Schedule
Wednesdays, 4.15-6.45 p.m., in Room Phil 204
24 September: The 'Shakespeare's Lyric Poetry' SNSF Project: A Work-in-Progress Report (Lukas Erne, Charlotte Potter, and Andy Reilly (UNIGE)
8 October: Work-in-progress papers by Diana Denissen (UNIL) and Georgia Fulton (UNIGE)
22 October: Aspects of Professionalization, led by Lukas Erne and Devani Singh (UNIGE)
12 November: Dr Ben Higgins (Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford), ‘The Places of Literature’
Where did reading happen? In what ways might we think about literary activity as conditioned by the environment in which that activity takes place? Our focus on libraries and studies as the organising environments of reading and writing in pre-modern periods risks neglecting the many alternative spaces in which books were carried, stored, and used. These different spaces, from the metal ‘forme’ of the printing press to the frost fairs found on the frozen Thames, solicited different modes of interpretive strategies and formal practice. Attending to these different spaces (both physical and conceptual) offers one way to overhaul the histories of reading and of book use, dragging manuscripts and printed texts out of the library and into the streets, pockets, and coffins of pre-modernity. Dr Higgins’ focus will be on the early modern period, but participants working on other periods are encouraged to attend and to reflect on and share their insights into the places of literature relevant to their work.
The workshop, which is part of a CUSO doctoral programme one-day event, will be preceded by an introductory exchange between Dr Higgins and participants (11 a.m., room tba), lunch, and a lecture by Dr Higgins (2.15 p.m., Phil 206).
26 November: Work-in-progress papers by Simone Camponovo (UNINE) and Kristen Haas Curtis (UNIFR)
10 December: Annette Kern-Stähler (University of Berne) and Mary Flannery (University of Berne), Disgust in the Middle English Literary Tradition
Wednesdays, 4.15-6.45 p.m., in Room Phil 204
26 February: Kirsten Stirling (UNIL), ‘Who from the Picture would avert his eye?’: John Donne, Visual Art, and the Cross
This workshop will present some of the findings from Prof. Stirling’s recent monograph Picturing Divinity
in John Donne’s Writings (Boydell & Brewer, 2024), focusing on previously unidentified sources which
illuminate the way Donne makes use of references to visual art in his work. In the second part of the session
we will look together at Donne’s poem “The Cross” in the light of another new source to be proposed—one
which clarifies some aspects of the poem but complicates others.
26 March: Collaborative Workshop, ‘Sonnets at Random’, introduced by Charlotte Potter (UNIGE) and Andy Reilly (UNIGE), cross-listed with the Doctoral Workshop in Modern and Contemporary
Literature in English
Drawing its inspiration from the Spenser Society’s “Spenser at Random” meetings, this workshop will engage participants in a collaborative close-reading of sonnets to be randomly selected from the work of a few sonneteers across the centuries, from Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti (1595) and William Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1609) to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850). In addition to questions of literary history, we will also reflect on the affordances of the sonnet form itself.
16 April: Work-in-progress papers by Chen Cui (UNIL) and Meg Duell (UNIL)
Wednesdays, 4.15-6.45 p.m., in Room Phil 204
25 September: work-in-progress papers by Mark Darcy (UNIGE) and Dr Lucie Kaempfer (UNIL)
9 October: Prof. Rory Critten (UNIL), Recovering Novelty in Early English Style
The novelty of writing in the vernacular was an effect that medieval and early modern authors were keen to exploit, but this effect is difficult to recapture now. What seemed new to them often seems old or odd to us. How can we recreate the excitement of hearing Chaucer’s or Shakespeare’s experiments in English for the first time? This interactive workshop will explore the ways in which online historical dictionaries (e.g. DOE, MED, OED, AND, DMF) can help us to start answering this question. Please bring a laptop or other portable device!
23 October: Prof. Paul B. Armstrong (Brown University), ‘Simulating Social Worlds: How “The Dead” Speaks Across Historical Distance’ (cross-listed with the Doctoral Workshop in Modern and Contemporary Literature in English)
Literary works make it possible for us to simulate the actions and interactions that constituted past social worlds by engaging in acts of imaginative participatory sense-making through which we interact with meanings held ready by the text. James Joyce’s story ‘The Dead’ (1914) is a rendering of a Christmas party in early twentieth-century Dublin that invites us to participate in animating the interactions through which a social gathering is constituted. This story provides a small-scale model of a paradox that characterizes all social worlds–namely, that the actions of individual agents engaged in coordinated, collaborative activity set in motion interactions that create a we-subject that goes beyond and is not reducible to those acts.
13 November: Prof. Robert Stagg (Texas A&M University), ‘Literary Form’ (part of CUSO one-day event)
This event centres on the subject of literary form, especially in the early modern period. We will think about the history of literary form(s), especially sonnet form and dramatic blank verse, and how ‘form’ corresponds to ‘style’. We will particularly consider the internationalism of early modern literary form, stretching well beyond Europe as it does, even if it has sometimes been regarded as an insular or insistently vernacular phenomenon. Most of all, we’ll think about what literary form does – how it interacts with, perhaps provides the foundation for, the ostensibly broader or bigger business of a literary text. The primary focus, here, will be on literary forms as they appear in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but these are questions with a wider resonance, and anyone interested in thinking about these matters, from any period, will be welcome, and will be able to have their work-in-progress discussed.
The workshop will be preceded by an introductory exchange between Prof. Stagg and participants (11 a.m., room tba), lunch, and a lecture by Prof. Stagg (2.15 p.m., Phil 206).
27 November: Bring a Text / Present a Problem Workshop
Each participant brings a short text and/or problem they have encountered in their research and has ten minutes to present it to or share it informally with the group. The text and/or problem can be of any kind, literary, critical, bibliographical, methodological, etc. The only requirements are that it/they be related to research and can be profitably shared with the group in ca. 10 minutes (including questions / feedback).