Date/Time
Date(s) - 7 Mar 2017
5:30 PM - 8:30 PM
Location
Columbia University Faculty House
Category(ies) No Categories
Katie Chenoweth, Princeton University
“French in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility”
This talk reexamines Joachim Du Bellay’s literary manifesto of 1549, La Deffence et Illustration de la Langue Francoyse, through the lens of media history. What does La Deffence, with its vision for a “new” French poetics of imitation, have to do with mechanical reproduction and printing as a “new” medium? To what extent is the rejection of “old” French poetic forms also a casting off of the oral/manuscript past? In this talk, I suggest that Du Bellay’s manifesto offers not only a model of imitatio or a rhetoric of vernacular nationalism but a revolutionary mode of reproducing poetic language in modernity that is grounded in the symbolic, material, and technological conditions of printing.