King Tut, the Duchess of Malfi and PoMo's decline
Monday last, went off to the see the Tutankhamun exhibition at the Melbourne Museum (go after lunch on any weekday and the session is not likely to be booked out). I greatly enjoyed it. I did not bother with the audio tape, as I like to form my own impressions. One can certainly see that Egypt influenced Greek sculpture, for example.
Then I walked across to Melbourne University to listen to a lecture on The Duchess of Malfi. The list email advertising the lecture described it as:
Mary Floyd Wilson (North Carolina, Chapel Hill) will be on campus next Monday 10 October to deliver a paper, “’To Think There’s Power in Potions’: Experiment, Sympathy, and the Devil in The Duchess of Malfi.”
This paper on Webster's Duchess of Malfi comes from Prof. Floyd-Wilson's current book-length project, Secret Sympathies, which contributes to the history of emotion by demonstrating that pre-eighteenth-century conceptions of nature's sympathies and antipathies (traditionally linked to magic) were integral to common, everyday interpretations of affect. But beyond its interest in an affective history, Secret Sympathies shows that the construction of scientific thought, as it began to emerge in the seventeenth century, depended on subduing the occult power historically invested in women's bodies, while also arrogating the occult knowledge long associated with female experience. By bringing this obscured boundary work to light, this project also moves our discussion of the transvestite theatre beyond the performative nature of sexual and gendered identity to consider how an all-male stage countered the cultural fear of women's embodied occult powers.
I was a bit worried I would get some capital 'T' Theory piece or PoMo waffle.
Fortunately no: instead, it was a very sensible and grounded lecture on the play and surrounding period attitudes. I did not ask any question during the discussion period (as I have not actually read the play) but I did approach her afterwards and we had a nice discussion on melancholia as depression, despair as a sin and the ambiguities of widowhood.
On the matter of matters PoMo, two recent straws in the wind. I was listening to a lunchtime paper a couple of weeks ago at Melbourne University by a DutchBelgian graduate student who is writing a monograph in Dutch on the fall of the Western Roman Empire (there not being such a monograph in Dutch). Unfortunately, I have not been able to get to all his papers, but have greatly enjoyed the ones I have attended. He has a very fine sense of sources and their limitations. At the most recent one I attended, he was presenting a paper on Aetius, the Attila and Battle of the Catalaunian Plains. In the course of his presentation he referred to "the scourge on historiography that is postmodernism". While I realise a classics audience is not likely to be a bastion of postmodernism, I thought his public derision noteworthy.
On Friday, I had not been able to get some garb that morning for a new female presenter. She just said "oh well, I can be a postmodern peasant". Two bright, educated twenty somethings who take it for granted that PoMo is a joke. It gives one hope for the future, it does.
ADDENDA Due to recurring spam attacks, comments on this entry have been locked.
Then I walked across to Melbourne University to listen to a lecture on The Duchess of Malfi. The list email advertising the lecture described it as:
Mary Floyd Wilson (North Carolina, Chapel Hill) will be on campus next Monday 10 October to deliver a paper, “’To Think There’s Power in Potions’: Experiment, Sympathy, and the Devil in The Duchess of Malfi.”
This paper on Webster's Duchess of Malfi comes from Prof. Floyd-Wilson's current book-length project, Secret Sympathies, which contributes to the history of emotion by demonstrating that pre-eighteenth-century conceptions of nature's sympathies and antipathies (traditionally linked to magic) were integral to common, everyday interpretations of affect. But beyond its interest in an affective history, Secret Sympathies shows that the construction of scientific thought, as it began to emerge in the seventeenth century, depended on subduing the occult power historically invested in women's bodies, while also arrogating the occult knowledge long associated with female experience. By bringing this obscured boundary work to light, this project also moves our discussion of the transvestite theatre beyond the performative nature of sexual and gendered identity to consider how an all-male stage countered the cultural fear of women's embodied occult powers.
I was a bit worried I would get some capital 'T' Theory piece or PoMo waffle.
Fortunately no: instead, it was a very sensible and grounded lecture on the play and surrounding period attitudes. I did not ask any question during the discussion period (as I have not actually read the play) but I did approach her afterwards and we had a nice discussion on melancholia as depression, despair as a sin and the ambiguities of widowhood.
On the matter of matters PoMo, two recent straws in the wind. I was listening to a lunchtime paper a couple of weeks ago at Melbourne University by a DutchBelgian graduate student who is writing a monograph in Dutch on the fall of the Western Roman Empire (there not being such a monograph in Dutch). Unfortunately, I have not been able to get to all his papers, but have greatly enjoyed the ones I have attended. He has a very fine sense of sources and their limitations. At the most recent one I attended, he was presenting a paper on Aetius, the Attila and Battle of the Catalaunian Plains. In the course of his presentation he referred to "the scourge on historiography that is postmodernism". While I realise a classics audience is not likely to be a bastion of postmodernism, I thought his public derision noteworthy.
On Friday, I had not been able to get some garb that morning for a new female presenter. She just said "oh well, I can be a postmodern peasant". Two bright, educated twenty somethings who take it for granted that PoMo is a joke. It gives one hope for the future, it does.
ADDENDA Due to recurring spam attacks, comments on this entry have been locked.