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Defenestrating Frantzen: a Fistschrift punctum books CFP: Defenestrating Frantzen: A Fistschrift Eileen Joy Published on: Jan 08, 2020 Updated on: Jan 12, 2020 punctum books CFP: Defenestrating Frantzen: A Fistschrift NOTE (added Jan 11, 2020): This CFP, like any punctum books pub, is open for annotation. After signing up for a PubPub account (upper right corner), select any text and an annotation window will appear. These annotations will represent a collective way of facing, working through, and hopefully repairing the kind of trauma that the field of early medieval studies has caused for so many years, and which this CFP has also triggered in our community of scholars and learners for whom we care deeply and with whom we want to model a better, more inclusive, and more generously capacious academic community-to-come. We want to model, further, a feminist critical practice in which the sorts of “argumentation” so prevalent in toxic masculine culture will not predominate. Eileen Joy, who wrote the CFP, will not “disappear” any of her words, and will be attentive, without interruption or pushback, to all annotations. No one at punctum will intervene to control, censor, or argue with any of the annotators. In the tradition of the medieval book, all annotations, along with the CFP, will stand as a public record of an academic community’s productively rowdy dissensus, and the page will be archived into perpetuity with no revisions whatsoever to anyone’s words: a cacophony, if you will, of a field in crisis, but in which everyone strives to really hear and respect each other’s feelings, experiences, trauma, and intellectual practices. The annotated page will become part of the permanent archive of punctum, always available for the scholars of the future, as opposed to disappearing into the ether of ephemeral social media owned by those who do not share our values nor care for us. TRIGGER WARNING: Great care has been taken to remove language that some readers may find triggering (especially vis-à-vis metaphors of sexual assault); but please also be forewarned that this CFP has been designed to be as offensive as possible, and that I welcome all of the blame and repercussions that might result. To those who worry that parts of this CFP simply reinscribe forms of sexual violence against queers (and thanks to the generosity of more than several scholars, including a graduate student at Cambridge University, who reviewed the CFP and alerted me to how some of the language in original draft might be overly triggering, this CFP has been revised multiple times), please consider the very real sexual and other forms of material-psychic assault and abuse that have been perpetrated, for decades, by some of the most celebrated and “distinguished” scholars of the field of Old English+“Anglo-Saxon” studies, and the ways in which these fields have labored mightily to keep these facts “on the downlow.” I myself am one of the victims, as well as know and have counseled so many others who have also been victims of both sexual and psychic abuse within these fields. Please do not read this CFP, also, if you are triggered by images and/or language culled from the online world of neofascist, white supremacist ethno-separatists. This is my CFP, mine alone (although my co-directors at punctum books strongly support this project and how it is framed), and comes from a place of deep anger and rage, as well as a conviction that some of us—well, at least me—are not going to take this anymore. It is clear to me, after working as a scholar, editor, and publisher in these fields for about 25 years, that there will never be redress or repair for the bodily and psychic damage that has been inflicted on so many students and peer colleagues by so many of the most distinguished scholars, institutions of higher learning, and also learned societies, who care more about maintaining their image than they do 2 punctum books CFP: Defenestrating Frantzen: A Fistschrift about addressing and preventing harm. I have no interest at this point in professional politesse or diplomatic decorum, so read this at your peril, or conversely, enJOY/enjoin it.1 Jack Donovan, Waldgang, Oregon. CFP: DEFENESTRATING FRANTZEN: A FISTSCHRIFT A volume of sexually-disciplinarily dissident essays to be published by punctum books in Autumn 2020, dedicated to the patrons and fearless sexual adventurers of the Catacombs in San Francisco, 1975–1981, and also to Janet Thormann (1940-2014) whom the field of Old English studies never gave proper due, while some in the field even stole and/or omitted her work on anti-Semitism in Old English literature, and she is the only scholar I knew of in the field who gave masterful Lacanian readings of Old English texts. She studied in the 1950s-60s at UC Berkeley with Alain Renoir, who founded the department of Comparative Literature there in 1966, and she taught at the College of Marin for her entire career, because she never wanted to leave San Francisco, where her husband, Graham Makintosh, ran White Rabbit Press, one of the most important avant-garde presses in American letters from 1968 to 1975, publishing such authors as Charles Bukowski and Nathaniel West, but even more importantly the “Berkeley 3 punctum books CFP: Defenestrating Frantzen: A Fistschrift Renaissance” circle of poets who were deeply invested in medieval poetry (such as “Beowulf ”): Robin Blaser, Robert Duncan, and Jack Spicer. Because Janet taught at a community college, and never produced a monograph, her presence has almost been erased from the canon of scholarship in Old English studies and almost no one cites her work, which was brilliant. She was one of the first (and practically only) scholar to tackle anti-Semitism in early medieval English texts, and when she brought up the subject of anti-Semitism in religious writings of the 10th century during an NEH Summer Institute on “Anglo-Saxon England” at Trinity College, Cambridge, led by Paul Szarmach in 2004 (which is where I first met her), she was told it was a completely irrelevant subject since “there were no Jews” living in England prior to the Norman Conquest, and thus we were to cease all discussion on the topic (in 2004!). She told me often that she believed her scholarship (published primarily as journal articles and book chapters) was being ignored and also plagiarized and she suffered no so small amount of psychic pain as a result. She was one of the first (and practically) only scholar in the field (other than John Hermann, whom the field also treated like shit) to fully address the period’s anti-Semitism in real depth (prior to the publication in 2004 of Andrew Scheil’s The Footsteps of Israel: Understanding Jews in Anglo-Saxon England), a fact for which she pretty much never gets the credit she deserves.2 In short, the field treats its Others like complete trash, and it always has. punctum books will be publishing Janet’s posthumous monograph on the “comic medievalism” of Chaucer in 2020. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices. ~ Audre Lorde Je m’imaginais arriver dans le dos d’un auteur, et lui faire un enfant, qui serait le sien et qui serait pourtant monstreux. [I imagined myself approaching an author from behind and giving him a child which would indeed be his but would nonetheless be monstrous.] ~ Gilles Deleuze The year 2020 will mark the 30-year anniversary of Allen J. Frantzen’s Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English, and Teaching the Tradition (1990), a book in which he cautioned scholars in Old English studies that if they continued to resist the insights of contemporary critical and cultural theories, they would risk irrelevance in the modern university. Now seems an apt time to keep Frantzen himself as 4 punctum books CFP: Defenestrating Frantzen: A Fistschrift relevant as possible, so that we can finally excavate and bring to light the traces of the homophobia, misogyny, and racism that inform so much of his work, as well as better reveal Frantzen’s ongoing (and lamentably hateful) nostalgia for a supposedly “lost world” of heroic (white) masculine culture in which women, effeminate fags, bull-dykes, drag queens,3 and other sexual dissidents need not apply, nor “figure.” The conjoined fields of Old English and “Anglo-Saxon”4 studies have worked mightily over the past thirty years (and more) to deny the essentially racist, homophobic, sexist, settler-colonialist, and white nationalist foundations of their fields of knowledge, and they have given Frantzen the lion’s share of all of their citations in their work on gender, sexuality, and the intellectual origins of early English studies, and with very little exploration of the deeper foundations of Frantzen’s own thought, even though he was pretty transparent in pretty much of all of his publications in showing his “hand.” So, for example, at the outset of Desire for Origins he wrote something that appears to admirably take up the cause of embracing critical theory in the field of Old English studies: engagement with political controversy has always been a distinctive and indeed an essential motive for studying language origins and therefore for studying Anglo-Saxon.
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