Date of Award
Spring 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
English Language and Literature
First Advisor
Butterfield, Ardis
Abstract
This dissertation explores a textual effect in late medieval English religious poetry, which the project terms “sonic virtuality”: a form of sensory stimulation where instincts of bodily sensation are activated regardless of the performative circumstances under which the poem is encountered. This effect allows the poems to catalyze for their audiences exceptionally vivid imaginative encounters with the poetic personas who appear in them. The project focuses especially on devotional lyrics written, copied, and circulated in medieval England during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, focusing on deictic ambiguities surrounding the lyrics’ uses of the first-person pronoun I. Studies of first-person voices in medieval lyric have often revolved around questions of subjectivity, particularly the extent to which a given I belongs respectively to the author, the speaking persona or character, the poem’s presumably intended audience within its own imagined world, the listener or reader who encounters the poem in the real, or even the text, in and of itself. This project takes a different approach by concentrating instead on the ways in which first-person I’s interact with each other within the space of a given lyric. These localized interactions amongst first-person subject-pronouns within lyrics, I argue, leverage deictic ambiguities in ways that activate bodily instincts on the part of their audiences and thereby generate virtual sensations of recognizing voices in the flesh. These appeals to sensory perception do not simply represent physical sensing as a conceptual act, but strikingly simulate sensory experience. Furthermore, since the effects inhere in the texts’ verbal and syntactic arrangements, they are at work regardless of the circumstances under which the poems are encountered––whether on the page, sung, read aloud or in silence, in company or in solitude. I argue that Middle English religious lyrics can be understood as a form of virtual environment, allowing their audiences to experience the imagined voices of poetic personas as somatic, acoustic objects emerging from virtual bodies. The project brings together threads of recent scholarly interest in lyric subjectivity, first-person voices, corporeal materiality, bodily knowing, and virtuality. The project thus contributes to discourses on first-person pronouns in medieval writing by exploring how the subject-I can formulate powerfully visceral sensory experiences of poetic voices. In doing so, it extends scholarly conversations about what Middle English lyric can offer our understanding of the capacity of verbal media forms for imagining––and transcending––textual bodies. My chapters focus on religious lyrics, predominantly those inscribed between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. The first chapter introduces the kinds of first-person ambiguities that lie at the heart of the project, primarily through studying a collective group of lyrics known as Maiden and mother come and see. Specifically, the chapter identifies effects of having to orient oneself as to the poetic speaker’s identity, as a result of unannounced changes in I-thou orientations over the course of given lyrics. The chapter refers to these effects as “I-shifting,” since they are generated by deictic properties of first-person pronouns as linguistic shifters. The second chapter examines a further, subsidiary form of first-person ambiguity, which it refers to as “I-conflation.” Like I-shifting, this is a textual effect deriving from pronominal deixis. However, whereas the speaker ambiguities of I-shifting are ultimately resolvable, the kind here permanently inheres, so that the I does not merely shift between speaking identities but in fact remains shared between two or more entities appearing within the poem (hence, “conflation”). This chapter extends the ways that deictic ambiguities can formulate different configurations of first-person subjects for the audience to experience––particularly subjects possessing bodies that are more abstract, unconventional, or otherwise difficult to imagine. Among the chapter’s case studies, for instance, are the first-person I’s of the Eucharist, alphabetical letters, and allegorical plant life. The third chapter couches I¬-shifting and I-conflation in the language of virtual experience. Drawing on the work of both medievalists and media theorists, this chapter examines how the lyrics’ shifting and conflated I’s engage their audiences’ sensory activity on a plane that is neither fully physical nor fully imaginary. Theories, examples, and concepts of virtuality help to illuminate the elusive materiality behind the textual corporealities that the lyrics’ I’s evoke through their uses of first-person deixis. The fourth chapter expands the reach of the project’s work on ambiguous I’s by applying the concepts of shifting and conflation to a non-lyric text––in this case, a longer religious prose text: The Revelations of Divine Love, by Julian of Norwich. In doing so, the chapter explores the applicability of the earlier chapters’ arguments to evocations of voice in medieval devotional writing more broadly.
Recommended Citation
Tu, Melissa, "Sonic Virtuality: Imagining Voices in Late Medieval English Lyric" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 911.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/911
