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Frances Dolan (UC Davis), "Compost/Compositions"

Frances Dolan
September 11, 2015
All Day
070/090 18th Avenue Library

Professor Frances Dolan, Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Davis, will give the first talk in the 2015-2016 CMRS Lecture Series. The talk will be preceded by an informal "open forum" to be held in 455 Hagerty Hall at 2:30 p.m. and followed by a roundtable discussion and reception.

Abstract:As part of an explosion of agricultural experimentation and innovation in seventeenth-century England, many “improvers” turned to composting as both an “ancient practice” and “newly born.”  The composting practices they advocated resembled the very particular practices that characterized early modern reading, remembering, and writing.  In comparing composting, commonplacing, and​ composition, amendment and revision, I hope to draw attention both to the importance of soil amendment in early modern English agriculture and to the ways it generated writing and modeled what writing might be. Focusing on early modern agricultural treatises, this talk will consider the compost pile as an archive, a commonplace book, an occasion of writing, and a pungent figure for assembling and ripening the past’s leftovers in the service of some future enrichment—that is, for the work of early modernists today.

 

For the full list of 2015-2016 lectures, please visit http://cmrs.osu.edu/events/2015-2016-lecture-series.