This working conference was designed to assess the present state of French Renaissance literary studies.

Funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and organized by Marcel Tetel, Duke University.

Thursday, April 12

Welcome
Marcel Tetel, Duke University
John Tedeschi, Newberry Center for Renaissance Studies (now professor emeritus, University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Session 1

Prolégomènes aux methodologies employees pour l’étude des textes de la Renaissance
Robert Aulotte, Université Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV)

The Role of Literary History
Donald Stone, Harvard University (now emeritus)

Session 2: Reading Montaigne

Chair: Raymond La Charité, University of Kentucky

Conceptions of the Text and the Generation(s) of Meaning
Richard Regosin, University of California, Irvine

Pedagogical Graphiti and the Poetics of Conceit
Lawrence Kritzman, Rutgers University (now at Dartmouth College)

A Wonderfull, Vaine, Divers, and Wavering Subject
Steven Randall, University of Oregon

Session 3: Text and Image

Chair: Ilana Zinguer, University of Haifa

Text and Image: Nicholas of Cusa’s De Icona
Michel de Certeau, University of California, Davis

On a Tactic of Sixteenth-Century Literature
Tom Conley, University of Minnesota (now at Harvard University)

The Problematics of Parody: Rabelais and Michelangelo
François Rigolot, Princeton University

Two Literary Genres: The Emblem and the Joke
Barbara Bowen, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (now professor emerita, Vanderbilt University)

Session 4: Rabelais and Feminism

Chair: Nancy Vickers, Dartmouth College (now president emerita, Bryn Mawr College)

Toward a Feminist Reading of Rabelais
Elizabeth Chesney Zegura, Duke University (now at University of Arizona)

Damning Haughty Dames: The Destruction of Petrarchan Topoi in Pantagruel xxi-xxiv
Carla Freccero, Dartmouth College (now at University of California, Santa Cruz)

Friday, April 13

Keynote Address

Recherches sur les fonctions épistémologiques d’une representation allégorique: L’exemple de l’apparition en Occident de l’allégorie de la Mort in squelette
Claude Blum, Université Paris X Nanterre

Session 5: History and Literature

Chair: Eric Cochrane, University of Chicago

Toward a Poetics of Culture
Stephen Greenblatt, University of California, Berkeley (now emeritus professor, Harvard University)

Renaissance Texts to the Historian’s Eye
Natalie Zemon Davis, Princeton University (now at University of Toronto)

Histoire et poétique: Vers une matrice du texte de la Renaissance
Michel Beaujour, New York University

Session 6: Literature and Rhetoric

Chair: Michel Dassonville, University of Texas at Austin

À quelle condition l’ancienne rhétorique peut-elle devenir un paradigm de recherché modern en literature?
Marc Fumaroli, Université Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV)

Strategies of Fluency in the Renaissance Text
Glyn Norton, Pennsylvania State University (now at Williams College)

Reading the Rhetoric of Genre in French Renaissance Poetry
George Joseph, Brandeis College (now at Hobart and William Smith Colleges)

Critiques paradigmatiques et lecture poétique
Jean-Claude Carron, University of California, Los Angeles

General discussion and closing remarks

Learn more about Center for Renaissance Studies programs.