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Richard Utz, professor and chair in the Ivan Allen College School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech, authored the “‘Game of Thrones’ Among the Medievalists” making the case that trying to turn the globally popular television show into a means of encouraging future medieval scholars is misguided.
Excerpt:
Clearly, an impactful cultural phenomenon like GoT deserves to be read as a self-standing cultural artifact, not as a derivative of its potential medieval models or a pretext for sustaining an academic discipline. So far, too often, medievalists have shown a narrowly parasitic relationship with medievalist and neomedievalist cultural productions.