An Errant Eye - Deciphering Maps as Poetry, and Poems as MapsAn Errant Eye - Deciphering Maps as Poetry, and Poems as Mapshttp://www.haverford.edu/calendar/details/156751Stokes 102 - Humanities Center2010-10-20T16:15:002010-10-20T18:00:00
October 20, 4:15PM
Stokes 102 - Humanities Center
Talk by Tom Conley, Abbot Lawrence Lowell Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies and of Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard University
Description
An Errant Eye studies how topography, the art of describing local space and place, developed literary and visual form in early modern France. Arguing for a “new poetics of space” ranging throughout French Renaissance poetry, prose, and cartography, Tom Conley performs dazzling readings of maps, woodcuts, and poems to plot a topographical shift in the late Renaissance in which space, subjectivity, and politics fall into crisis. He charts the paradox of a period whose demarcation of national space through cartography is rendered unstable by an ambient world of printed writing.
About the Speaker
Tom Conley is a scholar of extraordinary distinction in early modern writing, cartography, visual culture, French and comparative literary studies and contemporary film. As the Abbott Lawrence Lowell Professor in the Department of Romance Languages at Harvard, Conley has served as chair and director of Graduate Studies in French, directs the Renaissance Seminar at the Harvard Humanities Center, and has also led the Film Studies Department and the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies. A scholar of keen imagination and scope, Conley is the author of several seminal works: Film Hieroglyphs: Ruptures in Classical Cinema (1991; 2006), The Graphic Unconscious in Early Modern French Writing (1992; 2006), The Self Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France (1996; 2010) and Cartographic Cinema (2007). For his talk at Haverford, titled "An Errant Eye," Conley will introduce some of the ideas from his most recent book (of the same title), which is slated to appear in December. As he describes his talk, "some of the main lines of the new book would be threaded through images and texts taken from emblems, maps, and woodcuts of the years 1530-1590. The work moves along the cusp of art history and literature." Organized by David Sedley and Israel Burshatin; sponsored by the John B. Hurford ’60 Humanities Center, in collaboration with the Department of French and Francophone Studies, the Program in Comparative Literature, and the Distinguished Visitors Program. haverford.edu/hhc
Link: http://www.haverford.edu/hhc
For More Info
Hurford Humanities Center
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