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SUMMARY:The Places of Early Modern Criticism - Speaker to be confirmed
DTSTART:20150323T090000Z
DTEND:20150323T180000Z
UID:TALK55724@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:24901
DESCRIPTION:What is criticism?  There is a telling irony in the fact that 
 a word concerned with the making of clear separations and distinctions (< 
 Greek krinein) should be used of early modern practices so various and so 
 very often blurred in their disciplinary affiliation\, method\, aim\, and 
 indeed location.  Thinking about literature and the visual arts is found i
 n many places – in treatises on the arts of poetry or painting\; in defe
 nces\, apologies\, praises\, and paragoni\; in critical prefaces\, dedicat
 ory epistles\, commendatory verses\, letters\, and essays\; in commentarie
 s\, editions\, reading notes\, and commonplace books\; within or on the th
 resholds of works of poetry and painting (and in the on-stage audience of 
 the play-within-a-play).  It is situated between different disciplines and
  methods – borrowing structure\, terminology\, and taxonomy from rhetori
 c and logic\, for example\, or using the analogy of one art to think about
  another\, as when Renaissance literary theorists build on a long traditio
 n (it is there in Aristotle\, and in Homer) of thinking about the visual a
 rts in order to think about poetry\, fiction\, and mimēsis.  Critical ide
 as and methods come into England from other places\, most notably Italy\, 
 France\, and the Low Countries\, and take root in particular locations –
  the court\, the Inns of Court\, the theatre\, the great house\, the unive
 rsity hall\, school\, and library.  And commonplaces of classical poetics 
 and rhetoric – decorum\, speaking pictures\, nature and art\, necessity 
 and probability – serve both to connect and to measure the space between
  different critical discourses.  Tracing the history of the development of
  early modern thinking about literature and the visual arts therefore requ
 ires that one think about various kinds of place – both material and tex
 tual – and the practices particular to those places\; it also requires t
 hat those different places be brought into dialogue with each other.  This
  is work that has yet to be done\, and its lack accounts for the ongoing r
 eluctance of many critics\, literary historians\, and art historians to en
 gage fully with early modern thinking about the very materials they study.
   This conference will bring together scholars working in departments of E
 nglish\, modern languages\, classics\, and art history to look at the many
  different places of early modern criticism.  It aims to initiate a dialog
 ue involving scholars who are interested in the scope of criticism\, and i
 n looking at what happens on its margins\; and who are keen to interrogate
  their own critical practices and disciplinary methods by investigating th
 eir history.
LOCATION:CRASSH\, Alison Richard Building\, 7 West Road\, Cambridge\, CB3 
 9DP
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