Contact Zones

This book is based on the postmedieval journal special issue Contact zones: Fur, minerals, milk, and other things . It offers strategies for writing the companions of our humanity. Just as the book entails contact zones between scholars working across languages, periods, regions, and disciplines, we each envision contact zones between materials, bodies, and identities as multidirectional agentic exchanges that define and enact material-semiotic entanglements. Together, the chapters offer disanthropocentric readings of materiality that center the more-than-human agencies that impact human identities and embodiments across the medieval world. Previously published in postmedieval Volume 11, issue 1, March 2020.

Auteur

Elizabeth S. Leet Assistant Professor of French Department of Modern Languages, Washington & Jeffferson College, Washington, PA, USA

Texte du rabat

This book is based on the postmedieval journal special issue Contact zones: Fur, minerals, milk, and other things. It offers strategies for writing the companions of our humanity. Just as the book entails contact zones between scholars working across languages, periods, regions, and disciplines, we each envision contact zones between materials, bodies, and identities as multidirectional agentic exchanges that define and enact material-semiotic entanglements. Together, the chapters offer disanthropocentric readings of materiality that center the more-than-human agencies that impact human identities and embodiments across the medieval world. Previously published in postmedieval Volume 11, issue 1, March 2020.

Contenu
Writing companions: Toward a critical entanglement with the more-than-human world, Elizabeth S. Leet.- Human and insect bookworms, Emma Maggie Solberg.- Francis's animal brotherhood in Thomas of Celano's Vita Prima , Brandon Alakas & Day Bulger.- Reading the medieval fur experience: Peire Vidal and the poverty of Pelletiers, Sarah-Grace Heller.- Becoming object/becoming queen: the marital contact zone in Chrétien de Troyes' Erec et Enide , Elizabeth S. Leet.- 'Do not allow an empty goblet to face the moon': lyrical materialities in the drinking poems of Li Bai (701762) and Du Fu (712770), Elizabeth Harper.- Jahngr portrait shasts : Material-discursive practices and visuality at the Mughal court, Krista Hall Gulbransen.- The hungry monk: Bernard of Clairvaux in a trans-corporeal landscape, Melanie Holcomb.- 'Skin black and wrinkled': The toxic ecology of the Sibyl's cave, Alan S. Montroso.- 'De aymant en dyamant': Lexical transmutations in the works of Philippe de Mézières, Julie Singer.- Drink up! Losing yourself in the contact zone, Stacy Alaimo.- Posthumanism and the claim to rational action, Karl Steel.