Rankovic, Slavica

Foto: UiB

Phone: (+47) 55 58 30 43
E-mail: slavica.rankovic@cms.uib.no

Project Title:
Immanent Seas, Scribal Havens: The Bad Name of Formula and the Good Work of Formulopoesis in the Sagas of Icelanders

Project Summary:
There appear to be such things in the world as Egils saga, Njáls saga, Laxdæla saga (Íslendingasǫgur we call them), but then, there are doubtless such things as AM 162 fol.,
fragm. theta, AM 132, fol., Lbs 1421 8vo, GKS 1003 fol., ÍB 226 4to, which we trust to be either parts of the former or to feature them as parts instead. Then, over the sea of editions forgotten and new, diplomatic, normalized, translated, digitized, there tower the Íslenzk fornrit volumes, which in the passions of reading and scholarly analysis become, often with little or sometimes no reserve, the Íslendingasǫgur. And then, there is this other sea too, ‘det muntliga havet’ (Tommy Danielsson), that primordial soup where, scholars now agree, the sagas first started taking their many and variously sized protean shapes, only to dissolve the next moment, re-assemble again, always differently yet more and more stably, until some such formulations found themselves entangled among the inky webs of expert scribes. Fluid as they were and continued to be in this new medium too, we now imagine these quasi-forms seeping through again, spilling over and replenishing the sea of orality in turn with the souvenirs of their scribal passage. Finally, unlike the familiar bulk of the AM 132, fol., for example, with its concretizing paraphernalia of letters and numbers and reassuringly furnished with a name that seems to locate it (Mǫðruvallabók), there are those precious ‘first’, and very much lost fols, 4tos, 8vos, exuding such strong puzzle-appeal from the murky depths of the oblivion that one would be hard pressed to find a saga scholar who did not, at one time or another, ponder the mystery of their creation.

But what then, and indeed where and when, is a saga?

The infantile ring of this question is, of course, only indicative of its foundational and incalculably consequential character. So much so, in fact, that entertaining such an openended problematic at any one time appears to be a luxury entirely out of sync with the daily urgency of a dedicated scholarly work. It is telling, however, that when it was last confronted head-on, the puzzle was given the fabulous name of ‘immanence’ (Clover, Foley), as if to draw some comfort from the possibility that inscrutability is its ultimate answer. Motivated by these considerations and building on my previous research, I will dedicate the next two years to these works of immanence, or rather, to immanence as work, whose nuts and bolts are the tradition’s tissues, its folios, fragments, idioms and phrases, formless attitudes as well as tangible forms, preserved as well as presupposed – the play of formulaic structures we variously understand in terms of ‘traditional referentiality’ (Foley), ‘formulopoesis’ (Koljević), or even ‘play’ or ‘economy’ in general (Derrida).

Select Publications:

Edited Books
  • With Ingvil Brügger-Budal, Aidan Keally Conti, Leidulf Melve and Else Mundal, Tradition and the Individual Talent: Modes of Authorship in the Middle Ages (Toronto: The Pontifical Institute for Medieval Studies Press, forthcoming).
  • With Else Mundal and Leidulf Melve, Along the Oral-Written Continuum: Types of Texts, Relations and their Implications (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010).  

Articles
  • With Miloš Ranković, ‘The Talent of the Distributed Author’, in: Tradition and the Individual Talent: Modes of Authorship in the Middle Ages, ed. Slavica Ranković et al. (Toronto: The Pontifical Institute for Medieval Studies Press, forthcoming).
  • ‘The Oral-Written Continuum as a Space’, in: Along the Oral-Written Continuum: Types of Texts, Relations and their Implications, ed. Slavica Ranković et al. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), pp. 37-68.
  • ‘Communal Memory of the Distributed Author: Applicability of the Connectionist Model of Memory to the Study of Traditional Narratives’, in: The Making of Memory in the Middle Ages, ed. Lucie Doležalová (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010), pp. 9-26.
  • ‘Who is speaking in traditional texts? On the Distributed Author of the Sagas of Icelanders and Serbian Epic poetry’, New Literary History 2007, 38(2): 239-307.
  • ‘Golden Ages and Fishing Grounds: the Emergent Past in the Sagas of Icelanders’. Saga-Book 2006, 30: 39-64.

Reviews
  • New Directions in Oral Theory: Essays on Ancient and Medieval Literatures, Mark C. Amodio, ed. The Medieval Review, 2007, available at: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t /text/text-idx? c=tmr;cc=tmr;q1=Rankovic;rgn=main;view=text;idno=baj9928.0702.010
  • DuBois, Thomas A. Lyric, Meaning and Audience in the Oral Tradition of Northern Europe. Poetics of Orality and Literacy, The Medieval Review, 2007, available at: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=tmr;cc=tmr;q1=Rankovic;rgn=main;view=text;idno=baj9928.0707.010

CV:
Born 1971 in Smederevo, Serbia (former Yugoslavia). 1990–1992 studied Comparative Literature at the University of Belgrade. 1999: B.A. (Hons.) English Literature and Language, University of Leeds, UK. 2001: M.A. (by Research) in Slavonic Studies and English Literature, University of Nottingham, UK. Thesis title: Marko Kraljević Meets Grettir the Strong: A Comparative Study of Characterisation in Serbian Epic Poetry and the Sagas of Icelanders. 2006: PhD in English Literature and Slavonic Studies, University of Nottingham. Thesis title: The Distributed Author and the Poetics of Complexity: A Comparative Study of the Sagas of Icelanders and Serbian Epic Poetry. I have taught and/or been a teaching assistant for courses in Old Norse Literature (at both B.A. and M.A. levels), Literary Theory, Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian Literatures (various periods), as well as Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian Languages (M.A. in Translation Studies) at the Universities of Nottingham and Manchester. From 2006 to 2010 I conducted postdoctoral study at the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Bergen, Norway. My project was entitled: Between the Genius of the People and the Genius among the People: The Aesthetics of Distributed Authorship in Oral and Orally Derived Verbal Art.

Publications and activities registered in CRISTIN