Vladimir Brljak: Inventing Renaissance Poetics: Modernity, Allegory, and the History of Literary Theory

Speakers): Vladimir Brljak

Dr. Vladmir Brljak (English @ Cambridge) will be presenting a paper titled "Inventing Renaissance Poetics: Modernity, Allegory, and the History of Literary Theory." Radhika Koul (Comparative Literature) will serve as respondent. Followed by an open discussion. Please finds the abstract below and contact melihle [at] stanford.edu (melihle[at]stanford[dot]edu) for the paper.

In their attempts to present the Renaissance as the origin of modern literary theory in the West, historians of the subject have, from the later nineteenth century onward, systematically suppressed the continuing presence of allegorical poetics in the period. This article surveys the scholarship in the field from its beginnings to the present day, showing how this decline-of-allegory narrative emerged and how it has distorted our accounts of this important episode in the history of literary thought, rendering them internally incoherent as well as incompatible with parallel work in other corners of literary studies and beyond. Future work needs to address this problem and radically rethink the current configuration of the field.