Carol Braun Pasternack

Carol Braun Pasternack (1950 – September 2, 2020) was a professor of medieval English literature and language at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) from 1988 to 2013. She chaired the Medieval Studies department, and was also Dean of Summer Sessions at UCSB in 2011–2013.

Education

Pasternack received her PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1983.

Research

Her research interests included history of the English language, Old and Middle English literature, theories concerning oral tradition (especially the techniques of scops or oral poets) and textual transmission of early medieval texts, feminist approaches to medieval literature, and sex and gender in the early Middle Ages.

Her first monograph was The Textuality of Old English Poetry, published by Cambridge University Press in 1995. In The Textuality of Old English Poetry, Pasternack argued for the techniques of transmission of oral and textual poetry: "In a primary oral culture, to solve effectively the problem of retaining and retrieving carefully articulated thought, you have to do your thinking in mnemonic patterns, shaped for ready oral recurrence." (p. 62), and "Whenever scribes who are part of the oral traditional culture write or copy traditional oral works, they do not merely mechanically hand them down; they rehear them, 'mouth' them, 'reperform' them in the act of writing in such a way that the text may change but remain authentic, just as a completely oral poet's text changes from performance to performance without losing authenticity" (p. 27). Rosamund S. Allen, writing in the Modern Language Review in 1997 praised Pasternack for "establishing new ways of reading Old English [...] reject[ing] the 'New Critical' mode of treating Old English poems like modern written texts, with definable boundaries and an identifiable author. Bridging the divide between oral and written texts that seems to invest much recent discussion, Pasternack instead invites readers to consider these both as inscribed texts and recordings of previously performed verse, which present aural rather than visual cues".