Schedule / Horaire
Saturday 26 April 2014, 9h-10h30.
Room: V106A.
Leader / Organisatrice
Subha Mukherji, University of Cambridge (UK)
Participants
- Lorna Hutson, University of St. Andrews (UK)
Imaginary Work: Lucrece’s Circumstances - Joe Moshenska, University of Cambridge (UK)
King Lear, Awkwardness, and Intention: Tolstoy’s Diatribe Reconsidered - Subha Mukherji, University of Cambridge (UK)
‘O she’s warm’: sense, assent and affective cognition in the early modern numinous
Abstracts / Résumés
1. Lorna Hutson, University of St. Andrews (UK)
Imaginary Work: Lucrece’s Circumstances
The transformation, over the eighteenth century, of the meaning of the vocabulary of ‘circumstances’ has made it hard for us to reconstruct the word’s earlier imaginative scope. This paper will show how sixteenth-century rhetoric and dialectic presented ‘circumstances’ not as contingent objective realities but as topics of proof and stimulants to emotion and imagination. By way of a reading of Shakespeare’s Lucrece, it will argue that Shakespeare’s key innovation as a dramatist was to discover that he could unfold dramatic action and character through the enargeia of circumstances.
2. Joe Moshenska, University of Cambridge (UK)
King Lear, Awkwardness, and Intention: Tolstoy’s Diatribe Reconsidered
In ‘Shakespeare and the Drama,’ Tolstoy denounced Shakespeare as aesthetically inadequate and morally bankrupt, and urged his ejection from the pantheon of literary greats. George Orwell aside, Tolstoy’s attack has been mostly dismissed as the bitter ravings of an old man whose powers were on the wane. This paper argues that Tolstoy’s attack on King Lear in fact allows us to reconsider that play as Shakespeare’s most radical experiment with theatrical personhood. The awkwardness Tolstoy finds in characters’ inexplicable actions is an inadvertently apt response to Shakespeare’s implicit insistence that we can neither know, nor avoid speculating about, others’ intentions.
3. Subha Mukherji, University of Cambridge (UK)
‘O she’s warm’: sense, assent and affective cognition in the early modern numinous
Sceptical distrust of the senses, as well as their theological devaluations, were commonplace in early modern culture. Yet the period’s literature repeatedly arrives at its perceptions of the numinous through the senses. I will focus on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Winter’s Tale to show how the senses provide a vocabulary for a particular form of knowing – an elusive apprehension of the numinous – that goes back to pre-modern theology and the spiritual senses tradition; but takes a hybrid form in the early modern theatre, bridging the gap between the historiographic binaries of the secular and religious ‘Renaissance’.