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English

Martine Watson Brownley
Icons, Iconoclasts, and Seventeenth-Century English Biography

Martine Watson Brownley
Goodrich C. White Professor of English
Director, Center for Humanistic Inquiry

In 1680, Gilbert Burnet, fresh from ministering to the Earl of Rochester during his final illness, raced into print with Some Passages of the Life and Death of the … Earl of Rochester. Burnet was a notorious gossip, and Rochester obviously an ideal subject for an aficionado of scandal; readers undoubtedly anticipated a lively text. Despite these potentially promising biographical circumstances, Some Passages is a dull read. Usually a generic experimenter, in biography Burnet stayed resolutely conventional, as did almost all of his contemporaries. Various formal constraints that shaped biographical writing during the period dictated their conventionality, and evaluation of these parameters, in turn, raises questions about our current understanding of biography as a genre. Seventeenth-century biography was shaped primarily by the massive methodological and formal realignments that marked the historiography of the time. As the subject matter traditionally considered proper for history changed, writers experimented with new forms, many of them biographical. Plutarch’s terms of differentiation for biography and history, along with Bakhtin’s analyses of the conventions of classical biography, highlight the a number of the major reasons why seventeenth-century English biographers consistently produced static hagiographies.

From our contemporary perspectives on biography, the public, exemplary, and atemporal elements that shaped the accounts of Burnet and others are precisely what blocked the development of biographical discourse as we now know it—accurate chronological narratives of the lives and characters of individuals. But seventeenth-century biographical practices also interrogate our own priorities in life writing, suggesting, for example, that the literary history that we have constructed may overemphasize the narrative roots of biography while underestimating the influence of classical and medieval rhetoric. Questions about the relationship of biography to history and the validity of the dominant critical taxonomies for biography partially explain continuing contemporary complaints that biography lacks a poetics, while the answers to these questions suggest some of the points from which we might begin the task of constructing one.

Sheila Cavanagh
Tragic Humor: Macbeth as Comedy

Delivered at World Shakespeare Congress, Kolkata, India, December 2004

Sheila Cavanagh, Professor, English

In conventional performances, Macbeth is not a terribly funny play. Filled with murder and mayhem, the bloody spectacle would not be the obvious first choice of those wanting a light-hearted evening out. Notably, however, Macbeth has frequently been adapted into humorous presentations, which often offer surprisingly insightful interpretations of the drama. In this talk, I will consider two modern puppet versions of Macbeth which can be linked to early modern theatrical practices. Drawing from Scott Shershaw's work on early modern puppetry and Lawrence Danson's analysis of pyrotechnics on the Renaissance stage, I will discuss ways that unconventional productions of classic drama continue long-standing theatrical traditions, while providing fresh perspectives on the plays.

Lawrence Jackson
"Ralph Ellison's Colonial Concern" at the University of Paris on March 26, 2006.

Lawrence P. Jackson
Associate Professor of English and African American Studies

"Ralph Ellison's Colonial Concern" explores the final drafts of the novel "Invisible Man." Relying upon recently made available materials from the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., the paper argues for important similarities between Ellison and Franz Fanon around 1951-1952. Ellison's character "Leroy" provides the most startling glimpse at a broad project of revolutionary decolonization to which Ellison is rarely connected. Ellison's character posed combinations of militant violence and sly humanism for which Fanon became famous when he published his book "The Wretched of the Earth."

Richard Rambuss
Homodevotion and the Disciple Jesus Loved

Plenary address, "Queer Keywords," University College, Dublin

Richard Rambuss, Professor of English

This lecture addresses the current cultural celebrity of Jesus and his Passion mates, Mary Magdalene and John the Beloved Disciple in view of Mel Gibson’s blockbuster film The Passion of the Christ and Dan Brown’s best-selling religio-conspiracy thriller The Da Vinci Code. Both works claim, each in its own way, to be recovering for contemporary audiences some crucial, but now obscured, corporeal texture of the life of Jesus. In Gibson’s exhibitionistically sadistic film, it’s the overwhelming physical suffering that Jesus experienced during the Passion. Brown’s Christology is more concerned with what might be regarded as another version of the Passion of the Christ. Namely that Jesus was especially passionate about one of his first female followers, Mary Magdalene: passionate enough to marry and start a family with her. The Da Vinci Code thus performs a makeover of the Magdalene, turning her from the (converted) prostitute and exemplary penitent of Christian tradition into a good wife and mother. What’s more, in the novel’s centerpiece re-reading of Leonardo’s "Last Supper," Mary the wife displaces John the Beloved (male) disciple—and all that he might signify in terms of male "homodevotion" and alternative forms of intimate association outside the family and (sacred) domesticity.

Deborah White
"Anniversaries: Exiles and the Memory of 1848"

Deborah Elise White, Associate Professor, English and Comparative Literature, Emory University

My research at the British Library focused on the continental European exiles who came to England in the wake of the failed revolutions of 1848 and, specifically, on how the exile community's anniversary commemorations of past revolutionary events became occasions for the exiles to understand their seemingly failed relation to history. My work gives special attention to the role played by Victor Hugo who delivered several important speeches for these anniversary banquets. The materials I looked at are either unavailable in the United States or scattered in different special collections. These include rare pamphlets reprinting speeches given at anniversary commemorations held in Paris during the 1848 revolution. I also compared detailed accounts of banquets held by the exiles in England during the 1850's as reported in the exile's leading francophone journals, including L'homme (already the subject of important scholarship by Silvie Aprile) as well as in the English Chartist People's Paper. Accounts in the Francophone press suggest how firmly the discourse of the date "itself" as something bearing a quasi-sacred status took hold among the French and Italian exiles in particular. They also clarify to what degree the anniversary banquets were scenes of ritualized mourning as well as political debate. Reports on anniversary banquets were also notable for an emphasis on their international character. In addition to these pamphlets and journals, I also looked at first editions of Hugo's anniversary banquet speeches and eulogies for his fellow exiles—works which were published as independent duodecimo volumes. These include striking reflections on the significance of dates in the experience and conceptualization of history. Though the texts are available in modern scholarly editions, the first editions are of interest for their format as well as for textual variants. I also looked at a first edition of Felix Pyat's Loisirs d'exil which includes several passages meditating in half-mystical, half-ironic fashion on the significance of revolutionary dates. Arguably, such meditations are, like much anniversary rhetoric, an evasion of genuine historical self-understanding, but they may also have provided a point of departure for the invention of new historical and political identities. I drew on this research for a paper I delivered in Montreal this August at the 2005 meeting of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism.