|
Renaissance subjectivity has been the subject of scholarly interest for some time, but little attention has been given to what, in historical terms, might well prove to be something of an anachronism. Concepts such as ‘inwardness’, ‘repression’, ‘sublimation’, and the ‘unconscious’ itself have all informed scholarly debate, but there has been little attempt to explore their historical specificity. Thomas Hill’s Interpretation of Dreams (1571), and Timothy Bright’s Treatise on Melancholy (1584), as well as Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1627) all have much to say about what we have come to regard as the ‘unconscious’, and these writings are supplemented by such writers as Thomas Nashe, and the plays of Shakespeare and his Elizabethan and Jacobean contemporaries and successors.
The purpose of this one-day symposium is to seek to explore what might be provisionally labelled ‘The Renaissance Unconscious’. Papers are invited on a range of topics that might be gathered together under this heading:
• Dreams and Nightmares
• Renaissance creativity
• The ‘political’ unconscious
• Renaissance repression
• Terror
• The patriarchal unconscious
• Subjectivity
• Imaginary and Symbolic orders
• The Renaissance ‘mirror’
• The Elizabethan World Picture and its discontents
• Psychomachia and ‘character’
• Renaissance fantasy
• Renaissance Science Fiction
We particularly welcome contributions from those working in interdisciplinary fields in the period, and we would wish to extend a very warm invitation to human scientists, musicologists, archaeologists, librarians and museum curators, as well as those working in literary or historical fields. The colloquium is scheduled to take place in the Iris Murdoch Centre at the University of Stirling on Saturday, 25 February.
|
