- The Round TableNews from the North American branch
Website of the IAS-NAB: http://www.international-arthurian-society-nab.org/
NAB Officers 2017-2021 (for full addresses, see Bibliography of the International Arthurian Society [BIAS] or online at our website: http://www.international-arthurian-society-nab.org/Contact)
President: David F. Johnson (Florida State University)
Immediate Past President: Kevin Whetter (Acadia University)
Vice President: Joseph M. Sullivan (University of Oklahoma)
Secretary–Treasurer: Evelyn Meyer (Saint Louis University)
Bibliographer: Ann Howey (Brock University)
New Member of the Profession: Usha Vishnuvajjala (Indiana University)
Graduate Student Member: Danielle Taylor (Carleton University)
Arthuriana Editor: Dorsey Armstrong (Purdue University)
Advisory Committee:
Romance Languages: Monica Wright (University of Louisiana at Lafayette)
Canadian Representative: Robert Rouse (University of British Columbia)
Celtic: Lindy Brady (University of Mississippi)
English: Nicole Clifton (Northern Illinois University)
Germanic: Alexandra Sterling Hellenbrand (Appalachian State University)
Post–Medieval: Kevin J. Harty (La Salle University)
Past issues of ARTHURIANA
For back issues of ARTHURIANA, contact editor Dorsey Armstrong (camelot@purdue.edu).
The New BIAS and JIAS:
In the Fall of 2014, the publisher de Gruyter took over the publication of what used to be the BBIAS and divided this into two separate publications: the BIAS and the JIAS which are accessible to current members through the membership section on the International Arthurian Society website: [End Page 100] http://www.internationalarthuriansociety.com. If you do not have access, contact Secretary-Treasurer Evelyn Meyer, (evelyn.meyer@slu.edu). The JIAS publications are sent out annually, the development of the database to house our bibliography is still in development.
Your BIAS Abstracts: Members are reminded that for inclusion in the society's annual bibliography, they should send bibliographic entries and abstracts for articles or books published in the US in 2017 to Ann Howey (ahowey@brocku.ca). For publications in other countries, please submit those to the respective Branch bibliographers.
minutes of the international arthurian society–north american branch business meeting, held at the 52nd annual international congress on medieval studies in kalamazoo, michigan, may 12, 2017 at 12:00 noon:
The meeting was called to order at 12:03 p.m. by Kevin Whetter, presiding.
K. Whetter introduced himself and Evelyn Meyer respectively as branch President and Secretary-Treasurer. The agenda published in Arthuriana 27.1. was adopted.
james randall leader essay prize: Kevin Whetter presented this year's Leader Prize to Richard H. Godden (in absentia). The citation read:
'The number of outstanding articles in the pool for the 2017 James Randall Leader Prize was daunting, and I am extremely grateful to my fellow judges for their meticulous work in choosing this year's prize winner. While a number of essays contended valorously in the final grand meleé, the judges unanimously awarded the champion's garland to Richard H. Godden's "Gawain and the Nick of Time: Fame, History, and the Untimely in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" [Arthuriana 26.4 (Winter 2016): 152-73].
Godden's essay confronts the central question of chivalric identity in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, addressing the interweaving concerns of personal identity and Fame, time and the untimely, arguing ultimately that "the untimeliness of Gawain's fame drags in its wake a future that the poem seeks to banish, yet cannot seem to forget" (153). This concern with time, polychronicity, and the untimely is brought to bear in the first section, "The Time is Out of Joint," where Godden reads time in the poem as non-linear, porous, and ultimately metatextual in nature. The "first age" of the Arthurian court hides an anxiety about communal identity and the fame of the court, a fame whose "spectral quality" (157) is laid bare by the untimely arrival of the Green Knight. This interrogation of future-past reputation continues in [End Page 101] "Remembrance of Names Past," where Godden returns to the question of Gawain's intertextual identity and the shadow that it throws upon the young hero's adventures, convincingly revealing "fame's spectrality" through a deft analysis of Gawain's multiple, fragmented, and polychronic identities (164). In the third movement, "Haunted Futures," the essay turns to the fraught question of the girdle itself, arguing—in a damning...