Kathryn Boyer. “The Horror of the Harvest: Denaturing the Archive in Keats’s ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’”
To paraphrase Paul De Man, to give something a face is to deface it. John Keats’s 1819 ballad “La Belle Dame sans Merci” engages coyly with the treacherous nature of inscription. When the Belle Dame, an avatar of anti-anthropocentric revolt, sequesters her human lovers in her grotto and later leaves them on the “cold hill’s side,” she in fact creates an embodied archive of her own, one that is vengeful and transformative to its ghostly contents (39). The Belle Dame’s archive denatures (that is, alienates) normative archival practices by making them conspicuous. By seducing, trapping, and abandoning her thralls, the Belle Dame simultaneously preserves and destroys them, just as one would find, insert, and desert data in a textual archive. The thralls’ bodies dematerialize as their spirits gather in the barren grotto. Throughout the poem, the knight-at-arms elegizes himself, simultaneously inscribing his place within the Belle Dame’s archive of “death-pale” lovers (41). The Belle Dame has forcibly disembodied (and decontextualized) him.
While offering this gloss of normative archival practices, Keats’s poem also outlines an apocalyptic vision of archival assembly by underscoring the horror of unnatural preservation. When the poem’s narrator asks the knight-at-arms “what can ail [him],” now that “the harvest’s done,” s/he fails to understand that the harvest is the thing that ails (5; 8). Like a farmer gleaning crops, the Belle Dame has plucked her many lovers from the external world, holding them for some unknown purpose. There is a frightening despair in this harvesting, just as there is a ruthlessness in any subsequent prosperity enabled by the fully-stocked archive. My paper offers a close reading of Keats’s poem, engaging with de Man’s scholarship on the archive and inscription.
Alice Hall. “Embodied Archives: Trauma and Writing in Titus Andronicus”
The mutilated bodies of William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus are frequently read as symbols of Ancient Rome on the precipice of collapse. But how might the spectacularized disabled body, the body-in-disrepair, function as an embodiment of, and comment upon, the literary and cultural archive that produced it? As a walking reincarnation of Ovid’s Philomel, Lavinia’s raped and mutilated body in Titus Andronicus, I argue, speaks to the violence and trauma of existing within someone else’s archive. At the same time, when Lavinia “takes the staff in her mouth, and guides it with her stumps,” writing, for her, constitutes an act of resistance to the “archive” by naming and particularizing the violence perpetuated by it. So too, Aaron the Moor’s status as the resident “plotter and architect of woe” can be understood as a form of writing that constitutes resistance both through and against an imperial archive that would otherwise exclude and thus essentially negate him. Aaron’s famous speech, which refers to the carving “on the skins” of dead Romans, not only emphasizes that traumas of the past are at once expressed and avenged through acts of writing, but also demonstrates that writing and embodiment are inseparable in a drama that is essentially about, I suggest, the violence of the archive.
Diana Taylor defines the archive as that which traditionally valorizes written culture and “stands in for and against embodiment,” while Jacques Derrida compares the archive to a form of institutional “house arrest.” The paper situates scholarship on the archive and performance within established early Modern scholarship on early English imitation, emulation, and revision as it influenced the construction Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. Aaron and Lavinia’s embodied revisions, then, might be seen not only as a form of resistance to imperial or patriarchal narratives but a kind of break out from, and of, archival imprisonment. I argue that, in Titus Andronicus, the body functions as an archive of trauma as well as a vessel for revision, troubling and destabilizing both the past and the future.
Julie Wilson. “Transforming Garnett’s Beowulf: Re-Printing and Reproducing Old English in Late Nineteenth-Century America”
Transformation is essential for texts to enter and remain in the English literary canon. Consider the poem Beowulf: this pre-1066 work was written in Old English, a language that is almost illegible to modern English readers. However, its repeated translations into contemporary modes of language, poetic style, and physical presentation attest to and reinforce the poem’s relevance within the field of literary studies. While many scholars have examined the advantages and disadvantages of Beowulf’s linguistic and literary transformations, including its translation into other languages such as modern English and German, few studies have probed the textual and physical alterations of the poem with equal vigor. The physical details of a book, such as its binding, paper, and typeface, are features that are often taken for granted by readers. Nevertheless, readers rely heavily on these same features in order to successfully navigate, comprehend, and respond to the book.
The practices of translating and reproducing Beowulf first originated in the late nineteenth century, when dozens of Beowulf editions permeated American and European markets. Making Beowulf marketable to a modern audience consequently meant that nineteenth-century translators and publishers, much like the ones today, had to introduce new physical as well as linguistic mediators into their recreations of the poem. A good example of the physical transformations that Beowulf underwent can be found in the popular translation produced by American scholar James Mercer Garnett (1840-1916) from 1882 through 1912. Some of the textual alterations in the book, such as typeface, remain constant throughout different editions, while other components, like the quality of paper and the arrangement of gatherings, varied markedly from the start and were further affected by alterations made by university libraries and binderies. This presentation aims to use Garnett’s translation to explore the physical nature of reproducing Beowulf, as well as the advantages and disadvantages that inherently come with such a transformation.
