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"Morrison, Susan Signe"
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The literature of waste : material ecopoetics and ethical matter
\"Establishing the field of Waste Studies, a material ecocritical approach, The Literature of Waste traces literal and figurative waste in the western canon. The materiality of waste - as in landfills, trashcans, garbage dumps, compost piles - inevitably transforms into metaphor. Waste emerges out of various disciplines, such as anthropological codification, psychological repression of bodily decay, sociological civilizing process, historical garbaging of the past, economic conspicuous consumption, urban disposal of bodily waste, religious sin, and philosophical angst. Vibrant materialism disturbs the use of the metaphor of waste used to characterize people as disposable garbage. If we can read waste as possessing dynamic agency, how might that change the ethics of refuse-ing and ostracizing wasted humans? Poets, the ragpickers of litter-ature, cure homeopathically. Waste, Compost, and Gleaning Aesthetics acknowledge the poignancy of materiality by revealing the humanity we share. \"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
A Medieval Woman's Companion
What have a deaf nun, the mother of the first baby born to Europeans in North America, and a condemned heretic to do with one another? They are among the virtuous virgins, marvelous maidens, and fierce feminists of the Middle Ages who trail-blazed paths for women today. Without those first courageous souls who worked in fields dominated by men, women might not have the presence they currently do in professions such as education, the law, and literature. Focusing on women from Western Europe between c. 300 and 1500 CE in the medieval period and richly carpeted with detail, A Medieval Woman’s Companion offers a wealth of information about real medieval women who are now considered vital for understanding the Middle Ages in a full and nuanced way. Short biographies of 20 medieval women illustrate how they have anticipated and shaped current concerns, including access to education; creative emotional outlets such as art, theater, romantic fiction, and music; marriage and marital rights; fertility, pregnancy, childbirth, contraception and gynecology; sex trafficking and sexual violence; the balance of work and family; faith; and disability. Their legacy abides until today in attitudes to contemporary women that have their roots in the medieval period. The final chapter suggests how 20th and 21st century feminist and gender theories can be applied to and complicated by medieval women's lives and writings. Doubly marginalized due to gender and the remoteness of the time period, medieval women’s accomplishments are acknowledged and presented in a way that readers can appreciate and find inspiring. Ideal for high school and college classroom use in courses ranging from history and literature to women's and gender studies, an accompanying website with educational links, images, downloadable curriculum guide, and interactive blog will be made available at the time of publication.
eBook
“An Exterior Air of Pilgrimage”: The Resilience of Pilgrimage Ecopoetics and Slow Travel from Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road
While the Beats can be seen as critical actors in the environmental humanities, their works should be seen over the longue durée. They are not only an origin, but are also recipients, of an environmentally aware tradition. With Geoffrey Chaucer and Jack Kerouac, we see how a contemporary American icon functions as a text parallel to something generally seen as discrete and past, an instance of the modern embracing, interpreting, and appropriating the medieval. I argue that The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer influenced Kerouac’s shaping of On the Road. In the unpublished autograph manuscript travel diary dating from 1948–1949 (On the Road notebook), Kerouac imagines the novel as a quest tale, thinking of pilgrimage during its gestation. Further, Kerouac explicitly cites Chaucer. His novel can be seen not only in the tradition of Chaucer, but can bring out aspects of pilgrimage ecopoetics in general. These connections include structural elements, the spiritual development of the narrator, reliance on vernacular dialect, acute environmental awareness, and slow travel. Chaucer’s influence on Kerouac highlights how certain elements characteristic of pilgrimage literature persist well into the modern period, in a resilience of form, language, and ecological sensibility.
Journal Article
Teaching in East Germany in the 1980s
This essay reflects on Morrison’s experience teaching in East Germany in the 1980s through an exchange programme between Brown University and the (former) Wilhelm-Pieck-Universität Rostock. Of particular note is Morrison’s Stasi – or secret police – file. While some sections are typewritten, the pages from the IMs or “unofficial collaborators” are hand-written. Focusing on an incident from September 1985, when Morrison was in charge of the programme’s “wall newspaper,” this essay reflects on a student’s controversial article about “Good Women in the Soviet Union.” This was not received well by university authorities and threatened to undermine the delicately negotiated exchange programme. Research on the nature of secret police files from the former East Germany and other eastern European countries as literary narratives suggests that those drafting such files can be understood as fiction writers, including making totally innocent material sound shady. While one “unofficial collaborator” suggests that Morrison would be a good partner with Rostock in the future, some have suggested that he might have been intending to “turn” Morrison as a spy for East Germany.
Journal Article
Women pilgrims in late medieval England : private piety as public performance
This thought-provoking book explores medieval perceptions of pilgrimage, gender and space. It examines real life evidence for the widespread presence of women pilgrims, as well as secular and literary texts concerning pilgrimage and women pilgrims represented in the visual arts. Women pilgrims were inextricably linked with sexuality and their presence on the pilgrimage trails was viewed as tainting sacred space.
eBook
Teaching in East Germany in the 1980s
This essay reflects on Morrison’s experience teaching in East Germany in the 1980s through an exchange programme between Brown University and the (former) Wilhelm-Pieck-Universität Rostock. Of particular note is Morrison’s Stasi – or secret police – file. While some sections are typewritten, the pages from the IMs or “unofficial collaborators” are hand-written. Focusing on an incident from September 1985, when Morrison was in charge of the programme’s “wall newspaper,” this essay reflects on a student’s controversial article about “Good Women in the Soviet Union.” This was not received well by university authorities and threatened to undermine the delicately negotiated exchange programme. Research on the nature of secret police files from the former East Germany and other eastern European countries as literary narratives suggests that those drafting such files can be understood as fiction writers, including making totally innocent material sound shady. While one “unofficial collaborator” suggests that Morrison would be a good partner with Rostock in the future, some have suggested that he might have been intending to “turn” Morrison as a spy for East Germany.
Journal Article
A medieval woman's companion: woman's lives in the European Middle Ages
Focusing on women from Western Europe between c. 300 and 1500 CE in the medieval period and rich in detail, this book offers a wealth of information about real medieval women who are now considered vital for understanding the Middle Ages in a full and nuanced way.
eBook
Margaret of Beverley (c.1150–c.1214/15)
A document from 1366 tells the incredible story of Isolda Parewastel who survived horrors, only to ask permission to build a chapel in thanks for not dying:
For three years [Isolda] has daily visited the Lord’s Sepulchre and other holy places of the Holy Land, and has there been stripped and placed head downwards on a rack [a torture instrument], and beaten; then, half dead, she miraculously escaped from the Saracens.¹
Isolda survived this torture, triumphing to return home to Bridgwater, England and establish a chapel devoted to the veneration of the Virgin Mary. She was not the only woman
Book Chapter
Joan of Arc (c. 1412–1431)
Joan of Arc was killed while still a teenager, yet her legacy dominates images of the Middle Ages – and, indeed, images of women in the Middle Ages. She had visions (just as many mystics did); she was a farm girl (as the vast majority of people, male or female, would have been familiar with); she fought in battles dressed in men’s armor (just as many female saints resorted to male dress); and she was killed by a system designed to oppress behavior that threatened power structures (as with heretics). While her tale has themes we have seen in other
Book Chapter