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Vestigial Signs: Inscription, Performance, and The Dream of the Rood

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Seeta Chaganti
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Abstract

Anglo‐Saxonists often explore connections between The Dream of the Rood and two ritual objects, the silver Brussels cross and the sandstone Ruthwell monument, inscribed with verses related to the poem. This essay offers a new perspective on these artifacts, elucidating not a historical narrative linking them but rather an Anglo‐Saxon poetics made visible in their juxtaposition. It argues that these three manifestations reveal a dialectic of inscription and performance in Anglo‐Saxon poetics. Reading the familiar Old English text through J. H. Prynne's “A Note on Metal” (1968), which imagines dialectics both of metal and stone and of inscription and performance, the essay also interrogates certain divisions between premodern and modern aesthetic traditions. Theories of media, performance, and inscriptionality help to stage an interdisciplinary analysis of The Dream of the Rood and to show that its poetics originate in the formal frameworks of Anglo‐Saxon material culture. (SC)

Type
Cluster on Textual Materialism
Information
PMLA , Volume 125 , Issue 1 , January 2010 , pp. 48 - 72
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2010

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