We are delighted to once again offer a panel for those interested in Old Norse literature, history, and culture. This year’s panel theme is “Representations of the Body in Saga Literature,” a sponsored session that will explore the ways in which bodies and corporeality are constructed and represented in saga literature.
The body is an object upon which culture writes itself. It is the site of definition and re-definition as it witnesses history, moves through time and space, and is shaped by social, political, and cultural phenomena. Understanding how medieval audiences viewed the body and participated in the social construction of the body as object is essential to a better appreciation of medieval ideations of the human condition. We are interested in cultural, ideological, and literary investigations of the experience of embodiment in medieval Scandinavia and the representation of this experience in literature, art, philosophy, ethics, law, theology, and science.
Topics could include, but are not limited to:
- body-mind dichotomy
- ideological constructions of the body
- ableness and disability
- the monstrous
- gender and sexuality
- illness, death, and dismemberment
- body-soul dichotomy
- pagan vs. Christian bodies
- queer theory
- medicine
- medical transformations of the body
- body as landscape
- images of bodies
Brief (100-200 word) proposals are welcome anytime before September 15, 2017. E-mail submission to either of the organizers is invited.
Andrew Pfrenger (apfrenge@kent.edu)
John P. Sexton (john.sexton@bridgew.edu)