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Date/Time
Date(s) - 10 Mar 2017
7:00 PM - 8:30 PM
Location
Columbia University Faculty House
Category(ies) No Categories
Matthew Zarnowiecki (Touro), will give a paper titled “A Song’s Prosperity: Love’s Labour’s Lost, the Circulation of Song, and the Undoing of Meaning.”
Abstract: Love’s Labour’s Lost dramatizes both the breakdown and the explosion of meaning in a variety of contexts, from letters to courtly poetry to pageants and masques to jests. This essay explores whether the songs in the play are subject to the same gains and losses in meaning as these other discursive forms. The history of English song and printed songbooks may be relevant to this question, since some of Love’s Labour’s Lost circulated in other manuscript and printed contexts, since the polyvocality of madrigals was rapidly losing ground to the univocality of airs, and since there was in the late 1590s a brief moment of freedom from the monopoly on printed songbooks. These developments in song circulation may give us a better view of how to assess the play’s scenes of discursive loss and gain, from failed communications or thwarted performances to the irrepressible flood of language and associative connections occurring throughout.
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 now $30. When you RSVP to Alexander Lash please indicate whether or not you plan to come to dinner (by Tuesday February 28).