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Anticipating Alienation: Beowulf and the Intrusion of Literacy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Michael R. Near
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Abstract

Implicit in Beowulf's thematic involvement with language is a marked and persistent hostility toward the epistemological foundation underpinning the practice of literacy. While the poem seems to acknowledge the psychological posture conditioned by, or at least compatible with, literate practices, the acknowledgment characterizes that posture as a clear, direct threat to the ordering structures—and thus to the basic survival—of the poem's central system of personal interdependencies. Beowulf confronts the psychological demands of the reading experience by persistently reaffirming those idioms of speech and patterns of interaction that require the open immediacy of spoken exchange. The confrontations set in conflict not simply the characters of the poem but the psychological structures that the characters epitomize and thus the linguistic practices most compatible with those structures. (MRN)

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 108 , Issue 2 , March 1993 , pp. 320 - 332
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1993

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