Thomas Ohlgren

Purdue University, English, Emeritus

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Address: 136 Sumac Drive
West Lafayette, IN 47906

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Papers by Thomas Ohlgren

Medieval Literature and Social Politics: Studies of Cultures and Their Contexts by Stephen Knight

Arthuriana

not constituted in relation to masculine fantasies or demands. Rather than nightmares of women’s ... more not constituted in relation to masculine fantasies or demands. Rather than nightmares of women’s affective and embodied fluidity, this romance instead charts the ways that an impenetrable feminine body produces desires that cannot be contained by masculinist fantasies of penetration or manipulation. It is only with his Thisbe, whom Allen-Goss considers alongside Ariadne in Chapter Five, that Chaucer creates a narrative of feminine innocence that might exceed the phallic logic that a masculinist hermeneutic demands. By reading these women’s relation to veiling and reading, Chaucer’s legends entertain the possibility of lesbian-like erotic that admits feminine desire through gaps and openings in edifices conventionally drawn to render women’s bodies as available to men’s sexual domination. By circumscribing the desire Chaucer associates with these women, these legends mark feminine eroticism as deviant in a way that assures Chaucer’s own gendered authority. In Chapter Six, Allen-Goss turns to the late fifteenth-century romance, Undo Your Door, to argue that ‘female sexuality [is] represented as a transgressive yet creative force, which . . . assembles its own objects of desire from inanimate materials and from mechanisms disturbingly reminiscent of the objects medieval writers associated with same-sex desire and female autoerotic satisfaction’ (p. 166). By showing how women’s desire is associated with inanimacy, this popular and influential romance critiques the conventional procreative impetus of the genre, particularly its reliance on women’s passivity. This study is groundbreaking for its willingness to rethink how overlooked genres—romance and legend—might admit female same-sex desires that are usually proscribed or overwritten. Yet the analysis of romance is more persuasive, mainly because Allen-Goss explains how the very marginality of such stories might be conducive to an alternative hermeneutics. With Chaucer, Allen-Goss is convinced that women’s desire is ultimately conscripted to support a version of masculinist auctoritas informed by Jerome’s misogynist version of hermeneutics. I disagree, mainly because I am more interested in where women might take these narratives than where ‘father Chaucer’ wanted them to go. Despite this difference, I view AllenGoss’s call to consider feminine desire outside or beyond the structures of masculine fantasies as one of the most important interventions in feminist critical thought for late medieval English literary studies.

Media Texts and Readers

Communication Booknotes, 1977

Don R. Pember's Mass Media in America (Chicago: Science Research Associates, 1977—price not g... more Don R. Pember's Mass Media in America (Chicago: Science Research Associates, 1977—price not given, paper) Michael R. Real's Mass-Mediated Culture (Englewood Cliffs, NJ.: Prentice-Hall, 1977—$8.50, paper) Michael C. Emery and Ted Curtis Smythe, eds. Readings in Mass Communication: Concepts and Issues in the Mass Media (Dubuque, Iowa: Wm C. Brown, 1977—price not given, paper) Fredric Rissover and David C. Birch, eds. Mass Media and the Popular Arts (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977—price not given, paper) Thomas H. Ohlgren and Lynn M. Berk, eds. The New Languages: A Rhetorical Approach to the Mass Media and Popular Culture (400 pp., $7.95, paper) Leonard Sellers and William L. Rivers, eds. Mass Media Issues: Articles and Commentaries (384 pp., $7.95, paper) Peter M. Sandman, David M. Rubin, and David B. Sachsman, eds. Media Casebook: An Introductory Reader in American Mass Communications (288 pp., $6.95, paper)

Anglo-Saxon Art: A New Perspective. C. R. Dodwell

Speculum, 1984

... use of the religious community which daily raises praise to God in Christ Church; on conditio... more

Conference on Computerized Inventory Standards for Works of Art: A Review

Visual Resources, Sep 1, 1980

Medieval outlaws : ten tales in modern English

Earl Godwin, from the life of King Edward the deeds of Hereward Eustache the Monk the outlaw'... more Earl Godwin, from the life of King Edward the deeds of Hereward Eustache the Monk the outlaw's song of Trailbaston Fouke Fitz Waryn the tale of Gamelyn the saga of An Bow-Bender a gest of Robyn Hood Adam Bell, Clim of the Clough and William of Cloudesley from the acts and deeds of Sir William Wallace.

The Bodleian Library Slide Collection at Purdue: Guides to Illustrated Prose <i>Lancelot</i> Manuscripts

Arthuriana, 2009

Founded by Thomas H. Ohlgren in the early 1970s, by the year 2000 the Bodleian Slide Collection a... more Founded by Thomas H. Ohlgren in the early 1970s, by the year 2000 the Bodleian Slide Collection at Purdue University had grown to 1099 slide sets of the illuminated pages and partial texts from the chief Western manuscripts and early printed books—dating from the ninth through the sixteenth centuries—in the Bodleian, several Oxford College libraries, and several other libraries. Sold as unmounted rolls of color transparency film, the 35 mm transparencies were mounted as slides for use by faculty and students in the Medieval Studies program at Purdue and have proved an invaluable resource for those in the university community interested in exploring the images and iconography of the medieval world. Today, the slides in the collection number well over 20,000 and include images ranging from medieval maps, luxurious carpet pages, herbals, bestiaries, marginalia, objects excavated at archaelogical digs, and more. For a time in the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s the slide sets were available for rental by people outside Purdue University, but this practice was stopped because of the high maintenance costs. (For an online list of the collection, go to http://www.cla.purdue.edu/medieval-studies/Ohlgren/index.html.)