Seeing Perspective Crossways
A Proposed Panel for the Renaissance Society of America 27-29 March,
2014 in New York City
The story is familiar: Fourteenth-century artists in Italy developed a
variety of new strategies to represent space, but it was only with
Filippo Brunelleschi that linear perspective was advanced as a
monologic tendency that would typify modern visual regimes and allow
the manipulation of reality through calculation and exclusion.
Elsewhere in Europe, figures like Shakespeare and Rabelais have been
celebrated for going in the opposite direction, constructing a
multiplicitous humanism that John Keats famously characterized as
“negative capability.” However, the development of perspective in the
Renaissance was both more pervasive and more convoluted. Unitary
perspectives could be imagined within chaotic aesthetics, and deeply
disintegral action could be made to seem harmonious. Further, any
aesthetic configuration must occur within a social and historical
scene, which inevitably complicates matters, because wider cultures
sought coherence along confessional, linguistic and ideological lines,
even as their social worlds were riddled with divergent forces caused
by political, societal and religious change. Indeed many models of
social life in the Renaissance offered ways to conceal or efface
multiplicity, and such schemes are equally present in dramatic,
textual and viusal art of the period. We invite papers that mediate
between societal, visual and textual perspectives, as well as between
continental and English culture.
How were unified perspectives rendered dialogic or multiplicitous? And
how were ostensibly chaotic perspectives structured by emerging models
of coherence? How do recent theoretical developments mitigate our
perception of perspective in the past?
Proposals welcomed from literary studies, theater history, art history
and history.
Please submit a 250-word abstract, along with a current CV, to Michael
Saenger ([log in to unmask]) and Sergio Costola
([log in to unmask]) by May 30, 2013.
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Michael Saenger, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of English, Southwestern University
Office: Mood-Bridwell #206
Office hrs: Monday, Thursday and Friday 10-11
http://southwestern.academia.edu/MichaelSaenger
http://www.southwestern.edu/departments/faculty/faculty.php?id=saengerm&style=english
http://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=637&calcTitle=1&isbn=9780754654131&lang=cy-GB
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