Lecture by Dympna Callaghan: "‘Words, words, words’: Language and Poetry in Hamlet"
June 11, 2019, 1:30-3:00 PM, Room A 701 (in the context of the lecture "British Literature and Culture I" by Prof. Dr. Christina Wald) Guest lecture by the renowned Shakespeare scholar Dympna Callaghan (Syracuse, USA)
Hier ein kurzer Abstract des Vortrags:
Mallarmé famously observed that poetry is not written with ideas but with words. His remark draws our attention to the fact that, arguably, an idea does not exist outside its expression in language. Shakespeare’s tragedy similarly draws our attention to “words, words, words,” to the relationship between “matter”(substance/meaning) and “art” (style/mode of expression). While Hamlet addresses the momentous issues of death, revenge, religion, family, and action versus inaction, Shakespeare had to render those big cultural ideas in very specific words, penning them one at a time, and he did so in both the play’s poetry and its prose. This lecture will look very closely at some of Shakespeare’s words, including Hamlet’s first soliloquy, to see how exactly he achieved the vast scale of tragedy via the minutiae of individual words.
Und hier eine Kurzbiographie von Dympna Callagahan:
Dympna Callaghan is William L. Safire Professor of Modern Letters in the Department of English at Syracuse University. She has published widely on the playwrights and poets of the English Renaissance and was President of the Shakespeare Association of America in 2012-13. Callaghan has held fellowships at the Folger, Huntington and Newberry Libraries, at the Getty Research Centre in Los Angeles, and at the Bogliasco Center for Arts and Humanities in Liguria, Italy. She is a Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge University, and she was appointed Lloyd David distinguished fellow at the University of Queensland Australia for 2015. Her most recent books are Who Was William Shakespeare? (2013), Hamlet: Language and Writing (2015), and A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare, Second Edition (2016). She is the editor of the book series Arden Language and Writing, and co-editor, with Michael Dobson of the Palgrave Shakespeare monograph series.
She also recently co-edited, with Suzanne Gossett, the volume Shakespeare in Our Time (2016), prepared on behalf of the Shakespeare Association of America to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. Among other current projects, she is writing about the relationship between poetic fluency and freedom of speech.