Christopher Wood, NYU "A New Approach to the European Local Legends"

Cherpack Lounge, 543 Williams Hall, 5:15 - 6:30 pm.

Organized by the Department of Francophone, Italian, and Germanic Studies, with History of Art co-sponsorship.

ABSTRACT

The local legends of premodern Europe were short, unsophisticated, one might say “homemade” stories about inexplicable and uncanny incidents.  They relayed hearsay and news as well as local oral (or oralized written) traditions about the past.  They often drew upon a repertoire of conventional ghostly characters, or topoi:  revenants, poltergeists, water-spirits, changelings, dwarves and elves, werewolves, and the like.  Completely absent from the narratives is the Christian Church and its clerics. 

The legends are neglected by all the disciplines:  by historians because they seem so untrustworthy as evidence of actual practices or “beliefs,” and by literary scholars because they are so artless and plain.  

The legends, or Sagen, are not be confused with Grimm’s fairy tales (Märchen).  The narratives I am dealing with do not deliver satisfying plots, nor do they offer clear, edifying lessons or convertible wisdom.  Instead they mostly recount failures, misunderstandings, and disappointments.

Many such legends were transferred into writing and in fact directly into print in the 16th and 17th centuries.  These were later gathered, adapted back into pseudo-oral form, and reprinted by the Brothers Grimm (1816, 1818) and others in the 19th century.

I seek to develop a new way of reading these philological Sorgenkinder that instead grasps them as narrativized representations of encounters between ordinary people and extraordinary phenomena (whether real or fictional is irrelevant).  My thesis is that the topoi served as a commons, and as a medium, for reflection on the experience of running up against the outer edges of existence:  what it would feel like to encounter the living dead, or an outlaw; to face sex with a stranger, or discover an infant endowed with knowledge.  The narratives picture the bodily and affective experience of the unwanted confrontation with alterity.  As such the stories may be assigned a leading role in the prehistory of modern narrative fiction.

Christopher Wood came to New York University in 2014.  From 1992 until 2014 he taught in the Department of History of Art at Yale University.  At Harvard University he was a Jacob Wendell Scholar and a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows. In 2002 he was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and a NEH Rome Prize Fellowship to the American Academy in Rome. In fall 2004 he was Ellen Maria Gorrissen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.  In 2011-12 he was a Member of the School for Historical Studies of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; and a Senior Fellow at the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften, Vienna.  In fall 2018 he was Visiting Professor at Villa I Tatti.  In summer 2023 he was Aby-Warburg-Stiftung Professor at the Warburg-Haus in Hamburg and in the coming academic year he will be a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin.  Christopher Wood is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

https://figs.sas.upenn.edu/events/2026/02/17/new-approach-european-local-legends