Professor Suzanne Akbari will deliver the seventh lecture in the 2014-2015 CMRS Lecture Series.
Abstract: Metamorphosis and figurative language – both allegory and metaphor – are explicitly yoked together in Christine de Pizan’s allegories, most famously in the autobiographical opening of her Livre de la mutacion de Fortune, which recounts her transformation from female to male “selon methafore” [according to metaphor]. Her other allegories also highlight the transformative quality of figurative language, including the multi-level allegoreses featured in the Epistre Othea and the allegory of creation that opens the Avision-Christine. Through a close reading of the intertextual relationship of the speech of Pythagoras central to Book 15 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the early fourteenth-century Ovide moralisé, and the early fifteenth-century Livre de la mutacion de Fortune, I will illustrate the extent to which concepts of metamorphosis underlie Christine’s deployment of allegory, both in terms of Pythagorean metempsychosis and in terms of the Christian theology of incarnation.
Bio: Suzanne Akbari is Professor of English and Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. Her publications cover wide-ranging topics in medieval literary and intellectual history, from a book on medieval optics and allegory (Seeing through the Veil) to a volume on European perceptions of Islam and the Orient (Idols in the East). She has edited collections of essays on Marco Polo, Chaucer, medieval identity and community, and the literary history of Arabic in medieval Europe. Her current research projects include an exploration of metaphor and metamorphosis in Chaucer and Christine de Pizan, and an investigation of temporality in medieval poetic and historical literary traditions.
