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391 BOOK REVIEWS How Soon is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time. By Carolyn Dinshaw. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. ISBN 978-0-82235367 -6. Pp. xix + 251. $23.95pb. ISBN 978-0-8223-5353-9. $84.95hb. About seven years ago in Kalamazoo, I joined a vast throng squeezing its way into Western Michigan University’s sweltering Stinson Lounge to hear four luminaries of medieval scholarship read papers. The first, and the one for whom I was most willing to suffer the heat and claustrophobia, was Carolyn Dinshaw. I was a new (though not particularly young) medievalist, but I knew Dinshaw to be a top scholar in medieval and gender studies, two of the fields most important to my own PhD work. Having read her excellent Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (1999), I also knew that Dinshaw was an expert at elucidating vital connections between medieval and contemporary culture, defying the popular, politically-correct image of medieval studies as hopelessly irrelevant and of medievalists as doddering relics of elitist academia utterly out of touch with real-world issues. I cannot say that medieval studies or medievalists in general have successfully dispelled this pejorative view in the intervening years, but I can certainly witness to Carolyn Dinshaw’s uncanny ability to demonstrate its falsity. In How Soon is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time, Dinshaw once again demonstrates the interwoven nature of the medieval, the modern, and the contemporary in her study of medievalism, the amateur, and time. How Soon is Now?, a re-thinking of modernist linear time, joins an increasing bodyofphilosophicalandinterdisciplinaryscholarshipdebatingourunderstanding of time as a linguistic, anthropological, social, and cultural construction. Dinshaw notes recent scholarly discussion of “the now” from ethnographer Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, physicist Martin Land, and anthropologist Jonathan Boyarin as evidence of the current relevance of this debate. She structures her exploration of multiplicitous, plastic, and unstable temporalities around the figure of the amateur medievalist of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and defines their amateurism not on the basis of being paid or unpaid, but on their “affections, their intimacy with their materials, their desires,” explaining that the amateurs’ “operation” outside the “culture of professionalism” opens them to experience temporal connections in ways foreclosed to the professional—thus necessarily detached and objective— academician (29, 25). In addition, she characterizes her amateurs as queered by their connections to the past, as well as by their separation from the linear temporality of patriarchal reproduction. Dinshaw’s amateurs include historian Frederick James Furnivall, authors Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Washington Irving (along with his creation Geoffrey Crayon), scholar Hope Emily Allen, as well as amateur medievalist Thomas Colpeper, who is a character from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s baffling 1944 motion picture A Canterbury Tale. She adds herself to the list of amateurs, as well, in spite of her professional success and recognition. The chapters of the book are generally structured around a medieval Christianity and Literature 392 text or group of texts that have been particularly loved by and influential upon one of these amateurs. Connecting the queerness of time and its concomitant links between medieval text and modern amateur with her own experiences of queerness and time, in each chapter Dinshaw enacts the temporal complexity that she seeks to elucidate: throughout the book the medieval impinges upon the modern, joins present with past, and blurs into in the now of Dinshaw’s contemporary lived experience. The introduction to How Soon is Now? opens Dinshaw’s examination of queerness and time through the lyrics of the 1984 song by The Smiths from which she takes her title. Noting the “shifty” meanings of the words “soon” and “now” in the song, she establishes the relative nature of time and the impossibility of fixing these notions outside of perception and context (2). Defining her project as an exploration of “forms of desirous, embodied being that are out of synch with the ordinarily linear measurements of everyday life, that engage heterogeneous temporalities or that precipitate out of time altogether,” Dinshaw situates her postulations about temporality in a theoretical tradition “starting … with Aristotle” and deeply influenced by Augustine (4, 2). In...

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