures loss, absence, and alienation—linguistic, personal
and more broadly social—is also the concern of the essays by Frantzen,
Earl, Thormann, Kim, and Lerer. Because the field of Old English studies,
and of Beowulf studies, especially, is somewhat intimate, the readers
of this book will quickly discern how often the authors included here reference,
and concur and argue with, each other’s work, providing a valuable set
of cross-references that, we would argue, will lead to combinatory readings
the even the editors have not yet anticipated.
Ultimately, this book cannot deliver a neatly
programmatic or even a “whole” view of “the state of theory”
in Beowulf studies at present, for we are still living and working
in this moment—a moment, moreover, of constant and continual theoretical
upheaval and change, and into which we place The Postmodern Beowulf
as a selective representation of the first stage of an ongoing conversation
and critical debate among Old English and other scholars over the late modern
interpretation of the poem. To the question of what Beowulf might
have meant to its original audiences, and what it might mean to those of us
reading it and trying to understand it today in this place we call modernity
(or, postmodernity), the essays collected together in this volume offer a
diverse and wide-ranging set of possible answers, while also raising important
questions for future research and discussion. History, the things that actually
happen, as Leopold von Ranke would have said—not only the history of
the so-called Middle Ages, but also our own history, both personal and intellectual—is
always a more messy business than we would like it to be, more random and
chaotic than the structure and order we want to perceive in it (and often
invent for it), and despite the schematic organization of this book, we would
again urge also reading against that schematic, too. Only in that way can
connections between the essays not yet thought be discerned and new paths
of inquiry opened.
In a recent conversation between the two documentary
filmmakers Errol Morris and Adam Curtis, where they discussed the Vietnam
War and 9/11 (the subjects of their two most recent documentaries—The
Fog of War and The Power of Nightmares, respectively), Morris
asked, “is history primarily a conspiracy? Or is it just a series of
blunders, one after the other? Confusions, self-deceptions, idiocies of one
kind or another?” To which Curtis replied, “[h]istory is a series
of unintended consequences resulting from confused actions, some of which
are committed by people who may think they’re taking part in a conspiracy,
but it never works out the way they intended.” Curtis continued by arguing
that what really affects the outcome of history are ideas themselves (a notion
he credits to Max Weber): “People have experiences out of which they
form ideas. And those ideas have an effect on the world. . . . [e]ven though
it doesn’t actually ever work out the way the person who had the idea
intended.”[11] Such would be an
apt description of the development of a theoretical history, whether it begins
with Plato or Derrida, and wherever it continues to circulate as a stream
of literary consciousness, whether in the study of the Victorian novel or
Old English poetry. Foucault could not have guessed, when writing “What
Is An Author?” how his argument that the disappearance, or death, of
the author necessitates the tracing of certain textual “gaps and breaches”
in order to locate “the openings this disappearance uncovers”
might have been taken up by Carol Braun Pasternack in her discussion of the
“textuality” of Old English poetry, whose authors were always
already “missing” long before Nietzsche or Roland Barthes or Foucault
declared them so and called the resulting situation “modern.”
Such is the inherent transformative power of an idea let loose in the world.
The most valuable intellectual life, I believe, is one which allows for and actively embraces the infinite play and tension between differing ideas and systems of thought, and which desires the always open question over the statement that supposedly “closes” the debate. How could our future—never mind the past—be thought otherwise? Yes, some ideas will always be better (more ethically worthy, let’s say) than others, and we cannot entirely escape the responsibility of critical judgment if we believe there is something ultimately at stake in the reading, interpretation, and teaching of a poem like Beowulf, although the question of whether or not poetry “matters,” and how, is one of those open questions to which I believe the continued study of Beowulf could matter a great deal. And it is a question, moreover, in which something—the future of the study of literature within the public university, for example—really is at stake. Ultimately, whether we take the more positivist or the more poststructural approaches to the poem, what we are after is meaning. We want the poem to mean something because, even in postmodernity, there has to be some kind of answer to the eventual non-being of everything. The poem itself was likely written out of such a desire. There is no one, definitive way to read Beowulf, either as an artifact that can tell us something about that foreign country we call Anglo-Saxon England, or as a poetic narrative somehow relevant to the concerns of contemporary thought and life, and if The Postmodern Beowulf is read in the manner we have intended it to be read, it will hopefully demonstrate the benefit of an open-ended pluralism of theoretical approaches to the poem, as well as the ways in which the poem itself is inexhaustibly productive of the question of its own meaning. We learned that from theory.
Book/Chapter Outline
Preface: Eileen A. Joy, "After Everything, The Postmodern Beowulf"
I. INTRODUCTION
Eileen A. Joy and Mary K. Ramsey, "Liquid Beowulf" [original essay]
II. HISTORY/HISTORICISM
CRITICAL CONTEXTS
Edward Said, "The World, the Text, and the Critic" [originally published in: Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 31-53]
Claire Sponsler, "In Transit: Theorizing Cultural Appropriation in Medieval Europe" [originally published in: Journal of Early Modern and Medieval Studies 32.1 (Winter 2002): 17-39]
BEOWULF
Nicholas Howe, "Beowulf and the Ancestral Homeland" [originally published in: Nicholas Howe, Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England (1989; Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), 143-80]
Allen J. Frantzen, "Writing the Unreadable Beowulf" [originally published in: Allen J. Frantzen, Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English, and Teaching the Tradition (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 168-200]
John D. Niles, "Locating Beowulf in Literary History" [originally published in: Exemplaria 5 (March 1993): 79-109]
III. ETHNOGRAPHY/PSYCHOANALYSIS
CRITICAL CONTEXTS
Alfred K. Siewers, "Landscapes of Conversion: Guthlac’s Mound and Grendel’s Mere as Expressions of Anglo-Saxon Nation-Building" [originally published in: Viator 34 [2003]: 1-39]
John Moreland, "Ethnicity, Power and the English" [originally published in: William O. Frazer and Andrew Tyrell, eds., Social Identity in Early Medieval Britain (London: Leicester University Press, 2000), 23-51]
BEOWULF
James W. Earl, "Beowulf and the Origins of Civilization" [originally published in: James W. Earl, Thinking About Beowulf (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 161-88]
John M. Hill, "The Ethnopsychology of In-Law Feud and the Remaking of Group Identity in Beowulf: The Cases of Hengest and Ingeld" [originally published in: Philological Quarterly 78 (1999): 97-123]
Janet Thormann, "Enjoyment of Violence and Desire for History in Beowulf" [original essay]
IV. GENDER/IDENTITY
CRITICAL CONTEXTS
Carol J. Clover, "Regardless of Sex: Men, Women, and Power in Early Northern Europe" [originally published in: Speculum 68.2 (April 1993): 363-87]
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, "The Ruins of Identity" [originally published in: Jeffrey J. Cohen, Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 1-28]
BEOWULF
Clare A. Lees, "Men and Beowulf" [originally published in: Clare A. Lees, ed., Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 129-48]
Mary Dockray-Miller, "Beowulf’s Tears of Fatherhood" [originally published in: Exemplaria 10 (1998): 1-28]
Shari Horner, "Voices from the Margins: Women and Textual Enclosure in Beowulf" [originally published in: Shari Horner, The Discourse of Enclosure (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001), 65-100]
V. TEXT/TEXTUALITY
CRITICAL CONTEXTS
Michel Foucault, "What is an Author?" [originally published in: Josué V. Harari, ed., Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), 141-60]
Carol Braun Pasternack, "The Textuality of Old English Poetry" [originally published in: Carol Braun Pasternack, The Textuality of Old English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1-32]
BEOWULF
Gillian Overing, "Swords and Signs: Dynamic Semiosis in Beowulf" [originally published in: Gillian Overing, Langage, Sign, and Gender in Beowulf (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), 33-67]
Seth Lerer, "Hrothgar’s Hilt and the Reader in Beowulf" [originally published in: Seth Lerer, Literacy and Power in Anglo-Saxon England (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 158-94]
Susan M. Kim, "As I Once Did With Grendel: Boasting and Nostalgia in Beowulf" [originally published in: Modern Philology 103.1 (August 2005): 4-27]
POST-SCRIPT
Michelle R. Warren, "Post-Philology" [originally published in: Patricia Clare Ingham and Michelle R. Warren, eds., Post-Colonial Moves: Medieval through Modern (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 19-45]
Afterword: James W. Earl, "Reading Beowulf with Original Eyes" [original essay]
Preface Footnotes
1. On the supposed irrelevance and death of theory, see Emily Eakin, “The Latest Theory is Theory Doesn’t Matter,” The New York Times, 19 Apr. 2003: D9, and Stephen Metcalf, “The Death of Literary Theory: Is It Really a Good Thing?” Slate.com, 17 Nov. 2005, available at http://www.slate.com/id/2130583. For a spirited debate over the question of whether “the great era of theory is behind us” and the future of critical inquiry in general, see W.J.T. Mitchell et al., “The Future of Criticism—A Critical Inquiry Symposium,” Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 324-479. As to theory’s counter-movement, see Theory’s Empire: An Anthology of Dissent, ed. Daphne Patai and Wilfrido H. Corral (New York, 2005).
2. Allen J. Frantzen, “Who Do These Anglo-Saxon(ist)s Think They Are, Anyway?” Æstel 2 (1994): 1-43.
3. Gillian Overing, “Recent Writing on Old English: A Response,” Æstel 1 (1993): 135-49. See also T.A. Shippey, “Recent Writing on Old English,” Æstel 1 (1993): 111-34, to which Overing’s essay is a response. For an excellent historical overview of “the state of theory” (as of 1994) in Old English studies, see Roy Michael Liuzza, “The Return of the Repressed: Old and New Theories in Old English Literary Criticism,” in Old English Shorter Poems: Basic Readings, ed. Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe (New York, 1994), pp. 103-47. For an excellent survey of the most important developments in Old English manuscript and literary studies in general, see Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, ed., Reading Old English Texts (Cambridge, 1997).
4. Jennifer Howard, “The Fragmentation of Literary Theory,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 16 Dec. 2005: A12-13.
5. Terry Eagleton, After Theory (New York, 2003), p. 221.
6. Liuzza, “The Return of the Repressed,” pp. 129, 130.
7. Paul Strohm, Theory and the Premodern Text (Minneapolis, 2000), pp. 158, 160, 153.
8. Lee Patterson, “On the Margin: Postmodernism, Ironic History, and Medieval Studies,” Speculum 65 (1990), p. 106.
9. See, for example, the essays by Nicholas Howe and Seth Lerer (“The Afterlife of Rome: Anglo-Saxon England and the Postcolonial Void” and “‘On fagne flor’: The Postcolonial Beowulf, from Heorot to Heaney,” respectively) included in Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures, ed. Ananya Jahanara Kabir and Deanne Williams (Cambridge, 2005).
10. See Georges Devereux, Ethnopsychoanalysis: Psychoanalysis and Anthropology as Complementary Frames of Reference (Berkeley, 1978).
11. “Adam Curtis Talks With Errol Morris,” The Believer, April 2006, pp. 60, 61.