Mark your calendars for two upcoming Hoccleve at Home events:
Jonathan Hsy (George Washington University)
“Hoccleve’s Ethiopians: Black Faces, Disability, Metaphor”
Friday, October 25 at 1pm Central (2pm Eastern, 7pm UK & Ireland)
This paper explores Hoccleve’s preoccupation with the human face and its implications for theorizing race and disability. The first section traces Hoccleve’s considerations of the human face—as a somatic feature, and as a metaphor—within a medieval English literary context, putting his historical reflections on embodied difference into conversation with critical disability studies. The second section turns to race—specifically, medieval constructions of blackness—to unmask the unmarked status of whiteness in Hoccleve’s work. The final section integrates race and disability, posing new questions for Hoccleve and Middle English studies. This discussion incorporates concepts of disability as “narrative prosthesis” in literary criticism, as well as studies of metaphor as a historical race-making process, and it ends by suggesting future intersectional and global approaches to Hoccleve’s poetics.
If you’re not on our mailing list, contact hocclevesociety@gmail.com for the Zoom link.
And please save the date for our next event! We are delighted to host Charlotte Ross (Oxford) for a talk on Monday, November 18. Details forthcoming.
Hoccleve Society 