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Plenary lectures
The Elizabethans, Our Contemporaries Bebiano, Adriana Universidade de Coimbra (Portugal) Day and time: Thursday, 6th, at 18,30 Room: Sala "Europa"
If we accept Walter Benjamin’s claim that history is “time filled with the presence of the now”, it follows that all writing about the past is also a configuration of the present. Elizabethan lives and cultural practices have been subjected to constant rewriting and adaptation to present concerns. This process takes place across disciplinary fields – as much in historiography or in literary criticism as in fiction. Quotation of the past is used to give authority to present issues, as much in the easily recognized post-colonial, feminist or gender studies, as in the more idiosyncratic approaches. While imagination is applied as a tool of knowledge, imaginative reconstructions of the past are not circumscribed anymore to works of fiction, but spill over to such genres as biography or the cultural essay. What present fears and present fantasies emerge out of our rescriptings of sixteenth century British cultures? What current agendas are now visible in our (provisional) contemporary representations of the Elizabethans? Taking a handful of texts from different genres as a starting point, I will be looking into ways we represent ourselves while turning the Elizabethans into our contemporaries.
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Seventeenth-Century Women Playwrights and the Making of a Female Hero Cuder Domínguez, Pilar Universidad de Huelva (Spain) Day and time: Wednesday, 5th, at 10,30 Room: Sala "Europa"
The development of women’s writing in English throughout the seventeenth century is quite extraordinary. In the field of drama, women participated not only as spectators or readers, but more and more as patronesses, as playwrights, and later on as actresses and even as managers. Yet some dramatic forms proved more resilient than others to women’s coming to voice. Comedies were more flexible, as their conventions allowed for female characters—heroines--as mates and nearly equals to the young male hero. But tragedies demanded high-born, authoritative and powerful characters, and such defining traits seemed to be the prerogative of the male. The question, then, for these women playwrights, was to what extent one could bend the dramatic conventions to accommodate women’s heroic behaviour. How can one construct a female hero and yet not masculinize her in the attempt? Is it possible to rethink the traits of the heroic to include, rather than exclude, women? This paper engages with the ensuing problems and conflicts by looking into the work of three women dramatists of the period: Elizabeth Cary, Margaret Cavendish, and Aphra Behn. - o O o -
A New Kind of Dictionary for Shakespeare’s Plays: An Immodest Proposal Culpeper, Jonathan Lancaster University (United Kingdom) Day and time: Thursday, 6th, at 11,30 Room: Sala "Europa"
Surveying the current state of affairs, the scholar must first be wary of volumes that carry the word ‘dictionary’. Some recent ‘dictionaries’, such as that of Wells (1998) and Boyce (1996), are not dictionaries of the language at all, but designed to help readers by setting the scene with biographical information about Shakespeare and cultural information about his milieu, and by assisting comprehension of the plays with plot summaries, character sketches, and so on. The language of Shakespeare’s plays, however, has received substantial treatment in various ‘dictionaries’, ‘glossaries’, ‘lexica’ and ‘concordances’. The classic work must be Charles T. Onions’s Glossary (1986), written in the philological tradition that characterised the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), and providing pithy definitions and illustrative quotations. Similar to Onions, though with the merit of being much more comprehensive, is Schmidt’s two-volumed Lexicon (1971). However, dictionaries in the Onions tradition tend to have the following limitations: The focus on ‘hard words’ means that whole areas of vocabulary get missed out or inadequately treated, and this particularly applies to many frequently occurring items. The account of the usage of lexical items in context is inadequate Words are treated as single isolated units. Word meanings are dealt with in isolation. Grammatical treatment is limited to supplying part-of-speech labels. In cases where more than one label applies, there is little sense of the weightings of the various labels. Of course, none of these limitations decries the considerable scholarly achievements of these dictionaries. More recent publications, notably the Crystal and Crystal (2002) and Blake (2004), do go some way in addressing the first two bullet-points above. However, none of these dictionaries have availed themselves of the full potential that recent developments in corpus linguistics afford. In the same way that the Collins Cobuild English Language Dictionary heralded a revolution in modern lexicography, as it departed from the philological techniques typical of the OED and used a corpus-based methodology, so, I would argue, it is time to bring about a revolution in Shakespearean dictionaries. Essentially, this means incorporating frequency of usage as a central factor. Frequency is not an unknown factor in Shakespearean work, as Marvin Spevack’s (1986-1980) Concordance attests, but, strangely, it has not been central to dictionaries. Crystal and Crystal (2002) do – it must be acknowledged – take a step in the right direction, as they used concordances of Shakespeare’s works to produce usage-based definitions, but their conception of words is still essentially the same as that of Onions and they do not go as far as they could in incorporating frequency information, as they admit on their own website. In my paper, I will deploy a number of case studies, in order to show how techniques developed in corpus linguistics can be used to produce a new kind of dictionary based on usage. I will discuss a marginal word (e.g. ‘ah’), a fairly frequent word (e.g. ‘good’), a particular semantic field (e.g. ‘pain’), and the parts-of-speech and grammatical patterns relating to a particular word (e.g. ‘part’). Along the way, I will touch on familiar notions in corpus linguistics, such as collocation, cluster (multiword unit), keyword and grammatical and semantic annotation.
REFERENCES
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Catching the Sense at Two Removes?: Love's senses Robson, Mark University of Notthingham (United Kingdom) Day and time: Friday, 7th, at 11,30 Room: Sala "Europa"
In the first of his two ‘Jordan’ poems, George Herbert questions the nature of poetic expression, asking whether it is necessary for poetry to strive for a complexity that ‘veils’ its meaning. In particular, he objects to the necessity for readers to ‘divine’ a sense that appears to be ‘at two removes’. For Herbert, truth is simple, and thus poetic expression should be similarly simple. As he puts it: ‘Is there in truth no beauty?’ In this paper, I will explore this question of the relationship between truth and beauty in early modern poetry and poetics emphasizing, as Herbert does, the role of the reader. Drawing on a range of examples, including Philip Sidney, Fulke Greville, William Shakespeare, Mary Wroth and a variety of rhetorical, philosophical and theoretical texts, I will open up the idea of an early modern aesthetic through thinking about the role that the senses play in reading. Love, in its varied senses, and in its appeals to the senses, offers a way in to thinking through a series of related topics: Does love make sense? What does love make us sense? Is there an ethical response to love, if we think of response in terms both of writing and of reading? Must love’s sense always be caught at two removes? - o O o - |