Renaissances: Professionalization Workshop Series, “Supposing: On Form and Variation in Shakespeare and Picasso”

Professionalization Workshop Series, “Supposing: On Form and Variation in Shakespeare and Picasso”

Join Renaissances for our final Professionalization Workshop Series of the quarter. We are thrilled to host Professor Colleen R. Rosenfeld (Pomona College) for her talk entitled, “Supposing: On Form and Variation in Shakespeare and Picasso.” To RSVP, please complete this brief form.

Reading Picasso's Las Meninas (After Velázquez) (1957), alongside Shakespeare's Sonnets (1609), this talk will ask: What can Picasso's variations on Las Meninas teach us about aesthetic form that Foucault did not in his charismatic reading at the opening of The Order of Things? I suggest that Picasso's interlocking, double profile dismantles the Infanta's forward-facing gaze and eliminates the "essential void" that Foucault understood to underwrite acts of representation. Picasso's variations thereby suggest a new model for literary criticism. Through acts of supposition and the variations such acts produce, literary critics might attend to the contingency of form and a poem's latent capacity to be otherwise. When viewed from the angles of vision supplied by Picasso's variations, an aesthetic feature of Shakespeare's Sonnets traditionally described as their "vagueness," "imprecision," or "uncertainty" snaps into focus as the sonnets' capacity to shelter their own variations.