Carol Braun Pasternack facts for kids

Carol Braun Pasternack (born 1950, died September 2, 2020) was a university professor. She taught about medieval English literature and language. She worked at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). This was from 1988 to 2013. She also led the Medieval Studies department. Later, she was the Dean of Summer Sessions at UCSB.

Her Education

Carol Pasternack earned her PhD degree in 1983. She got it from the University of California, Los Angeles.

What She Studied

Carol Pasternack loved studying many things. She was interested in the history of the English language. She also studied Old and Middle English literature.

She looked at how stories were passed down. This included scops, who were oral poets. They told stories by speaking them, not writing them. She also studied how old texts were copied and shared.

Her Main Book

Her first big book was The Textuality of Old English Poetry. It came out in 1995. In this book, she talked about how poems were shared. Some were spoken, and some were written down.

She explained that in old times, people remembered things by using patterns. This helped them share stories by speaking them. She also said that when scribes (people who copied texts) wrote down old poems, they didn't just copy them. They "re-performed" them. This meant the text might change a little, but it was still true to the original.

A reviewer named Rosamund S. Allen praised her work. She said Carol Pasternack helped people read Old English in new ways. She showed that these old poems were both written texts and recordings of spoken stories.

Her Published Works

Carol Pasternack wrote many articles and chapters. Here are a few examples:

• Her article "Stylistic Disjunctions in The Dream of the Rood" was published in 1984.
• She also wrote "Anonymous polyphony and The Wanderer's textuality" in 1991. In this article, she suggested that the Old English poem The Wanderer had many voices. This was different from what others thought.
• She wrote a chapter called "PostStructuralist Theories: The Subject and the Text" in a 1997 book. In this chapter, she looked at different theories. She then used them to read parts of the famous poem Beowulf.

Books She Helped Edit

Carol Pasternack also helped edit other books:

• With A. N. Doane, she edited Vox intexta: Orality and Textuality in the Middle Ages (1991).
• With Sharon Farmer, she edited Gender and Difference in the Middle Ages (2003).

Her Life

Carol Pasternack passed away on September 2, 2020. She was 70 years old.