Selves and Subjectivities in Medieval North Atlantic Verse

This thesis explores the construction of speaking-subjects and their subjectivities in medieval North Atlantic verse. Although first-person poetry in medieval Irish and Welsh, Old English, and Old Norse-Icelandic has enjoyed a good deal of critical attention, little of it, with the exception of the Old English material, has focused on the strategies and rhetoric poets employed in the creation of lyric poetry’s speaking personas. The intent of this project is thus to analyze, discuss, and highlight the creativity and skill with which North Atlantic poets brought the speaking-subjects of their poetry to life. “Subject” and “subjectivity” are understood in psychoanalytical terms, primarily through the narrative of signification articulated by Julia Kristeva. In particular, Kristeva’s understanding of the formation of subjectivity through the interaction of the semiotic and the symbolic order forms both the thesis’s primary tool of analysis – along with close reading – and its organizing principle. The lyric poems under consideration here are thus organized into chapters according to the relationship of the semiotic and symbolic in the formation of their speaking-subjects. The first chapter, then, examines how Irish monastic poets constructed a Christian subjectivity in which the semiotic, bodily drives of the speaking-subject – in its ideal form – ran in perfect accord with the Christian symbolic order. The second chapter takes up the theme of consolation, and examines how Old English, Irish, and Norse verse could be used as a therapeutic tool to end a speaking-subject’s alienation by modelling a process through which the subject signifies himself within an alternative symbolic order, one which enables the speaker to understand his or her subject-position in a more positive light, thus bringing semiotic and symbolic closer to accord. The third and final chapter turns to those alienated speaking-subjects for whom there is no hope of achieving accord between the semiotic desires of the body and the symbolic order, or of finding even consolation. The chapter explores some of the topoi of alienation – eros, old age, illness – prevalent in North Atlantic verse, examining the conditions through which these lyric speakers have become alienated, and what strategies poets employed to represent their estranged state.Ph.D.2020-07-10 00:00:0