Hi, I posted the Passport Essay that I used for my comp exam in the appropriate folder on dropbox. What I posted below is a draft of the first three paragraphs of the final project that I want to work on, which is a dissertation prospectus. I put a longer (7 page) draft of it in the final project folder on dropbox.
Agencies of the Middle: Moving in-Between Action and Inaction in Middle English Devotion, Poetry and Prose
This project asks how the non-volitional[1] character of affect informs the representation and understanding of agency in a variety of Middle English writings. The project envisions juxtaposing the formulations of agency in several prose devotional texts—The Myroure of Oure Lady (which is a translation and explanation of the Offices used by the Sisters of the Brigittine Monastery of Sion), Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ) and indulgence documents—to fictive portrayals of agents that are doing devotion in major narrative poems (Piers Plowman, Confessio Amantis, The Pilgrimage of the Lyf of Manhode) and in several minor poems of John Lydgate. Across these diverse writings, I would like to investigate the ways in which, external, multiply sourced, affective impetuses jointly co-produce the agency that is associated with individuated human actors.
The contexts in which this study examines non-volitional action and affect are diverse; they include devotion, further instances of pious religious observance, and aging. In them permutations in the composition of agency often go together with the entanglements of religious observance. While the Brigittine Myroure points out the affect modulating effects which the Office can have, in several moments of Nicholas Love’s Mirror (when the narrator shifts from his customary “I” to “you” address into the plural “we”) the accumulation of affect incorporates the agency of the translator with that of the text’s users. Interplays of pluralizing, exterior coupling, also re-arrange the focal site of agency in the wanderer’s—devotionally active—search for Truth in Piers Plowman. The searcher recites the Creed, the Rosary and takes part in angelic song while Langland’s narrative recomposes its wandering agent from a dreamer in the Malvern hills to the (dreamed) crowd on the plain, to Piers, to Will, to Will in company with Patience and Conscience. Bouts of dream and swooning intensify the interaction of non-volition with devotion and aging in relation to action in Piers and Confessio Amantis. While the successive confessional devotions of Amans frame the collection of tales in Confessio Amantis, Amans’s aging body provides the primary focus for the largely non-volitional process that lets Amans act in book eight. There, in a prolonged passage of intensely heightened awareness Amans stares, mute, immobile and masochistically complicit, as a procession of exemplary lover-pairs discuss whether or not, due to his advancing age, Amans is to stay at Venus’s court. In each of the examples just noted, pre-volitional affect enters the life of agents, augmenting their relational possibilities to “self” and to others, in the different textures of their conjunction with technologies of prayer and with the process of aging. My focus will be to understand how, the capacities of affect de-individuate agency into a composite in each of these contexts. The extra-personal character of this sort of agency suggests that paying attention to surface adjacencies and textures, which agents use (including their bodies) and which vary with changes in direction and intensity of affect, helps approach the dispersal of individuated-self into the larger agentive complexes that appear in these texts.
Affect is theorized in many ways and may be imagined as an unfolding preconscious, yet situationally-interdependent, process from which the conscious orderings of subject and object and cause and effect arise post hoc. To take affect on board and guide the investigation of its implications for agency, I would like to draw on clusters of parallel and, at times, closely convergent theoretical moves emanating from Eve Sedgwick’s Touching, Feeling, Gilles Delueze’s and Felix Guattari’s Thousand Plateaus, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s The Feeling of What Happens and cognitive scientist Andy Clark’s Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again. A common theoretical tendency in these texts is to compose “self” not as a firmly bounded and personally discrete, individuated locus of inwardness but as a moving relation of exterior conjunctions between human and non-human actors. Considering human agencies of devotion in Middle English texts through this lense shifts the focus off of “inwardness” and away from the regard of inwardness as incipient[2] for a flowering of individualism that inaugurates early modernity. Rather, the attention that Sedgwick, Deleuze and Clark give to the exterior interrelations between “actors” and “objects” is well suited for articulating joint productions of agency which come about through the use of various technologies of prayer or accompany the process of aging in the writings noted above.
[1] The postwar psychologist Silvan Tomkins points to the non-volitional quality of affect when he describes it “as a separate but amplifying co-assembly” (qtd. in Sedgwick Touching Feeling 100).
[2]As in Jennifer Bryan’s 2008 U Penn title Looking Inward: Devotional Reading and the Private Self in Late Medieval England or Nicholas Watson’s Richard Rolle and the Invention of Authority.
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