The late twentieth century is so awash in ironical and romantic revisitations of the medieval that articulations, in Stuart Hall's sense, of the really really early modern--as the Spice Girls might call it--with the really really late modern are commonplace in popular culture. Joining the popular to the academic does run the risk, or at least the charge, of medievalizing, but I want to try it on. Implicating medieval and cultural studies in the introductory syllabus is for me an exercise in pedagogy, a challenge to make some of the circumstances of my life connect with the circumstances of my students' lives and to use these circumstances to promote cultural analysis within a context of educating for a critical citizenry.
Popular reception of the medieval is curiously ambiguous: the medieval is at once appropriated as malleable and resisted or embraced as intransigently other. In my introductory university class, otherness, in the sense of alien, seems to be the norm. A desire for textual stability, an investment in description, and an eagerness to accede to what Geraldine Heng calls "the provenient univocality of the pentangle logos" in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight seizes most of my students. This is in stark contrast to the behaviour of children who in their play with toys (from Barbies to plastic Knights of the Round Table and, later, with videos of the Cadfael files) habitually other them, in the sense of resisting the dominant narratives that come with them. A tale of institutional education is thereby told.
In responding to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and particularly to Gawain, the male embodiment of civility in the aristocratic court, many students indulge a fantasy of textual closure and singular identity, choosing to focus on the comforting integrity of the "endeles knot" rather than on an analysis, an unloosening, that other transformative sign, the "luf-lace," the girdle, the baldric, might provide. It is as though a contractual ideology is developed between students who locate themselves within a local biblical tradition and Gawain as a passive consumer of courtesy ideology. The challenge, then, is to encourage an inquiry into the alterity that has been suppressed, without relocating students in the geography of rhetorical individualism, that countersignatory gesture which retreats to a mythical autonomy and claim to a fundamentally private reading. Cultural studies can then work as critical theory to effect a politics of interruption in approaches to the medieval and to develop, as much as the academy can, resistance to cultural hegemony and the formation of critical alternatives.