Dante and Shakespeare: Cosmology, Politics and Poetics, University of Poitiers, France, 4-6 April 2019. Deadline for proposals: 30 June 2018
What, when & where
Dante and Shakespeare: Cosmology, Politics and Poetics, University of Poitiers, France, 4-6 April 2019.
Deadline for proposals: 30 June 2018
Venue: Centre d’Études Supérieures de Civilisation Médiévale (UMR 7302) – France
Co-organisation: Isabelle Battesti (CERLIM, Sorbonne Nouvelle) and Pascale Drouet (CESCM, Poitiers)
Dante is probably to Italian literature what Shakespeare is to British literature. Both are, because of the depth and density of their respective works, monuments of European literature who transcend national boundaries. As T.S. Eliot put it in 1929: “Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them; there is no third.” This claim may be questioned, of course, but both authors did bring literature and the spirit of their time to a peak. It may be wondered whether Dante’s writings influenced Shakespeare and his contemporaries. However, this conference particularly aims at bringing together, beyond chronological considerations, the reflection and the aesthetics at work in their respective creations, by comparing them from thematic perspectives.
Their writings are still powerful today, including in the collective imagination, probably because everything, or nearly so, was treated in them: a theory of the cosmos and knowledge; a representation of social organization and power; a poetics and a narrative art. This conference thus invites a comparative approach of both writers’ works according to three main lines: cosmology (a meditation on the divine and on the natural order); politics (a reflection upon human society and political constitution); and poetics (a reflection upon the art of writing)
Suggestions:
— Dante, Shakespeare and cosmology
— Dante and Shakespeare: moral typologies and political stakes
— The truth/illusion dialectic in Dante’s, Shakespeare’s and Elizabethan and Jacobean writers’ works
— Dante as both a poet and poetician (Rime, Vita Nova, De Vulgari Eloquentia) and Shakespeare as a poet, as well as Donne, Spenser, Sydney, Wroth…
— A Dante/Shakespeare “function” in contemporary imagination?
Deadline & how to apply
Abstracts and a brief biographical notice are to be sent by 30 June 2018 to both Isabelle Battesti isabelle.battesti@univ-poitiers.fr and Pascale Drouet pascale.drouet@univ-poitiers.fr
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