Amoral Gower: Language, Sex, and Politics Book

A History of Old English Literature by R.D. Fulk and Christopher M. Cain is an overview of the existing corpus of Old English literature and its social and material context. The authors begin by introducing the reader to the landscape of Old English literature, and they attempt to lay out specific periods of Anglo-Saxon literary production, ranging from the pre-Christian period, through the Alfredian period, to the decades after the Norman Conquest. Specifically, the authors are interested in impressing upon the reader how different the experience of reading was in Anglo-Saxon culture. From the production of texts to the consumption of those texts, every step of the process was different from the way in which we, as contemporary readers, interact with the written word. This theme of difference is central from the first page of the Introduction to the last page of the Conclusion. Each chapter of the text is devoted to various selections of Old English literature, categorized by theme. In these chapters, the authors contextualize the works and they are careful to note their continental or native insular influences. The thing which problematizes Old English literature is "residual orality."
In the remarkably enlightening Conclusion chapter of the book, the authors turn their attention directly to the history of the study of Old English literature. Anglo-Saxon studies originated for overtly political, nationalistic purposes, but, as the authors argue, the study has developed into a much more objective, scholarly pursuit. That does not mean that Anglo-Saxon studies is not still a problematic field. As the authors argue, the study of Old English literature is troublesome because it resists the critical apparatus of literary studies born of the New Criticism movement. In the author's words: "Old English texts have continuously unsettled the assumptions of the field of literary criticism that developed over the course of the twentieth century, for its residual orality challenges the tenets of twentieth-century formalism and its cultural remoteness resists the presentism of so many more recent hermeneutic trends" (233). The real success of A History of Old English Literature is that it gives us access to the scholarly consciousness of the Anglo-Saxons. It shows us how that consciousness is so radically different from the contemporary scholastic mind. The authors argue that Anglo-Saxon texts do not seem to be capable of being understood by the terms of Freudian, Lacanian, Derridean, or feminist discourse. Old English texts simply do not mean in the same way that postmedieval texts mean.
The point that Fulk and Cain make clear is that Anglo-Saxon literature is different. It is marginal, essentially, because it does not'cannot'conform to modern sensibilities and contemporary critical understanding. This does not mean that Anglo-Saxon studies have no value to us. Quite the opposite, indeed, the authors assure us that the study of Old English holds a great deal of weight, and an effort to understand it can be incredibly valuable. As the authors state in the final sentence of the book: "Ultimately, then, this field's chief contribution to literary studies at large may be to serve as a model for dealing with the complexities of extreme textual alterities" (234). This is quite a remarkable idea. Modern theory, as deconstructivist, humanist, and liberal as it may be, can potentially exclude the "other." The idea that Old English literature can redecenter the decentering dialogue of Derrida is troublesome. Old English literature cannot conform to the orthodox dialectic of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis that forms the dominant aspect of literary studies. The center of Old English literature is not the same center we experience in postmedieval literature, and this is thanks to the orality of Old English literature. Meaning in Old English literature does not center on the cult of the author, instead, meaning is not centered in Old English literature at all. Meaning, in Old English literature is centered on a communal cultural system of common meaning that persists into the Old English literature that represents a literary sensibility that persists from Germanic oral culture, but it is a sensibility that is radically foreign to a 2015 literary sensibility.