What to Do with Nostalgia in Medieval and Medievalism Studies

This essay considers the place of nostalgia in scholarly research and writing in the light of psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity and desire. The term ‘nostalgia’, coined in the seventeenth century to define a medical condition, is, despite attempts at rehabilitation, generally employed to describe a weak sentimentality incompatible with genuine research. Two writers, Walter Benjamin (a leader of the Frankfurt school of criticism) and Carolyn Dinshaw (a medievalist and queer theorist), have opened up a different path for nostalgia in the light of different temporalities. Both invoke a ‘time of the now’, in Benjamin’s words, to allow a ‘touching across time’, in Dinshaw’s. In the light of their experience of time, nostalgia can shake off its usual association with sentimentality or melancholia. Challenged by their example the essay ends with an investigation of my own research and the part nostalgia, sometimes unconscious, has played in it

Aesthetics · Art · Criticism · Epistemology · Literature · Medievalism · Middle Ages · Posthumanism · Psychoanalysis · Psychoanalytic theory · Queer · Queer theory · Sentimentality · Sociology · Subjectivity · Temporalities · Temporality · Unconscious mind · Narrative Theory and Analysis · Nostalgia and Consumer Behavior · Philosophy · Psychology · Travel Writing and Literature