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• W2078531521 abstract "Reviewed by: Performing the Middle Ages from Beowulf to Othello Michael R. Near Performing the Middle Ages from Beowulf to Othello. By Andrew James Johnston. Late Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 15. Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2008. Pp. vii + 342. EUR 70. In his introduction to Performing the Middle Ages from “Beowulf” to “Othello,” Andrew James Johnston demonstrates his keen awareness of medieval identity issues and proposes a strategy with which to confront these issues directly. Framing his study within the postmedieval perspective on the Middle Ages as a distanced, generalized other, he identifies modernity’s projection of alterity that would fix the identity of the Middle Ages as the ideological production of modernity itself. Countering this perspective, Johnston proposes that the medieval period was not, in fact, void of its own forms of historical self-consciousness and that “it may be possible to discern within medieval literary discourse forms of cultural self-analysis that form the basis for some of the tropes and topoi which, ironically, later served to insulate the medieval securely in its ineluctable sphere of total alterity” (p. 14). Allowing for “forms of conscious medieval self-scrutiny” (p. 15), Johnston suggests that the period might bespeak its own identity, not in the discourse of the postmedieval subject but in a kind of half-secret interplay texts stage “between narrative voice(s) and narrative structure” (p. 18). Medieval texts can be seen to interrogate their own performances in “complex analyses of medieval performativity itself, analyses that achieve their specific claims to sophistication by staging what they discuss” (p. 18). Expressing its identity in these interrogations, the Middle Ages offers a self-conscious sense of itself as an alternative to the identity imposed by modernity. Addressing the link he suggests between medieval identity and a text’s discursive practices, Johnston draws upon Judith Butler’s proposal in Gender Trouble that the repetition of a rule-bound discourse structures a given concept of subjectivity. He applies a version of Butler’s complex sense of identity construction to the “epistemological processes by which historical periods are established” (p. 19). Historical periods, Johnston contends, like gender identities, depend “on the illusion of the natural, on substantializing effects which create a vision of the kind of discursive unity that is called an ‘age’, an ‘era’, or a ‘period’” (p. 19). Texts repeat (enact) the informing discourse from which the identity of the Middle Ages as a discursive unity emerges. As evidence for his thesis Johnston engages in a series of critically insightful and quite densely argued close readings of passages from canonical texts that, by his own admission, evince a Middle Ages “that is aristocratic, courtly . . . martial, male, and overwhelmingly secular” (p. 20). The chronological sweep of these texts is quite extensive, but an overarching concern characteristic of each text, Johnston contends, is “aristocratic nostalgia, the dream of a heroic world larger-than-life and decidedly prelapsarian in its lack of complexity or self doubt” (p. 313). The textual performance of this concern reveals a medieval imagination in immediate confrontation with its own notion of a past “lacking the forms of consciousness, complexity, and self-knowledge supposedly distinguishing the present” (p. 313). [End Page 413] The premodern text, Johnston suggests, has already presented and critically engaged the very sense of medieval identity that modernity would appropriate as its own in a postmedieval formulation of historical difference. The means by which medieval texts perform and critically engage their own historical identity comprises the principal foci of Johnston’s analyses. Given the length and complexity of the works he considers (Beowulf, Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the Alliterative Morte Arthure, and Shakespeare’s Othello), Johnston must necessarily situate his discussion in the selected passages or episodes that speak most directly to his theme. His engagement with critical and historical contexts, however, while consistently interesting, intricately informative, and at times exceptionally creative, ensures that, for their voices to be heard, these passages, more often than not, must patiently wait their turn. Johnston contextualizes his analysis of Wealhtheow’s speaking truth to power concerning the issues of Danish succession in Beowulf (Chapter 1: “Beowulf and the Mask of Archaism”) in a..." @default.
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• W2078531521 date "2010-01-01" @default.
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• W2078531521 title "<i>Performing the Middle Ages from Beowulf to Othello</i> (review)" @default.
• W2078531521 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/egp.0.0160" @default.
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