Pull Your Self Together

The Dangers of Dissociation in Old English Poetry

Bibliographic Data

ID8863372
AuthorsSimon C Thomson (0000-0002-1591-2710, Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Philosophische Fakultät, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Deutschland/Germany, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume105
Issue3
Pages475-498
Publication date2024-04-02
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueEnglish Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0013-838X • E-ISSN: 1744-4217
PublisherRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/0013838x.2024.2333637
OpenAlexW4396505459
LanguageEN
References cited35

This paper argues that one way of reading the portrayal of misery in Old English poetry is as an abjected state; something against which the not-miserable self and community is continually being defined. It argues that, to this end, otherness of different forms is constructed as inherently miserable; and that we should therefore be open to reading unhappy figures as inherently othered. Using a range of poetic case studies, it goes on to suggest that this might be because Old English poetic unhappiness is associated with dissociation and fragmentation, which poses a fundamental threat to the profoundly networked sense of selfhood and intersubjective social system prevalent in the same poetic corpus. The social function of performing the poetry of alienation, then, is proposed to be a communal therapy of abjection, inviting self-identification with traumatised figures in order to abject that aspect of the self

Aesthetics · Alienation · Art · Close reading · Linguistics · Literature · Poetry · Reading (process · Self · Sociology · Crime, Deviance, and Social Control · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · Medieval Literature and History · Psychology · Philosophy · Social Psychology

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