Daily Archives: 16 October 2013

Shakespearean Perceptions – Call For Papers

“Shakespearean Perceptions”
The 12th Biennial International Conference of the Australian and New Zealand Shakespeare Association (ANZSA)
The University of Southern Queensland
October 2-4, 2014

Confirmed keynotes include:

  • Professor Peter Holbrook (University of Queensland)
  • Emeritus Professor Helen Ostovich (McMaster)
  • Professor Garrett Sullivan (Pennsylvania)

Shakespeare’s career coincided with a period during which the nature of perception was being radically reimagined. While the rise of the Elizabethan theatre brought with it new configurations of audiences, Elizabethans were learning to view plays—and indeed their world—with fresh eyes but also with fresh noses, fresh ears, fresh skin, etc. This rethinking of sensory perception also resulted in a new understanding of the roles of reason and the imagination in shaping lived experience. Rather than being a phenomenon limited to the work of Shakespeare alone, the reinvention of perception mapped itself out across the whole of the Elizabethan and Jacobean worlds, and is worth tracing in the work of Shakespeare’s coevals (Jonson, Marlowe, Middleton, and many others). By the same token, modern audiences and readers of Shakespearean drama refashion this work according to visual and sensory economies made possible by new technologies and new modes of representation.

Topics that may cover this notion of “Shakespearean Perceptions” may include, but need not be limited to:

  • Shakespearean drama and modes of perception: the senses, passions, embodiment, and medicine
  • Audiences of Shakespeare in the past and present
  • Cultural histories of perception and performance
  • Art and the iconic or emblematic nature of Shakespearean plays
  • Reinterpretations of Shakespearean drama for the modern stage
  • Editors and readers of Shakespeare
  • Modes of cognition and experience in the early modern theatre
  • Perceptions in Shakespearean drama of classical, medieval, or “New World” ideas and sources
  • New media and film and adaptations of Shakespeare’s work and that of his contemporaries
  • Shakespearean drama in translation to non-English-speaking languages
  • Perceptions of the natural and supernatural worlds
  • Ways of seeing Shakespeare in political and social contexts.

The conference venue is situated in the picturesque garden city of Toowoomba, located at the edge of the Great Dividing Range in Queensland, Australia. ANZSA 2014 will be held in conjunction with the 11th annual Shakespeare-in-the-Park Festival. Conference registration will include attendance at the opening show of the main stage performance of Much Ado about Nothing, and for participation in selected other events at the Festival.

The conference will include lectures, papers, workshops, seminars, and performances. We invite proposals for papers or presentations (20 minutes), panels (90 minutes), and workshops (90 minutes) on any aspect of the conference theme, broadly interpreted. Proposals (250 words or less) should be sent by 29 April, 2014 to Associate Professor Laurie Johnson or Dr Darryl Chalk by email: Shakespeare.Symposiums@usq.edu.au

More information at the conference website: http://conference.anzsa.org

ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions – Collaboratory: Arts and Rhetorics of Emotions in Early Modern Europe

ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions 
Collaboratory: Arts and Rhetorics of Emotions in Early Modern Europe
University of Queensland, Brisbane, and Toowong Rowing Club (on the UQ campus)
25-27 November, 2013

Keynote Speakers:

Rhetorical theory since the Ancients assumed writers and artists aimed to excite and manipulate the emotions of their audiences. The period in Europe from Renaissance to Enlightenment was one of astonishing inventiveness in literature, art, sculpture, music, and numerous other art forms (design, architecture, the masque). Radically new styles, genres, and expressive practices emerge (opera, the novel). How did these new techniques work to elicit, produce, or condition emotional responses in their audiences? What types of emotional experience did these innovative aesthetic modes make possible? What was the relation of new affective realities to Judeo Christian or classical values?

Topics addressed might include:

  • Rhetoric, oratory, performance, and theatre as emotional technologies
  • Music, dance, and other non-verbal artistic and cultural media and the emotions
  • The passions in Renaissance discourses
  • Affective possibilities of new literary and artistic genres: lyric poetry, the novel, the essay, diaries, scholarly history, lifewriting.
  • Emotional inflections of early modern art movements: Renaissance, neo-classicism, sentimentalism, mannerism.
  • The arts of religion and the emotional styles of everyday life: liturgy, worship, prayer, sermon.
  • Emotional character of Protestantism and the Counter- Reformation
  • Art and rhetoric of sacred and profane passions: enthusiasm, empiricism.
  • Philosophical perspectives on emotion and the emotional colouring of early modern philosophical movements: neostoicism, neo-Platonism, Spinozism, scepticism, Cartesianism, the scientific revolution.
  • The affective dimensions of political discourse and public life.

Collaboratory will include a performance of Johann Christoph Pepusch’s Venus and Adonis, a 1715 masque with a libretto by Colley Cibber on Tuesday 26 November at the UQ Arts Museum.

Register on-line here by 31 October 2013

Enquiries to uqche@uq.edu.au or call (07) 3365-4913.