Upon entering this class, we were prompted to think of history, literature, and humanity as a labyrinth-like library in which we are forever trapped. A large part of this comes from recognizing the past not as a linear progression of time and events, but as something far more complex. History is a web of intertwining truths and lies, disseminated through texts, that have somehow managed to survive from the pitfalls of civilization to the time and place we currently inhabit.
The texts we studied helped us to build our own understanding of the temporal interlacement between the past and the present, and encouraged us to see the ways history not only grasps at us from the dead, but also how it might affect the future of literary studies. We discussed texts as living things: bodies that change over time, evolve as they are read and disseminated, transcend boundaries, and translate ideas across time and space. In this way, history is an active force that can create either alterity or anachronism--otherness or connection.
As we descended into the labyrinth of time, we realized that the lens we often use to view history is but a peephole into a room we cannot fully see, a space that is too open-ended to understand accurately from our limited point-of-view. We struggled to find hermeneutic meaning by looking at the texts semiotically, focusing not only on the meaning of the texts themselves but also on how meaning is produced by specific elements in the system. We then applied this concept to time itself, intending to interpret history analytically, therefore performing semiotics on the past.
Over the course of the semester, we pieced together our own views of history and its narrative, taking turns scribing, reviving artifacts, and asking questions: What do you preserve when civilization is crumbling? What are you willing to do in the present for an imaginary past or future? Do readers have the ability to assert control over a text, and do individuals have agency within their own lives, when both the reader and the individual exist within structured systems? How can we possibly render meaning from a text, an artifact, or the universe itself?
We hope to replicate the Medieval convivium--an intellectual conversation over food and drink among fellow intellectuals--with you as, together, we navigate the giant that is time.
The texts we studied helped us to build our own understanding of the temporal interlacement between the past and the present, and encouraged us to see the ways history not only grasps at us from the dead, but also how it might affect the future of literary studies. We discussed texts as living things: bodies that change over time, evolve as they are read and disseminated, transcend boundaries, and translate ideas across time and space. In this way, history is an active force that can create either alterity or anachronism--otherness or connection.
As we descended into the labyrinth of time, we realized that the lens we often use to view history is but a peephole into a room we cannot fully see, a space that is too open-ended to understand accurately from our limited point-of-view. We struggled to find hermeneutic meaning by looking at the texts semiotically, focusing not only on the meaning of the texts themselves but also on how meaning is produced by specific elements in the system. We then applied this concept to time itself, intending to interpret history analytically, therefore performing semiotics on the past.
Over the course of the semester, we pieced together our own views of history and its narrative, taking turns scribing, reviving artifacts, and asking questions: What do you preserve when civilization is crumbling? What are you willing to do in the present for an imaginary past or future? Do readers have the ability to assert control over a text, and do individuals have agency within their own lives, when both the reader and the individual exist within structured systems? How can we possibly render meaning from a text, an artifact, or the universe itself?
We hope to replicate the Medieval convivium--an intellectual conversation over food and drink among fellow intellectuals--with you as, together, we navigate the giant that is time.