The text below is an uncorrected, pre-ublication version of a concise essay, "Past, Present, and Neo" published in Humanistic Perspectives in a Technological World, ed. Richard Utz, Valerie B. Johnson, and Travis Denton (Atlanta: School of Literature, Media, and Communication, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2014), 139-40:
Past, Present, and Neo
Richard Utz
"The past is never
dead. It's not even past."
William Faulkner
At the airport’s baggage
claim, a colorful screen display invites her to be “swept away to an age of
bravery and honor” and partake in “a feast of the eyes and appetite with all
the splendor and romance” of medieval Spain at the Atlanta Castle of Medieval
Times, a dinner theater chain. A courtesy
van, which treats her as if she were a noble lady at a medieval court, takes
her to her downtown hotel, the Knights Inn. After a change of clothes, she
takes a taxi to the Catholic Cathedral of Christ the King, where she attends
her college roommate’s wedding, which includes the celebration of the Eucharist,
a sacramental ritual originating in the Fourth Lateran Church Council’s decision
on transubstantiation in 1215. She is especially impressed by the performance
of members of the Atlanta Early Music Alliance, who perform wedding songs from
before 1800, accompanied by instruments made according to medieval and early
modern building instructions. On her way out of the Cathedral, a Knights of
Columbus honor guard greets the guests who are then bused to the wedding
reception at Rhodes Hall on Peachtree Street. There, our visitor admires the Victorian
Romanesque revival architecture and watches as the photographer takes pictures
of the newlyweds before a backdrop of stained-glass windows depicting the rise
and fall of the Confederacy and a gallery of saintly-looking generals. Her day continues
with a guided afternoon visit to the Margaret Mitchell House arranged for some
of the non-Atlantan guests by the wedding planner. The guide ends his narrative
of Mitchell’s biography with informing his audience how she was killed by a
speeding car on Peachtree Street in 1949. She was on her way to the cinema to
watch A Canterbury Tale, a British
war-time movie loosely linked with Geoffrey Chaucer’s late fourteenth-century Canterbury Tales. Inspired by the story
of Mitchell’s life, our visitor ends her day by renting David O. Selznick’s film
version of Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind
in her hotel room. She drifts off to sleep shortly after taking in the famous
introductory foreword: “There was a
land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South. Here in this pretty
world, Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of
Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave. Look for it only in
books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the
wind....”
When
I share this obviously fictional narrative with my students, they quickly catch
on and research and identify dozens of other examples of how individuals,
groups, corporations, and nations have recreated, reenacted, and reinvented the
medieval past to make statements in their own postmedieval art, architecture,
entertainment, literature, politics, race, religion, and sports. They soon
notice that, while practically all these older forms of “medievalism” employ
some kind of technology and scientific practice to represent what we know about
the “real” Middle Ages, there now also seems to exist a new and different kind
of connecting with medieval culture, one related to the ways in which various new
media allow for heretofore unknown representations of space, story, and time.
More
often than not, such recent narratives, with which my students tend to be more
familiar than I, no longer make any serious attempt at heeding what scholars
have established about the “real” Middle Ages. In fact, they (for example: Arcanum,
Guild, Skyrim, Medieval: Total War, World of Warcraft)
are content with creating pseudo-medieval worlds that playfully obliterate
history, authenticity, and historical accuracy and replace history-based
narratives with “simulacra” of the medieval, employing images and narrating
stories that are neither an original nor the faithful copy of an original, but
entirely “Neo.” Does this mean that these new simulational media will
fundamentally change how we speak about and relate to the past? Will we no
longer, as first Renaissance humanists and later Enlightenment thinkers have admonished
us, try to become ever more perfect as human beings by studying the original stories,
language, and motivations of our predecessors? And will this shift in our
relationship to humanity’s past contribute to the “posthuman” or “transhuman”
kind of world science fiction writers and futurologists have been contemplating?
I am convinced that our students, with their strongly interdisciplinary curricular focus, are particularly well prepared to investigate “medievalist” as well as “neomedievalist” narratives, and Atlanta, Georgia Tech, and particularly the School of Literature, Media, and Communication provide the perfect intellectual lab spaces to do that. As “critical makers” who write and interpret, build and critique, play and create, they are able to shape the future developments at the intersection of ever so many humanistic, sociological, and technological practices. In their lives and careers, past, present, and “Neo” will be of equal importance. [© R. Utz, 2014]
I am convinced that our students, with their strongly interdisciplinary curricular focus, are particularly well prepared to investigate “medievalist” as well as “neomedievalist” narratives, and Atlanta, Georgia Tech, and particularly the School of Literature, Media, and Communication provide the perfect intellectual lab spaces to do that. As “critical makers” who write and interpret, build and critique, play and create, they are able to shape the future developments at the intersection of ever so many humanistic, sociological, and technological practices. In their lives and careers, past, present, and “Neo” will be of equal importance. [© R. Utz, 2014]
