Session 10: From the Past to the Present

Session 10: From the Past to the Present
Chair: Shoshana Sitton

Political Spaces: Medieval Marginalia and Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale
Danielle Magnusson
University of Washington, USA

Scholars acknowledge that the Nun’s Priest’s Tale could not have been written before 1381. They know this because the Tale includes an allusion to Jakke Straw—a leader in the Peasants’ Revolt of the aforementioned year.  As the only overt mention of events taking place in the 14th century to appear in the Canterbury Tales, the reference forces scholars to question authorial intent. In placing such a serious detail in such a playful text, did Chaucer anticipate having the comment feel as misplaced as it does?
I would argue that, because of the medieval relationship to forms of visual literacy, this reference would not have felt misplaced for Chaucer’s contemporaries. I believe that the mention of Jack Straw appears in a Tale which is fundamentally tied to forms of contemporary visual art and, more importantly, that this detail reflects a growing impulse for art to showcase realism in predictably unpredictable presentations.
The Nun’s Priest’s Tale is an unmistakably deliberate visual construction. Chaucer, for example, devotes considerable language to the description of specific colors, the position of the sun, vegetation growing in the yard, and of course, animal imagery. The text constructs a world in which colors and light threaten a politicized narrative. Likewise, medieval marginalia was absolutely concerned with problematizing (but never threatening) textual authority. As a form of visual literacy, and as a unique commentary on the more authoritative textual center of the medieval page, marginalia was highly politicized space. Marginalia permitted representations of marginalized individuals, as well as derisive commentary on courtly, urban, and religious life. Importantly, marginalia was created (as Michael Camille argues in Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art) “by virtue of the absolute hegemony of the system it sought to subvert” (160).
In order to fully understand Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale, I believe that we must examine both visual elements found within the text, as well as the influence of marginalia—a form of visual literacy—on both the work of Chaucer and on late medieval society as a whole.

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Facing Medusa, or How to Visualize the Unrepresentable
Sibylle Baumbach
International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC), Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen, Germany

“You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she laughs“, claims Hélène Cixous in her essay The Laugh of the Medusa andenacts the unthinkable. The look into Medusa’s face would not only deprive the formidable figure of its terror and its fascination, which derives from her ineffability but is an unattainable endeavour. Insofar as the Medusa resists portrayal and creates her own monuments by her petrifying gaze rather than becoming tangible herself, she appears as a semiotic gap, a blank space, which not only inscribes itself into various spaces of memory and time but simultaneously secures for itself a peculiar timelessness. Literature and art seem to be the only media that succeed in sustaining the tension between representability and unrepresentability while assigning some meaning to the horror vacui attached to this figure, without necessarily suspending it. Verbal and visual documents can not only bestow the Medusa with a face but, as literary and artistic monuments, they also testify the paralysing effect of this figure, which creates its own artefacts by turning its beholders to stone. In relation to the question of how the unrepresentable can be (re-)presented, one focus will be set on translations from the visual into the verbal) and vice versa, which explicitly refer to the corresponding text/image (P.B. Shelley’s ‘On the Florentine Meusa’; D.G.Rosetti), whereby I will examine the different strategies of visual literacy, paying special attention to the function and functionalisation of the reader beholding the image in the text or in a painting.. Another focus will be the sustainability of the myth until the present day. As an encoded visual literacy, the Medusa figure seems a multi-faceted figure that is drawn from for CD-covers, publishers and artists before. This paper is part of a greater project examining the representations, of and the narratives and reception connected to the Medusa-figure in text and image.

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Radical Media Literacy For a Radical Democracy
Jorge Calles Santillana
School of Law and Social Sciences, Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, Puebla, México

Democracy needs critical and well informed citizens. A good information-gathering strategy is not enough for a citizen to identify cultural values and world views embodied in both fiction and non-fiction media products.  Ideology and political values are mostly implied rather than displayed in media narratives.  Special analytical skills are required to unveil those values.
As Douglas Kellner argues, media culture is not only a market of cultural commodities but also a site for meaning and ideological struggles.  Thus, media play an important role in the process of building cultural hegemony.  As Stuart Hall and John B. Thompson sustain, the symbolic power of media is unequally used by social groups to promote representations that give more visibility and relevance to some ideas, values, images, and world visions than others.  By including facts, characters, stories to the expense of others, media products offer to their consumers cultural pictures pretending to correspond to social life rather than being ideological constructions of social life.  Based on the semiotic approach by Daniel Chandler, my model provides media consumers with analytical tools to recognize the syntagmatic construction of media narratives and the paradigmatic selection of actors, actions, contexts and vocabularies through which the stories are built.
This model is designed to develop abilities in media audiences to critically decode representations on social groups, cultural values and ideal types of subjects and political actions in all kinds of media.  Media-literate audiences will be able to understand every social event and character as socially constructed.  Therefore, empowered audiences will be in the position to develop a political culture suitable to what Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau call a radical democracy, a democracy where every social group and citizen is able to understand diversity and the need of dialogue and understanding to preserve civil coexistence.