“Of this I can make no sense”: Wulf and Eadwacer and the Destabilization of Meaning
Donahue, James J.
Medieval Forum, vol. 4 (2004)
Abstract
This article performs two functions. First, to provide a survey of the scholarship on Wulf and Eadwacer. This alone is of limited importance, though necessary for the second function, discussing the limitations of the critical community in providing a stable meaning for this poem. The critical communities investigated have provided meanings for this all but untranslatable poem. However, each “reading” is inevitably constructed not out of the poem itself but by means of scholarly contextualizations, the difficulties of which are investigated in this paper. In the process, this article also comments on the fallibility of scholarly tools in the production of meaning for texts outside of our own cultural framework, and implies the necessity for further research into primary documentation for the clarification of meaning.
Click here to read/download this article (HTML file)
“Of this I can make no sense”: Wulf and Eadwacer and the Destabilization of Meaning
Donahue, James J.
Medieval Forum, vol. 4 (2004)
Abstract
This article performs two functions. First, to provide a survey of the scholarship on Wulf and Eadwacer. This alone is of limited importance, though necessary for the second function, discussing the limitations of the critical community in providing a stable meaning for this poem. The critical communities investigated have provided meanings for this all but untranslatable poem. However, each “reading” is inevitably constructed not out of the poem itself but by means of scholarly contextualizations, the difficulties of which are investigated in this paper. In the process, this article also comments on the fallibility of scholarly tools in the production of meaning for texts outside of our own cultural framework, and implies the necessity for further research into primary documentation for the clarification of meaning.
Click here to read/download this article (HTML file)
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