[Hum_Calendar_Events] May 19th - N + 2: A Renaissance Poetics of Enumeration - a lecture by Christopher Johnson

[CDH Service Desk]

UCLA | Department of Spanish and Portuguese
&
Early Modern Cosmopolitanisms
a lecture series sponsored by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for
Transformational Support in the Humanities

present

Christopher Johnson (Harvard University)

N + 2: A Renaissance
Poetics of Enumeration

May 19th, 2011 | Humanities 193 | 4 pm

This talk will explore a late Renaissance poetics of enumeration and how it informs lyric and
encyclopedic impulses. Parataxis, list-making, summation schema, and related strategies, it
argues, help François Rabelais, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, George Herbert, Guillaume du Bartas,
Quirinus Kuhlmann, and others to discover the limits of expression, self, and world. Indicative
at once of boundless material, rhetorical, and epistemological ambitions, such a poetics is also
a form of zero-degree writing that self-consciously flirts with redundancy and aporia.

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON (Comparative Literature, Harvard) teaches and writes about early
modern literature and intellectual history. Recent publications include his monograph,
Hyperboles: The Rhetoric of Excess in Early Modern Literature and Thought (HSCL, 2010), and a
bilingual edition of the Selected Poetry of Francisco de Quevedo (University of Chicago Press,
2009), which he translated and edited. He is currently finishing a book on Aby Warburg's
"Mnemosyne" and is working on book project about the rhetoric and epistemologies of late
Renaissance encyclopedism.


[cid:part1.00030704.01030909 at humnet.ucla.edu]
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