Princeton professor gives talk "Errors of Nature and the Renaissance: A Literature of Demystification" Sept. 30
Date: Sep. 30, 2008
Time: 4:00 p.m.
Location:
Jepson Hall, Room 120
Professor Francois Rigolot, Meredith Howland Pyne Professor of French Literature at Princeton University, will give a lecture entitled "Errors of Nature and the Renaissance: A Literature of Demystification" on Tuesday, September 30 at 4 p.m. in Jepson Hall.
Rigolot will discuss the attention Renaissance writers paid in their work to "errors of nature," congenital abnormalities, monstrosity or other serious deviations from the norm. Several parallel discourses evolved: some thinkers created a typology of monstrous forms; others explored the root of the abnormality, trying to explain the phenomena as the result of humans ignoring the laws of nature; while still others tried to attribute special significance to the disability. Two French writers, in particular, Francois Rabelais (1494?-1553) and Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), employed a project of "demystification" of the monstrous by assigning abnormalities to a category of chance to relativize fantasies associated with the unknown. Rigolot will also introduce some of the views of scientific thinkers of the day, such as Girolamo Cardano and Francis Bacon, on the "errors of nature."
Rigolot is an authority on stylistics and poetics, and on the literature of the Renaissance. His books include Les Langages de Rabelais, 1972 (new edition, 1996); Poétique et onomastique, 1977; Le Texte de la Renaissance, 1983, for which he received the Gilbert Chinard Prize; an edition of the complete works of Louise Labé, 1986; a study of Ovid's influence on Montaigne, Les Métamorphoses de Montaigne, 1988. Rigolot was one of the contributors, along with T. Todorov, J. Cohen, W. Empson, and G. Hartman to Sémantique de la poésie, published by Editions du Seuil in 1980. His critical edition of Montaigne's Journal de voyage, based on a newly discovered manuscript, was published by the Presses Universitaires de France in 1992.
As co-editor of A New History of French Literature (Harvard University Press, 1989), Rigolot was awarded the James Russell Lowell Prize by the Modern Language Association of America in 1990. The French version of the Harvard History was published as De la Littérature française by Editions Bordas in 1993. In his Louise Labé Lyonnaise ou la Renaissance au féminin (Paris: Champion, 1997), he addressed the problems of a middle-class woman writer in the age of humanism. His book on the concept of "error" before Descartes (L'Erreur de la Renaissance) was published by Editions Champion, and his Poésie et Renaissance by Editions du Seuil, both in 2002. His critical edition of Sainte-Beuve's Causeries sur Montaigne was published by Éditions Champion in 2004.
Posted August 5, 2008