BGSU English Department

Erin Felicia Labbie, Associate Professor

labbie@bgsu.edu

East Hall 420
419-372-0598

Degrees and Institutions:

Ph.D., University of Minnesota, Literature and Cultural Studies

M.A., Bucknell University, Comparative Literature

B.A., Miami University, Literature and Political Science

Area: Literature; School of Cultural and Critical Studies Affiliate

Courses Taught: 

Courses Regularly Taught:

ENG 2640/2650 British Literature Survey
ENG 3020 Introduction to Literary Theory and Criticism 
ENG 4020 English Medieval Literature
ENG 4560 Topics in Critical Theory
Graduate courses in Theory and Criticism

Special Topics Recently Taught:

Posthumanism
The Interpretation of Dreams and Dream Vision Poetics
Medieval Technologies
Saints and Schizophrenia
Chaucer
Michel de Certeau on the Horizon of History
Theories of the Gaze
The Concept of Evil
Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis

Research Interests: Medieval Studies, Psychoanalysis, Visual Culture Studies, Chaucer, Anglo-Norman studies, Old French, Provençal, Anglo-Saxon studies, The Frankfurt School, Feminism(s), Queer Theory, Meta-criticism, Intellectual History.

Recent/Selected Publications:

“The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: Animation and Alchemy in Disney’s Desire for the Middle Ages” in Disney’s Middle Ages. Eds. Susan Aronstein and Tison Pugh. New York: Palgrave, 2012.

Beholding Violence in Medieval and Early Modern European Culture. With a Foreword by W.J.T. Mitchell, co-edited with Allie Terry-Fritsch. New York: Ashgate Press, 2012.

Interested in the ways in which medieval and early modern communities have acted as participants, observers, and interpreters of events and how they ascribed meaning to them, the essays in this interdisciplinary collection explore the concept of beholding and the experiences of individual and collective beholders of violence during the period. Addressing a range of medieval and early modern art forms, including visual images, material objects, literary texts, and performances, the contributors examine the complexities of viewing and the production of knowledge within cultural, political, and theological contexts. In considering new methods to examine the process of beholding violence and the beholder's perspective, this volume addresses such questions as: How does the process of beholding function in different aesthetic conditions? Can we speak of such a thing as the 'period eye' or an acculturated gaze of the viewer? If so, does this particularize the gaze, or does it risk universalizing perception? How do violence and pleasure intersect within the visual and literary arts? How can an understanding of violence in cultural representation serve as means of knowing the past and as means of understanding and potentially altering the present?

 

“Beholding Violence, An Introduction,” (with Allie Terry-Fritsch) in Beholding Violence in Medieval and Early Modern European Culture. Eds. Erin Felicia Labbie with Allie Terry-Fritsch. New York: Ashgate Press, 2012.

“Beholding Typology: The Violence of Recognition in Caravaggio’s Sacrifice of Issac,” in Beholding Violence in Medieval and Early Modern European Culture. Eds. Erin Felicia Labbie with Allie Terry-Fritsch. New York: Ashgate Press, 2012.

“Quidditas, or, Medieval Studies Today,” Quidditas, Fall 2010.

“Lear to the Letter: Derrida Before Lacan, Poe Before Shakespeare,” Shakespeare Yearbook, Fall 2010.

“We Have Never Been Schreber,” co-authored with Michael Uebel. The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages, eds. Andrew Cole and D. Vance Smith. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009.

“The Speaking Thing: Prosopopoeia, the Death Drive, and the Return.” Monokl 6: A Special Issue on Lacan. Summer 2009.

Lacan's Medievalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

“The Negation of the Negation is Not My Friend.” Review essay of Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. 434 pp. Rhizomes, Issue 10, Fall 2006.

“Zizek Avec Lacan: Splitting the Dialectics of Desire,” Slovene Studies, Volume 25, numbers 1-2, 2003 [published February 2005]: 23-46.

“Battle Rage and Civility in Beowulf”, Co-authored with Tom Wymer. The Heroic Age. Issue 7, Spring 2004, Fifth Anniversary Issue.

“History as ‘Retro’: Veiling Inheritance in The Female Quixote,” ed. Greg Clingham, Making History. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1998: (79-97).

“The Specular Image of the Gender-Neutral Name: Naming Silence in Le Roman de Silence,” Arthuriana, Vol.7.2 (Summer 1997): 63-77.  

“The Vacant Mirror in Lombarda’s Tenson,” Romance Notes, Vol. 36.1 (1995): 13-26.

“Identification and Identity in James Boswell’s Journals: A Psycholinguistic Reflection,” James Boswell: Psychological Interpretations, ed. Donald J. Newman. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995: (51-70).

Select Reviews

Review of: George Edmondson, The Neighboring Text: Chaucer, Boccaccio, Henryson. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011. Paper. Pp. xii, 280. $40. ISBN: 9780268027759. Invited and refereed. Printed in Speculum (2012), 87: 1186-1188 
Copyright © The Medieval Academy of America 2012.

Review of: James W. Stone. Crossing Gender in Shakespeare: Feminist Psychoanalysis and the Difference Within. New York and London: Routledge, 2010. Invited and refereed. Printed in The Upstart Crow: A Shakespeare Journal (2012), volume 31.

Books in Progress:

Glossing is Glorious: The Philosophy, Ethics, and Poetics of Commentary

Dream Vision Poetics and the Interpretation of Dreams

The Medieval Remainder