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Caroline Bergvall’s Medievalist Poetics
Migratory Texts and Transhistorical Methods
Arc Medievalist
Edited by Joshua Davies and Caroline Bergvall
204 Pages, Trim size: 6 x 9 in
- Hardcover
- 9781802700015
- Published: November 2023
Caroline Bergvall’s celebrated trilogy of interdisciplinary medievalist texts and projects—Meddle English (2011), Drift (2014), and Alisoun Sings (2019)—documents methods of reading and making that are poetically and politically alert, critically and culturally aware, linguistically attuned, and historically engaged.
Drawing on the wide-ranging body of criticism dedicated to Bergvall’s work and material from Bergvall’s archive, together with newly commissioned texts by scholars, theorists, linguists, translators, and poets, this book situates the trilogy in relation to key themes including mixed temporalities; interdisciplinarity and performance; art and activism; and the geopolitical, psychosexual, and social complexities of subjectivity. It follows routes laid down by the trilogy to move between the medieval past and our contemporary moment to uncover new forms of encounter and exchange.
List of Illustrations
David Wallace, "Foreword"
Caroline Bergvall and Joshua Davies, "Introduction"
Part 1: Meddle English
Documents
1: Drew Milne, "A Veritable Dollmine"
2: Mary Wilson, Meddle English
3: Jacob Edmond, “'Let’s Do a Gertrude Stein on It': Caroline Bergvall and Iterative Poetics"
4: Robert Sheppard, "Inventive Reworkings: Transformation and Translation in Caroline Bergvall’s Meddle English"
5: Candace Barrington, "Midden, Trash, and Garbage: The Discourse of Debris in Bergvall’s 'The Franker Tale (Deus Hic, 2)'”
6: Vincent Broqua, Translative Bergvall, or the Work of Translation
Part 2: Drift
Documents
7: So Mayer, "All at Sea"
8: David Kaufmann, "Drift"
9: Cherry Smyth, "Caroline Bergvall’s Drift"
10: Áine McMurtry, "Giving a Syntax to the Cry: Caroline Bergvall’s Drift"
11: Adalaide Morris, "Forensic listening: NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, Caroline Bergvall’s Drift, and the Contemporary Long Poem"
12: Sierra Lomuto, Drifting into the Fog: The Opacity of the Past in Caroline Bergvall’s Drift"
Part 3: Alisoun Sings
Documents
13: Greg Bem, "Alisoun Sings"
14: Charles Theonia, "Collective Poesy: The Disruptive Pleasures of Caroline Bergvall’s Alisoun Sings"
15: Kyoo Lee, "Alisounation"
16: Usha Vishnuvajjala, "Alisoun’s Friends: Caroline Bergvall’s Community of Alisouns"
17: Tamsin Blaxter, "Old Language is Dredged up a New"
18: Marion Turner, "Alisoun after Alisoun"
19: Georgina Colby, “'A happy combimess, simple': Forms of Activism
and Collective Resistance in Alisoun Sings"
Part 4: Other Voices
20: Charles Bernstein, "Bergvall’s Meddling and Brush up your Chaucer"
21: Sawako Nakayasu, "Dream Number One"
22: Mónica de la Torre, "Parable"
23: Vincent Broqua, Abigail Lang, Anne Portugal, "Le Non Conte (Funérailles)"
24: Erín Moure, "In Arborescence"
25: Imogen Stidworthy, "Airborne"
26: Anthony Vahni Capildeo, "Weather Systems"
Part 5: Interviews
27: Susan Rudy
28: Eva Heisler
29: Greg Nissan
Rachael Gilmour, "Afterword"
Select Bibliography on Bergvall’s Medievalist Trilogy
Index
Joshua Davies is Senior Lecturer in Medieval Literature in the Department of English at King’s College London and published Visions and Ruins: Cultural Memory and the Untimely Middle Ages in 2018.
Caroline Bergvall, Global Professorial Fellow, Queen Mary University London, is an award-winning poet, artist, and performer. She has an interdisciplinary practice, working across artforms, media, and languages in a wide range of contexts.