Skip to content
IUScholarWorks Journals
20.05.06 Chaganti, Strange Footing

20.05.06 Chaganti, Strange Footing


Seeta Chaganti's Strange Footing revels in the "material collusion" between dance and poetry, arguing for formal interactions between the two arts beyond discourses of analogy. The book is of a piece with Chaganti's previous book, The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary, which links poetry and material culture. In Strange Footing, the "collusion" between poetry and dance concerns how "perceptual experiences" of participants and spectators in one art form can inform experiences of the other art. Chaganti acknowledges that her method for thinking about these perceptual experiences turns not to "traditional historicist interpretive practice" but "the present's perspective on performance" (42). Her account of experience and performance nevertheless emerges from the medieval rhetorical concept of ductus, which she characterizes as "the experience of the work [that] engages the viewer's participation, skill, habituation, and perception" (43). She argues that a turn to the medieval need not reify discourses of unity and proportion. Instead such a turn engenders "strangeness" (4). The titular phrase registers Brecht's concept of Verfremdungseffekt, a term uncited by Chaganti, but which one might variously translate as alienation-effect, defamiliarization, or estrangement.

Strange Footing is divided into three parts of two chapters each along with an introduction and conclusion. Twenty-four black and white images are interspersed throughout the text, and ten full-color plates are collocated in the center of the book. Both black and white images and color plates present manuscript images, in-situ and reconstructed mural art, and stills from performances of twentieth- and twenty-first century dance. A robust index appends the text. Part One of the book includes chapters that define key concepts and Chaganti's application of them to considerations of poetic form. Parts Two and Three present case studies of the poetic and artistic dimensions of danse macabre and carole/carol, respectively. Throughout, the footnotes are crucial, often clarifying the book's methodology.

This review will focus on Part One of the book, as those initial chapters set the conceptual stage for the case studies in Parts Two and Three. The conceptual complexity of Chaganti's argument in her opening chapters makes succinct summation difficult, and so I believe attending more fully to that complexity will best represent the book for potential readers. Furthermore, my attention to Part One performs critique as a participatory thinking-with Chaganti, rather than as a claim to disentangled evaluation. I do so to recapitulate Chaganti's own sense of "reenactment," as well as demonstrate the generative nature of Chaganti's study. My hope is that readers of this review will find such a rather unconventional move both appropriate and productive.

The densely recursive first chapter, "'Vanysshed Was This Daunce': Reenactment, Experience, Virtuality" interlaces the three titular concepts. "Reenactment" exists in relation to considerations of performance and reconstruction; Chaganti posits the utility of the self-aware reenactment entailed in historical research but turns to dance's gestural modalities to consider that utility. Reenactment in Strange Footing is marked not by imagined direct contact with the past but by "negotiating interstice[s]," "unearthly forces," "gaps," "recalcitrance," and "elusive aspects." The subsequent titular concept, "experience," emerges from this highly postmodern reenactment, but it does entail a participatory connection. Experience "reflect[s] the habituation, responsiveness and interactivity that characterize medieval dance-based experience" (36). Finally, "virtuality" names a participatory, habituated experience. Whereas the concept otherwise might be associated with digital media, for Chaganti it is tied to embodiment, following dance theorists who understand "virtuality as force" (7). "Virtuality" is not opposed to reality but "seems to occupy a space between the material and immaterial and that weaves itself into the spectating dynamic" (48).

The first chapter begins with a potentially perplexing statement: "I draw attention to an inextricable relation of dance and verse and set the stage for the ensuing readings that reenact poetic form as an experience produced in interactions among media" (27). The statement entails that the readings in the book are themselves a form of "reenacting." The book, then, advances an implicit argument concerning the scope and mode of academic argument in addition to its attention to poetic form and dance in the Middle Ages. It seems to this reviewer that a surprising implication of this articulation is that readers of the book themselves are participants via their "spectatorship." The implication is that to read Chaganti's book is to become caught up in a reenactment of medieval spectacular works. It is unclear the extent to which such a dynamic necessarily participates in the knowing, critical mode of reenactment outlined in the first chapter.

The second chapter, "Bonaventure and a Strumpet: A Theory of Medieval Poetic Form," advances a theory of poetic form that excavates a critical history of the analogy between poetic and visual arts, and it puts forward the rhetorical concept of ductus to parse the art forms' interconnections. Chaganti argues that foregrounding an analogic relation between visual and poetic arts ultimately renders opaque how "we move between verbal and visual forms" (65). Later in the chapter, she advances the utility of the medieval concept of ductus because it opens up a space for understanding how "nonverbal media" inform "an audience's formal experience of poetic text" (73). Chaganti's use of the prologue of Bonaventure's Beviloquium, a pedagogical treatise on reading scripture, demonstrates an investment in ductus as theoretical lens that highlights virtuality as a dimension of readerly experience. The concept is not proffered in order to participate in the study of the history of rhetoric. Primary rhetorical texts relevant to medieval accounts of ductus by Martianus Capella or Consultus Fortunatianus, for example, are uncited by Chaganti, though such works inform crucial secondary sources in Strange Footing--the work, for example, of Mary Carruthers and Paul Crossley.

In developing her theory of medieval poetic form that ranges across perceptual experiences, Chaganti briefly connects ductus to the concept of habitus via Katherine Breen's adaptation of Pierre Bourdieu's concept. Bothductus and habitus crucially entail the idea that "habits of perception…constructed in one area can affect others" (73). The rhetorical roots of ductus usefully highlight the performative dimensions of the multimedial dynamic Chaganti is after. In light of these rhetorical roots and performative dimensions, I would further suggest that ductus could be productively put in dialogue with the concept of the chora, especially as recently used in contemporary rhetorical theory. Discussed most often in relation to Gregory Ulmer's idea of "choric invention," the chora is, variously but not exclusively, an "act of social remix" [1]; an "ongoing attunement to the materialities of body, place, and environment" [2]; "a juxtaposition of personal experience alongside objective, public representation." [3]. Chaganti's use of ductus to investigate what she calls the "medial situation" of danse macabre or the "medial relations" of the carole dance to textual carol suggests the potential usefulness of the medieval rhetorical term far beyond work in rhetorical history.

Much appreciated is Chaganti's demonstration of the necessary place of the Middle Ages in crafting an account of poetic form. Her sustained analyses of danse macabre and carole/carol demonstrate how medieval works' ductile features traverse too-easy separations of the past from the present. Chaganti explicitly critiques the placement of modern poetry at the center of formalist praxis when medieval lyric is the object of analysis. This reviewer would suggest that Strange Footing implicitly goes further: it articulates the utility of attending to the medieval in developing a theory of poetic form that speaks to contemporary digital cultures. Chaganti considers danse macabre, for example, in relation to the contemporary concept of "multimedia," especially in terms of "multimedia environments" wherein "vernacular poetic text visibly collaborates with the spectacle's other media of paint, architecture, and moving bodies" (145).

Such an account of a premodern multimedia form potentially complicates, for instance, contemporary accounts of digital works. The above-mentioned imbrication of "paint, architecture, and moving bodies" indanse macabre installations speaks directly to Janez Strehovec's enumeration of "e-literary" forms, "as a performance, event, procedure, program, ride, textual instrument." [4] Similarly, one might recognize the "medial relations" of carole to carol in Stephanie Strickland's claim that "E-poetry does things rather than says things. To read e-works is to operate or play them (more like an instrument than a game, though some e-works have gamelike elements)." [5] In a reading of "Maiden in the mor lay," a fourteenth century lyric whose status as a "karole" has long been debated, Chaganti argues that the poem's generation of a "virtual burden" entails "the encounter with dance as a bodily medium" (275).

If Strange Footing demonstrates how the imbrication of the premodern with the concept of "multimedia" constitutes a productive node for Medieval Studies and beyond, this reviewer would argue for a similar utility of the concept of "multimodality." Coined by Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen, the concept describes multimedia communication across embodied senses. [6] As Virginia Kuhn argues, however, "there is nothing specifically digital about the multimodal." [7] My mention of "multimodality"--like my earlier mention of the chora--is not a critique of Chaganti's argument in which I imagine she should have written her book using those concepts. I proffer these conceptual resonances as a reflection on the possibilities the medieval provides to choreograph interventions in contemporary debates across and beyond the humanities, especially concerning literary form, material culture, and media. I am thinking here of the insights medievalists would bring to a discussion with, for instance, work like Shannon Mattern's in which urban landscape, technology, and media are imbricated. Mattern argues in Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media, for example, that "our cities have been smart and mediated, and they've been providing spaces forintelligent mediation, for millennia." [8] Chaganti provides something beyond a model of applying contemporary multimedia conceptual frameworks to topics germane to Medieval Studies. Strange Footingmodels how the medieval performs productive misalignments to the modern.

--------

Notes:

1. Sarah J. Arroyo and Bahareh Alaei, "The Dancing Floor," Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy 17.2 (Spring 2013), http://66.113.161.124/17.2/topoi/vitanza-kuhn/arroyo_alaei.html.

2. Thomas Rickert, Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013), 69.

3. Marc C. Santos and Ella R. Browning, "Maira Kalman and/as Choric Invention," enculturation: a journal of rhetoric, writing, and culture 18 (December 2014), http://enculturation.net/kalman-choric-invention.

4. Janez Strehovec, "The E-literary World and the Social," electronic book review, 1 December 2013, http://electronicbookreview.com/essay/the-e-literary-world-and-the-social/.

5. Stephanie Strickland, "Born Digital." poetryfoundation.org, 13 February 2009, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69224/born-digital.

6. Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen, Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (London and New York: Routledge, 1996).

7. Virginia Kuhn, "Multimodal," in Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Concepts, Models, and Experiments, https://digitalpedagogy.mla.hcommons.org/keywords/multimodal/.

8. Shannon Mattern, Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), xii (emphasis in original).