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Speaker(s): Vincent Barletta

Although it is most associated with the Renaissance, the pastoral as a literary mode has its roots in third-century BCE Alexandria and has been an integral part of Western literature ever since. In its most simple form, it presents the reader with young shepherds singing songs of amorous suffering to one another as their flocks rest nearby. This said, the pastoral is nearly always concerned with some of the most complex and intractable problems of human existence: love, pain, death, corruption, the limits of linguistic expression, etc. In this workshop, we'll look at the pastoral through the lens of "closeness" and examine some of the ways in which the pastoral mode represents, theorizes, and entails relations of proximity between humans as well as between humans and nature.

Lunch will be served.

Closeness is a Research Group supported and funded by the DLCL. For more information contact Friederike Knupling (knupling [at] stanford.edu (knupling[at]stanford[dot]edu))