This course concentrates on a constitutive problem in OE literature: the theme of “making” and “makers”. What powers does a text assume when it makes an inanimate object speak? What temporal and spatial fantasies about English origins and ambitions do OE texts build? What ideas of identity? We’ll scrutinize authorship, too, asking how one learned and shaped the poet’s role, and how OE texts represented literary composition and understood the tools of singing and writing. Each dramatic, dynamic text we’ll encounter asks us to think about how words shape and fabricate the worlds of the OE period.
