Right now, the text I’m considering most strongly is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I’ve already done a lot of thinking and writing about this text, and I never get sick of it no matter how many times I read it. I’m really interested in the physicalization of shame in the poem (as well as in a lot of the comparatively less-interior narratives of Medieval romance in general). I’m obsessed with Gawain wearing the girdle as a method of socially signaling his shame, though his fellow knights insist that he has nothing to be ashamed of. I think there’s something in there I could tease out about the communal, fraternal culture of the Arthurian knights, and how it informed expressions of guilt and punishment. This ties back (in my mind) to another one of my fascinations, which is how often knights faint and weep in courtly romance as a way of expressing feeling (or even capacity to feel). If I go down this road, I’ll be working with affect theory primarily.
I’m also interested in (and very curious about) the way that the carnal and the grotesque function in the text. I’ve the bleeding-together of gluttony and lust in Gawain, where hunting/eating meat are positioned as a substitute for sexuality. My theories around this draw from theories about the abject and the grotesque, as well as pieces like Dinshaw’s “A Kiss is Just a Kiss” which focus on the formation of social bonds between the characters. As I see it, the meat in the text is a stand-in for the carnality of sex/homosexuality, and when it’s eaten/not eaten has important meaning in the story. Free-associating a bit, this idea is caught up in my mind with Medieval humoral theory (which puts crazy ties between gender and consumption), and also reminds me of the introduction of the sins in Piers Plowman and the way their bodies are described.
I think this angle is what I’m most likely to go with. There’s a ton of stuff in Gawain about desire and carnality, and I definitely have not unpacked it all. I’d love to explore more about the associations of meat and hunting with gender and personality in Medieval literature, as well as the symbolism of the individual animals that the Green Knight hunts. This topic also plays into some of my other interests (outside of Medieval stuff). I’m really interested in horror and horror theory in my personal reading and writing; while Gawain is not horror in the traditional sense, there is something profoundly scary and interesting to me in the social games of medieval Knighthood (and manhood in general) and the integrity of blood and violence in forming Gawain's identity withinin the text.