Lecture by Timothy Hampton: "Diplomacy and Literature in Early Modern Europe"
Building 460, Room 426.
Abstract:
Historians of early modern Europe have long
stressed how new
practices of diplomacy that emerged during the
period transformed European
politics. Tim Hampton’s newly
released book, Fictions of Embassy, is the
first
book to examine the cultural implications of the rise of
modern diplomacy.
Ranging across two and a half centuries and
half a dozen languages, Timothy
Hampton opens a new perspective
on the intersection of literature and politics
at the dawn of
modernity.
Hampton argues that literary
texts--tragedies,
epics, essays--use scenes of diplomatic
negotiation to explore the relationship
between politics and
aesthetics, between the world of political rhetoric and the
dynamics of literary form. The diplomatic encounter is a scene of
cultural
exchange and linguistic negotiation. Literary depictions
of diplomacy offer
occasions for reflection on the definition of
genre, on the power of
representation, on the limits of rhetoric,
on the nature of fiction making
itself. Conversely, discussions
of diplomacy by jurists, political philosophers,
and ambassadors
deploy the tools of literary tradition to articulate new
theories
of political action. Hampton addresses these topics through a
discussion of the major diplomatic writers between 1450 and
1700--Machiavelli,
Grotius, Gentili, Guicciardini--and through
detailed readings of literary works
that address the same
topics--works by Shakespeare, More, Rabelais, Montaigne,
Tasso,
Corneille, Racine, and Camoens. He demonstrates that the issues
raised by
diplomatic theorists helped shape the emergence of new
literary forms, and that
literature provides a lens through which
we can learn to read the languages of
diplomacy.
Timothy Hampton is Professor of French and holds the Bernie H. Williams Chair of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.Ìý He is the author of Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature and Literature and Nation in the Sixteenth Century: Inventing Renaissance France, both of which were published by Cornell University Press.
Ìý
A lunch workshop will follow on May 29 (see separate listing). For more information contact ryanmz [at] stanford.edu (Ryan Zurowski).