Laying Claim to the Canon
Join us for a conversation with Professor Daisy Delogu.
About the Event
Who determines which artists and works are canonical? What kind of power or pressure does the canon exert over artists and writers? How can the canon be used to exclude or punish writers or artists who challenge the rules, or who don’t conform to our ideas about who and what is “great”?
Join us for a conversation with Daisy Delogu, Howard L. Willett Professor of French Literature at the University of Chicago, to examine the canon through the case study of Shakespeare’s The Tempest and later adaptations and contestations of this work. The conversation will preview Professor Delogu’s forthcoming course at Graham.
Who's Speaking
Daisy Delogu
Howard L. Willett Professor of French Literature
Daisy Delogu is a leading scholar of medieval literature who specializes in vernacular texts of the Middle Ages. She researches the ongoing relevance of medieval works for our own times by showing how the practices of figuration that characterize the literary—such as metaphor and allegory—convey ideas about human political society that remain relevant.
Her current book project, a monograph in progress titled The Political Pastoral: Shepherds, Sheep, and Wolves between Late Medieval France and Burgundy (1364-1461), explores questions related to political organization and the exercise of power which continue to resonate in our current moment, when concerns about leadership may evoke the familiar metaphor of the wolf in sheep’s clothing. The trials faced by Charles V, Charles VI, and Charles VII of France – including foreign invasion, mental illness, and civil war – and the broader concerns to which they gave rise, were often negotiated figuratively, via a staging of shepherd, sheep, and wolf. The complex cultural imaginary surrounding these figures produces a robust range of potential meanings which writers freely deployed and recombined. The Political Pastoral shows how, unconstrained by generic norms, late medieval French and Burgundian authors used the pastoral mode both to delineate theoretical premises of political philosophy and to respond to urgent challenges.
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