| This dissertation traces and describes a non-representational medieval poetics of wonder. My argument stages mutually informative comparative readings between medieval language and literature and the medievalism of the mid twentieth-century "Berkeley Renaissance." "Wonder" emerges as a mode of ethical entanglement of poem, poet, and reader with the mundane physicality of a larger ecology or cosmology; and "ornamentality" describes a capacity for an aesthetics of de-instrumentalized interface that makes wonder possible. I trace these concepts through the Old English Riddles and Beowulf as well the Middle English Pearl and the Old French Le Conte du Graal alongside the rigorous theoretical frames implicit in the medievalism of Robin Blaser, Robert Duncan, and Jack Spicer. In turn, careful attention to medieval texts demonstrates the persistence of the medieval in the modern and the importance of academic medieval studies in avant-garde American poetry. The significance of this project stems from its development of diachronically comparative reading practices between medieval and modern poetics. The medievalism of the Berkeley Renaissance delineates an alternative to the history of wonder in the Middle Ages focused on an epistemologically oriented affect as studied by Katharine Park and Caroline Walker Bynum. Extending Michael Davidson's work on coterie in the New American Poetry as well as Wai Chee Dimock's concept of the 'deep time' of de-nationalized literary history, I analyze how the community of the Berkeley Renaissance, renamed the "Berkeley Middle Ages," expands human sociality into a larger ecology through relations to the past. Adapting Mary Carruthers' insights into medieval aesthetics and composition, I examine the phenomenological spaces produced by both medieval and modern poetic ornamentation. The project extends the impulse of recent work on ecology in medieval and in modern poetics by Miriam Nichols, Jed Rasula, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, and Alfred K. Siewers. Read as ornamental rather than revelatory, wonder functions less in terms of significance than as a mode of non-representational connectivity of ecologically emplaced thriving: the poem is an aesthetic interface with what is radically Outside us. |
