The Uses of Anachronism and Anachrony. Sponsored Session: Medieval French Forum (MLA 2022, Washington, DC)

CFP: MLA Annual Meeting, January 6–9, 2022, Washington, DC

Sponsored Session: Medieval French Forum

The Uses of Anachronism and Anachrony

Anachronism has long been the third rail of medieval studies—or, to quote Lucien Febvre, “the worst of all sins, the sin that cannot be forgiven.” Medievalists want to get our period “right,” which has often meant understanding it in relation to “euchronic” evidence. The intolerance of anachronism is, however, in conflict with medieval literary aesthetics, which often collapses differences between past and present. It is also at odds with recent developments in adjacent fields. Ancient historian Nicole Loraux invites us to embrace the present as “le plus efficace des moteurs de la pulsion de comprendre” and to experiment, knowingly but audaciously, with time “hors de ses gonds.” Art historian Georges Didi-Huberman likewise asks us to consider that when we are “devant l’image” we are “devant le temps,” with its unstable, irresolvable aporias. Finally, philosopher Jacques Rancière urges us to discard the pejorative term “anachronisme” in favor of “anachronie”: “un mot, un événement, une séquence signifiante sortis de ‘leur’ temps, doués du même coup de la capacité de définir des aiguillages temporels inédits, d’assurer le saut ou la connexion d’une ligne de temporalité à une autre.”

This panel will reflect on the uses of anachronism in medieval literature but also, and more importantly, on the insights we may glean from anachronic methods. What can we learn by choosing to read medieval literature outside its time? Can medieval authors leap across temporal lines, bringing them closer to us and us closer to them? Most importantly, can they help us answer questions we have long assumed they didn’t, and couldn’t, pose? Is there, in short, an impossible Middle Ages that we can make real by being more agile in our relationships to time?

Please submit abstracts of ~250 words by March 15 to Noah Guynn, ndguynn@ucdavis.edu.