Reading Selves, Writing Selves: Literacy and the Representation of Subjectivity, 1100-1650

The Middle Ages witnessed a dramatic conceptual transformation which resulted from the reorganization of its social structures from orally-based systems of thought to written, textual ones. By placing the concept of the "subject" against this technological shift, the dissertation sets a framework for investigating the change in social and private consciousness that results as the symbolic systems become "textualized." The self comes to understand its own subjectivity as being in effect a representation; it recognizes its own capacity to discursively produce itself and to project an identity distinct from essentialist or metaphysically conceived notions of being. This project is particularly concerned with how literary texts position roles for individual agency within the larger cultural discourses and truth-claims at stake within this changing framework, and suggests that many Medieval and Renaissance literary texts create a rich contrastive structure to these philosophical positions which acts as a sort of "testing ground" through which various assumptions about human identity are questioned or proved.

The ability to "read" or interpret one's context is, within this model, a condition for ethical action. The literary text orders a world of discourses, giving them an internal coherence within which the fictive hero is cast into a particular subjective role which must manipulate these tensions as a means of locating or valorizing particular ideals. Though the text may publicly affirm the dominant structures of power as a means of imposing normative regimes upon its audience, it offers itself merely as a framework, rather than as a truth, against which individual action may be measured. As social and ideological regimes come into conflict we are asked to recast the ideal accordingly, adapting our "norms" to circumstances which are seldom stable. Thus, far from accepting and rehashing ideological dogma, these literary texts challenge assumptions about human action and motivation in ways which indicate that early perceptions of self and responsibility were much more sophisticated than is frequently believed.