Fall 2024
December 6: Alani Hicks-Bartlett, 12PM, room 102, 190 Hope St.
Portraits and literary descriptions of portraiture and tangible objets d’art loom behind many of the representational strategies of many premodern authors, especially as regards to a type of spectral lingering that we can align with commemoration and memory. In particular, Petrarch and some of his humanist and early modern counterparts struggle to make tangible the moment of loss while reconciling the difficult commensurability between tangible object and ineffable experience; this, in turn, lends to a haunting and challenging authorial task of representing absence. This paper offers a preliminary analysis of some of the ways in which Petrarch evaluates embodiment and essence, materiality and loss across different texts and genres.