Zoom link forthcoming.
Prosopopoeia (rhetorical impersonation) was part of the nuts and bolts of literacy in early modern Europe. One of the pedagogical exercises used in schools from Antiquity through the early seventeenth century termed progymnasmata, prosopopoeia taught children to assume a point of view far from their own subjective reality and to write directly from this point of view, to “speak as this person.” It was also a basic device in the early novel, one that brought into being peculiar entities: person-fictions, hybrid creatures blurring the lines between fictional characters made of paper and ink and real persons in flesh and blood—part and parcel of this period’s expanding book trade which trafficked in such fictional personae: Amadis, Fiammetta, Panurge ... In studying a quintessentially rhetorical device, this seminar will venture onto anthropological terrain, taking from Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency the fundamental premise that art objects are by their very nature social agents and therefore animistic. Early novels’ readers were not only partaking of literature as an esthetic pursuit; they were also engaging in a social relationship that did not happen to involve another human being. (Perhaps all readers are animists.) The focus for this seminar will be the mechanisms that brought these person-fictions to life: rhetorical practice; printing combined with the expanding book trade; and, finally, the profoundly human drive to attribute personhood to non-human things (animism)—all forces at work in the early novel.
