Reading Medieval Literary Time, Emotion, and Intimacy: On Affective Temporality in an Era of Asynchronicity and Artificial Intelligence
Open Access DepositedThis dissertation performs sustained readings of five different medieval texts across four chapters by grounding its readings via three primary words: time, emotion, and intimacy. The study surveys much of the literature on the emerging field of affective temporality, which as a term of theoretical inquiry began appearing in the late ‘90s and continued being used sporadically but with increasing regularity up until 2016, when studies began using the term as a unifying principle across different disciplines. The first chapter, “Emotion, Truth, and Politics Across Centuries in On the Times: An Exploration through Affective Temporality,” analyzes the fourteenth-century Ricardian poem On the Times, thinking through how it resonates across time with contemporary issues such as the COVID-19 pandemic and advancements in technology such as generative artificial intelligence, while performing close readings of the text’s affective currents and emotional performativity and considering them in light of modern crises. The second chapter, “The Affects of Asynchronicity and Intimacy in A Treatise on the Astrolabe,” reconceptualizes Geoffrey Chaucer’s A Treatise on the Astrolabe, in particular by reading its affective dimensions in the context of pedagogical changes induced by the pandemic, an important component of which is affective pedagogy and the role of asynchronicity in contemporary education. This chapter also thinks through asynchronous engagement mediated via technology, imagining and anticipating emotional connection via the transmission of knowledge. The third chapter, “Polychronicity and Feeling in The Ruin and St. Erkenwald,” examines affective temporalities in the Old English poem The Ruin and the Middle English poem St. Erkenwald, using polychronicity—multiple forms of time that may exist within a narrative—as an organizing concept, one that is augmented by a reworking of Edward T. Hall’s nine definitions of time, in order to read feelings across time and text. The nine definitions are revised into three main temporal lenses called perceived time, sociotemporality, and ecocosmic time, the definitions of which are composed for specific theoretical inquiry. The final chapter, “Feeling Time and Sound in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: An Archive of Aurality and Genre Experimentation,” investigates the first fitt of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It specifically approaches the poem by unpacking its archive of soundscape elements, which are then parsed and read through affective temporality. The chapter also experiments with genre forms, integrating traditional commentary structures within the parameters of a dissertation chapter, and constructing a taxonomy for identifying aurality, which is then applied to select passages using OpenAI’s ChatGPT to demonstrate potential collaborative scholarly projects while simultaneously offering critiques and deeper author-composed close readings as a contrast. The chapter adds more to the discourse on medieval digital humanities in light of generative AI, looking back on some of the history of digital humanities and imagining potential future directions.
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