Date/Time
Date(s) - 15 Sep 2016
5:45 PM - 8:30 PM
Location
Columbia University Faculty House
Category(ies) No Categories
Welcome to the 2016-2017 University Seminar in Classical Civilization (#441)! We are very pleased to announce our first speaker of the fall semester:
Thursday, September 15, 7:30pm
James Uden (Boston University)
“Horace, Lucan, and the Beginnings of the Eighteenth-Century Gothic”
Faculty House (please check the signs in the lobby for precise location)
Prof. Uden kindly shared an abstract of his upcoming talk with us:
“The emergence of the Gothic novel in eighteenth-century England has long been seen as a reaction against the elite literary culture of Neoclassicism, a reassertion of the irrational after the controlled formalism of the classical ideal. Yet the two works at the very origin of the genre – Horace Walpole’s Gothic novel ‘The Castle of Otranto’ (1764) and his incest tragedy ‘The Mysterious Mother’ (1768) – are replete with allusions to Horace, Lucan, and Seneca, albeit twisted and rewritten in perverse ways. This talk argues that Walpole’s Gothic aesthetic was never a rejection of Classical authors and ideas, but a startling reinterpretation of them. The Gothic genre rediscovers for an eighteenth-century audience the dark underside of ancient literature.”
The evening will begin with drinks at 5:45 PM at the fourth-floor dining room of Faculty House, followed by dinner at 6:15 PM. Please email our new rapporteur, Jeremy Simmons ([email protected]) by noon on Monday, September 12th, in order to make a dinner reservation. Note that the price of the meal is $30, payable by check to “Columbia University.”
Professor Uden’s lecture will begin promptly at 7:30 PM.