at the end of one year, reassessment of my academic interests have revealed that they are falling into more defined groups:

1) medieval. i've actually done very little to establish myself as a medievalist this year, and i don't even know i want to be a full-fledged medievalist, although i would like to be associated with them in part. so early and late medieval english literature as well as the latin middle ages constitutes the first group. i'm thinking probably of examples set by people like ker and auerbach.

2) well, "neo-structuralist" stuff - genre and narrative theory, linguistics in literature, semiotics. on the whole, jakobsonian rather than frye

3) closely associated with that fairy tales, children's literature and mythology in literature

4) riddles belong in quite a group of their own, because despite the riddle's ludic content and social function and kinship to folk riddles, fairy tales and children's literature, i'm really more interested in structural and generic aspects of the riddle, as well as theories of literary riddling, the riddle's association with metaphor, allegoresis, figurative language, lyric poetry, narrative time-changing, and the larger concern of linguistic paradoxes, enigmatic language, cognitive categories, prophecies and so on.

5) translation theory and linguistics, multilingual literary studies, although i have far less training in this.

6) textual criticism, paleography.


i seem to have lost interest in epic and romance, which is just as well, why should i go trampling all over ground so well-ploughed?