Date/Time
Date(s) - 13 Oct 2017
7:00 PM - 8:30 PM
Location
Columbia University Faculty House
Category(ies) No Categories
For our next meeting, Friday October 13, Corey McEleney (Fordham) will give a paper titled “Devils in the Details: Richard Dadd’s Shakespeare.”
Abstract: “Shakespeare,” says a character in Joyce’s Ulysses, “is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance.” Why have Shakespeare’s poems and plays become magnets for madness, attracting obsessive readers and inspiring excessive readings? What forms does this madness take? And, above all, what can these eccentric engagements with Shakespeare teach us about the irrationality inherent in the act of reading itself? My talk will explore these questions by focusing on the Victorian painter Richard Dadd. A promising artist trained at the Royal Academy of Arts, Dadd was institutionalized in the Bethlem Royal Hospital (Bedlam) after murdering his father. While confined in Bedlam, Dadd produced a couple of highly detailed paintings inspired by A Midsummer Night’s Dream and other Shakespeare plays. I contrast the disorienting form of these works with the Midsummer paintings he produced prior to his institutionalization in order to show how Dadd’s commitment to microscopic detail not only exhibits the profound links between madness and the detail but also, in the process, defamiliarizes Shakespeare’s play in ways that anticipate 20th-century interpretations of its darker and more discordant aspects.
The event will be held in Faculty House, 64 Morningside Drive. As always social hour will be from 5-6, dinner 6-7, and the talk 7-8:30. Please reply to the Evite. The cost for dinner, payable by check only, is $30. When you RSVP to Alexander Lash please indicate whether or not you plan to come to dinner (by Tuesday October 3) so that I can give the chef an accurate count.