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The literature of medieval Europe presents figures (and entire communities) that speak to us, whether explicitly or implicitly, from the margins. The marginality of those whom history has attempted to rewrite (and to write out) nonetheless interject their own indeniable influence on the dominant culture. The Early Christian Church, for example, endeavored to negate the "living corpse" of Jewry only to be defined by it and dependent on it for the construction of its own identity. Literary works manifest this presence and the anxiety it inevitably produces in a variety of forms and contexts. Topics addressed may include:
-the body and embodiment / marginalization as "virtual" or "ghostly" / incarnation
-rhetoric of inauthenticity / impurity / blindness
-identities threatened by and dependent on the existence of the other
-forced conversion
-temporality / conceptualization of history by the Early Christian Church (e.g. Augustine)
-role of allegory
-dehumanization / ineffability of the human
-literary manifestations of religious tension
-hermeneutic concerns of the modern reader
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