Please join us for this talk in our 2021-2022 Colloquium Series! This event is free and open to the public.
Registration link for Zoom attendance: https://osu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAlf-6spjkrHdOV1HZd0AXXsHAWStXIJ5qd
Registration link for in-person attendance: https://cmrs.osu.edu/events/2021-2022-in-person-rsvp-form
Speaker: Clinton ‘Clint’ Morrison Jr. is a PhD candidate in the Department of English. His dissertation “Dancing Descriptions: Choreographing Middle English Romance” considers the relationship between Middle English poetic description and movement. Morrison is the recipient of the Medieval Academy of America’s 2020 Hope Emily Allen Dissertation Grant and a 2022 Presidential Fellowship.
Morrison’s teaching interests include medieval and early modern literature, popular culture, and technical writing. He has taught writing courses that explore the rhetoric of travel narratives, urban spaces, and medievalism. In 2019, he served as a teaching assistant in the Department of Material Science and Engineering. In 2020, he taught “Introduction to Shakespeare’ and led two recitation sections for the “Survey of British Literature to 1800.”
Synopsis of the colloquium: Clint will discusses his dissertation chapter on Thomas Chestre’s gamification of dance in Sir Launfal. Chestre’s Sir Launfal is a Middle English reimagining of Marie de France’s twelfth-century Lanval. Both narratives follow an Arthurian knight who betrays a promise to his fairy lover not to reveal her identity. This betrayal occurs during an unwanted advance from Arthur’s queen. Chestre expands the episode to describe Launfal and the queen’s confrontation occurring during a dance. The poem’s dance simulates cultural game theory’s concept of a magic circle—a playground where players’ actions have consequences both within and beyond the game space. He will demonstrate how Chestre’s description of the dance follows a structural pattern established in his descriptions of earlier games. He will argue that the gamification of the poem’s dance realizes the serious implications and dangers imagined in late medieval social games.
