Erin Labbie on the Medieval Remainder

ACS-affiliated faculty member Dr. Erin Felicia Labbie will be giving her ICS lecture:

Dr. Erin Felicia Labbie

Wednesday, October 29, 11:30 – 1:00, 207 BTSU

Labbie Medieval Remainder2.1

The Medieval Remainder attends to traces of medieval systems of belief as they are expressed in the Faust legend and its traditions from the 13th to the 21st centuries. Within the legend, Faust, the scholar, and the devil both function on the basis of an economy of the sign, yet their engagement with the excess or surplus is distinctly medieval, indicating that the concept of the social contract that we tend to consider “modern,” is, in fact, entrenched in a pre modern understanding of the arts and sciences. More precisely, literary analysis focuses on a linguistic pact in which words signify in a way that is determinable; yet, language does not neatly conform to this economy. This project attends to the ways in which contractual language, oaths, pacts, and promises function to exceed their asserted boundaries.

Erin Felicia Labbie, Associate Professor of English and ACS-affiliated faculty member, is the author of Lacan’s Medievalism (Minnesota, 2006) and co-editor of Beholding Violence in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Ashgate, 2012). Her current research projects include a collection on medieval dream vision poetics and commentary and a monograph, The Medieval Remainder, from which her ICS Fellowship talk is taken.

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