cRam Session: Medieval Literature and the Weird

cRam Session is a VCU News feature that highlights the breadth of offerings in the VCU Bulletin course catalog and the wide-ranging expertise of the instructors. Associate professor Adin Lears, Ph.D., teaches in the Department of English and is affiliate faculty in the Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies. She shares quick insights from her course Medieval Literature and the Weird.

Tell us something surprising or truly notable about your course's subject.

Today, we tend to use the term "weird" to mean something like "mysterious," or something closer to "odd" or "strange." But early usages of the word align the weird with the powers to control the fate or destiny of human beings.

Historically, as a noun, wyrd (weird) is attributed to God, and at certain points it gets quasi-personified into "the Weird sisters" - referring to the Fates, or goddesses, of ancient mythology - and Shakespeare's witches. What interests me most about the concept of the weird is the way that its early history raises questions about human agency as well as vulnerability in a cosmic order that is much larger than humans are inclined to acknowledge.

In a lot of medieval literature, and also in modern and contemporary cosmic horror and sci-fi, this gets tied to questions about the nature of the human and what makes the human different from other living beings. If we are not actually in full control over our own destinies, how are we different from animals, which act through base instinct alone, or even plants, which just exist?

What is your favorite assignment you have students do?

I've really enjoyed reading the 14th-century poem "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" with students because of how its treatment of the weird combines Christian cosmology with fairy lore, raising questions about masculinity, agency and the human. Essentially, the poem stages an encounter or conflict between Christian and chivalric systems of morality and the more antic and chaotic forces of the fairy court.

For me, the poem explores the ways that medieval social and religious institutions shaped notions of masculinity and the self - and it probes the feelings of fear and anxiety that emerged when those basic ideas were challenged.

How does an element of this subject intersect intriguingly with a different field?

Because of the ways that the weird makes us think about the place of the human in a larger cosmic order, there is a definite ecocritical angle to it.

A lot of the weird is about encounters with nature or nonhuman worlds that make humans aware of their own limitations and vulnerability. An encounter with radical otherness that defies rational comprehension leads to an awareness of diminished agency and physical vulnerability, even creatureliness.

For example, in early weird fiction by H.P. Lovecraft, this kind of encounter generates horror. But contemporary "new weird" writers like Jeff VanderMeer and Elvia Wilk are engaging with environmentalist thought by probing how this kind of experience might be necessary to challenge the idea of the human as the center of the universe.

Because these kinds of weird encounters are so focused on feelings of vulnerable embodiment, I also think there are ways they might speak to medicine and perhaps offer a certain perspective on patient experiences of pain and need.