Doctoral Dissertations

Eileen A. Joy

Date of Award

12-2001

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

English

Major Professor

Joseph B. Trahern

Committee Members

Owen Bradley, Thomas Heffernan, Laura Howes

Abstract

In his Introduction to A Beowulf Handbook, John Niles writes that "future Beowulf studies are likely to reflect an increasing self-consciousness about both the historicity of Anglo- Saxon scholarship and the theoretical underpinnings of literary scholarship in general."1 There have been many scholars who have recently been attending to this task, especially in order to trace the connections between the historical and political issues of English linguistic imperialism and cultural colonization and the history of Old English studies, with the intention of raising what Allen Frantzen has termed a "critical self-consciousness" among Old English scholars, such that they might be willing to rethink their practices and subjects within the larger arena of "Cultural Studies," while still continuing to emphasize the close study of language and history.2 As a result, it is no longer "news" that Anglo- Saxon England and the Middle Ages are, to a certain extent, cultural constructs that have arisen out of the negotiations and interactions between scholars and their subjects, and therefore, efforts thus far to construct disciplinary genealogies often focus on persons, texts, and textual "events" that tend to underline the notions that "Anglo-Saxon England" is mainly a discursive formation and that scholarly disciplines are mainly ideological enterprises and power discourses which, over the course of time, cover over their political origins through various acts of repression and "forgetting."

While it seems apparent that disciplines maintain their institutional existence and authority–that they endure–through the discourses of one or more dominant ideologies, hidden or overt, and through historically codified systems of doctrine, it is the argument of this dissertation that the discipline of Beowulf studies emerges out of a series of historical accidents intersecting-sometimes randomly, sometimes more purposefully-with what Michel Foucault called "the more enduring structures of history,"3 in much the same way Beowulf exists for us today, not as the singular fruit of a long and purposeful enterprise of a unified nationalist bibliography, but rather, as one of the more beautiful scraps of the floating wreck of history. Furthermore, the scholars of our discipline cannot be construed as knowing subjects embodying transcendental notions of language and history; rather, caught in the pitch and tide of existential time, their lives and careers represent, not the fixity of any one idea, but the flux of ideas.

This study constructs a narrative of Anglo-Saxon scholarship from the seventeenth through twentieth centuries that will hopefully draw a picture of both the always historically contingent nature of the scholarly enterprise as well as the necessity of rethinking that enterprise in ways that could connect the study of an Anglo-Saxon text like Beowulf with one of the most pressing and urgent questions in the university community today: why are humanities studies necessary? Given the current state of the American university, which, as Bill Readings has shown so cogently in his book The University in Ruins, has become a kind of transnational techno-bureaucratic economically-driven corporation, the very question of the value of culture (detached from its role in building bureaucratic "excellence") has reached a crisis point. Readings convincingly argues in his book that we need to find a way to both recognize the "historical anachronism" at the heart of the "space of the university" (it is no longer the perfect model of a rational community, nor the sole legitimator of what culture means), while also continuing to hold that space open as "one site among others where the question of being-together is raised," which is another way of saying that the university is quite possibly the best site (if somewhat structurally and ideologically past) for holding open the temporality of questioning culture's relationship to history and vice versa, and this dissertation aims to demonstrate that the study of Beowulf can play an important role in this project.

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