Book Review: How Soon is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time

Abstract

How Soon is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and Queerness of Time. By Carolyn Dinshaw. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. ISBN 978-0-82235367-6. Pp. xix + 251. $23.95pb. ISBN 978-0-8223-5353-9. $84.95hb. About seven years ago in Kalamazoo, I joined a vast throng squeezing its way into Western Michigan University's sweltering Stinson Lounge to hear four luminaries of medieval scholarship read papers. The first, and one for whom I was most willing to suffer heat and claustrophobia, was Carolyn Dinshaw. I was a new (though not particularly young) medievalist, but I knew Dinshaw to be a top scholar in medieval and gender studies, two of fields most important to my own PhD work. Having read her excellent Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (1999), I also knew that Dinshaw was an expert at elucidating vital connections between medieval and contemporary culture, defying popular, politically-correct image of medieval studies as hopelessly irrelevant and of medievalists as doddering relics of elitist academia utterly out of touch with real-world issues. I cannot say that medieval studies or medievalists in general have successfully dispelled this pejorative view in intervening years, but I can certainly witness to Carolyn Dinshaw's uncanny ability to demonstrate its falsity. In How Soon is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and Queerness of Time, Dinshaw once again demonstrates interwoven nature of medieval, modern, and contemporary in her study of medievalism, amateur, and time. How Soon is Now?, a re-thinking of modernist linear time, joins an increasing body of philosophical and interdisciplinary scholarship debating our understanding of time as a linguistic, anthropological, social, and cultural construction. Dinshaw notes recent scholarly discussion of the from ethnographer Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, physicist Martin Land, and anthropologist Jonathan Boyarin as evidence of current relevance of this debate. She structures her exploration of multiplicitous, plastic, and unstable temporalities around figure of amateur medievalist of nineteenth and twentieth centuries and defines their amateurism not on basis of being paid or unpaid, but on their affections, their intimacy with their materials, their desires, explaining that amateurs' operation outside culture of professionalism opens them to experience temporal connections in ways foreclosed to professional--thus necessarily detached and objective--academician (29, 25). In addition, she characterizes her amateurs as queered by their connections to past, as well as by their separation from linear temporality of patriarchal reproduction. Dinshaw's amateurs include historian Frederick James Furnivall, authors Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Washington Irving (along with his creation Geoffrey Crayon), scholar Hope Emily Allen, as well as amateur medievalist Thomas Colpeper, who is a character from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's baffling 1944 motion picture A Canterbury Tale. She adds herself to list of amateurs, as well, in spite of her professional success and recognition. The chapters of book are generally structured around a medieval text or group of texts that have been particularly loved by and influential upon one of these amateurs. Connecting queerness of time and its concomitant links between medieval text and modern amateur with her own experiences of queerness and time, in each chapter Dinshaw enacts temporal complexity that she seeks to elucidate: throughout book medieval impinges upon modern, joins present with past, and blurs into in of Dinshaw's contemporary lived experience. The introduction to How Soon is Now? opens Dinshaw's examination of queerness and time through lyrics of 1984 song by The Smiths from which she takes her title. Noting shifty meanings of words soon and now in song, she establishes relative nature of time and impossibility of fixing these notions outside of perception and context (2). …