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Nicholas Johnson (Butler), "Returning the Music of the Spheres: Johannes Kepler and the Transition from the Renaissance to the Musical Baroque"

CMRS Knot
October 6, 2014
All Day
205 18th Ave. Library

Professor Karma Lochrie will deliver the second lecture in the 2014-2015 CMRS Lecture Series.

 

Abstract:  It is standard to read Thomas More’s “Utopia” in terms of its classical roots in Plato’s Republic, and at the same time, to treat it as an inaugural text, that is, as the text that marks the beginning of utopian thinking and a significant cultural break from the Middle Ages.  This lecture challenges the historical methods responsible for this narrative of utopianism, providing an alternative account of utopianism that includes medieval texts and thought. Instead of reading backwards from More’s text, Lochrie suggests a method of “reading forward” to More from medieval texts that engage utopian perspectives, ideas, and places.  “Unmooring” More, therefore, involves a rethinking of the way we conduct literary history as well as the way we understand utopianism.  Using John Mandeville’s Travels and the Middle English Land of Cokaygne, Lochrie maps alternative utopianisms to More’s and suggests new historical interlocutors that complicate our current understanding of utopian thinking and writing.

 

Bio:  Karma Lochrie is the Ruth N. Halls Professor of English at Indiana University, where she teaches and conducts research in Medieval Studies.  Her work covers a variety of interests, including mystical texts and vernacular theology, medieval constructs of gender in terms of secrecy, and medieval configurations of sexuality.  Her most recent book, Heterosyncrasies: Female Sexuality When Normal Wasn’t (U Minn P, 2005), argues against heteronormativity as a historically useful category for understanding medieval sexualities or queer possibilities.  Her most recently completed book manuscript investigates premodern utopianism before Thomas More by way of complicating More’s work and extending modern understandings of utopianism.