#[sound of inbox pinging] [sound of large door being broken down] oh no you've released the monster. the thesis rambling monster

[swordatsunset]

hello! i love your blog and your 'for the thesis' tag is especially intriguing to me (i'm very curious about medieval literature and history); would you be willing to talk a little about what your thesis is about, if you're comfortable with it? no problem if not! have a nice day :)

[wearing my neon pink "ask me about my thesis" t-shirt] haha yeah of course

SO the short answer is that I’m tackling various adaptations of Arthurian works through an ecocritical and racial lens.

The long answer is all of that, but with more detail, lol. I have a couple through-lines in my adaptations insofar as the histories they’re building upon— I’m tackling Le Morte d’Arthur by Malory, so I’m also tackling Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and TH White’s The Once and Future King. I’m looking at Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, so I’d also like to tackle The Green Knight (2021) (I might scrap that though, sadly) and, though this doesn’t as much fit into these two camps, I think Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant slots in quite well with the concerns of SGGK. There are other works that I’m interested in too, though I don’t know to what extent or how much time I’ll be afforded: there’s a really interesting amount of adaptations of Chaucer’s the Wife of Bath’s Tale, with all that it holds, and I’d like to see if I can include Patience Agbabi’s Telling Tales and Zadie Smith’s The Wife of Willesden, which both adapt the story into a modern context, with a stronger focus on race— which is super interesting to me on the racial lens more than the environmental!

In an overarching sense, my thoughts are centered around the construction of capital-N Nature, nation and empire (you see this very heavily in Idylls of the King, unsurprisingly) through Arthurian legend as well as how those ideas are both corrupted (see The Buried Giant, The Green Knight) and boldened by adaptations, as well as the specific connections between empire and environment and how those lay the groundwork for thoughts around race.

The theoretical texts I’m working with are primarily Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman, Iman Jackson’s Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World, Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World, Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, and Kathryn Yusoff’s A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. I’m delighted to talk more about how these texts fit into my critical work, but this answer is already long enough lol!!!

I’m particularly curious about how/why adaptations of Arthurian legend are so concerned with nature and the environment (see The Once and Future King), and what about Arthurian legend makes it such a heady and rich place for analysis and environmentally concerned fiction. How does the constructed and real history of the UK/Britain/England as reflected through Arthuriana reveal anxieties and insights on environmental changes of the time? Can the fall of King Arthur’s court be used today as a metaphor for species extinction? Is the Anthropocene- and all the dicey territory that comes with such a term- in Camelot? Is the Holy Grail a Hyperobject? Where do Hyperobjects appear in Arthurian adaptations? How does environmentalism interact with race in these adaptations, and in their historical situations?

My thesis tag is a little misleading insofar as there are quite a couple posts in there that don’t really have anything to do with my thesis in particular, but rather just remind me of it and the stuff I’m working on!!!

Thank you for asking and loving my blog hehe :3 I hope this answered your question and if you have any more questions or anything like that feel free to ask or also dm me if you prefer :D

(edit: OH there's also another work I'm super interested in though I need to bring this one up to my thesis advisor called King Artus: A Hebrew Arthurian Romance of 1279 which is super fascinating on both a racial and 'adaptational' (to which that can be discussed as an appropriate term) level)