Literary Dimensions Seminar

Michelle Karnes studies medieval literature in its intellectual context. She works to uncover medieval theories about how literature affects us--how it engages us, confuses us, or amazes us--by looking at medieval literature and philosophy in tandem. Her current project studies marvels in medieval romance and philosophy, in both the Latin and Arabic-speaking worlds. In all of her scholarship, she identifies similar interests between writers of fiction and philosophy, as in the mechanisms of metaphor and the power of marvels, and even in the sort of "truth" that literature lays claim to, and uses those similarities to build arguments about the purpose of literature as it was understood in the late Middle Ages.

In her Literary Dimensions seminar, Dr. Karnes will draw from her current research on the reception of Arabic philosophy in medieval Europe and its influence on theories of metaphor and fictionality.