Luke Barnhart: True Plain Words from Your True-Telling Friend
Speaker(s): Luke Barnhart
The Workshop in Poetics will be meeting on Tuesday, March 6th from 6-8 pm at the Humanities Center Boardroom.
Luke Barnhart (English) will present a dissertation chapter titled "True Plain Words from Your True-Telling Friend" and Juan Lamata (English) will respond. You can find the chapter in the attachment and a short abstract below. A light dinner will be served.
Abstract: This chapter considers Shakespeare’s Sonnets as one of the earliest poetic treatments, in England, of bad faith in plain style. I argue that Shakespeare recognizes the commonness of claims to plainness at the turn of the seventeenth century, putting awareness of the rhetorical attenuation (due to overuse) of plain style to important thematic effect in the sonnet sequence. More specifically, I claim that the sonnets explore plain speaking as a mode of surreptitious critique. They ask: when is claiming plainness not an attempt to convey transparent truth, but rather a covert justification of transgressive and polemical rhetoric, or even outright insult?
Luke Barnhart is a PhD candidate in the English department whose work focuses on early modern poetry, especially lyric.
Juan Lamata is a fourth-year PhD candidate in English. His dissertation, tentatively titled Masterless Renaissance, focuses on how literature theorized life outside the bounds of traditional structures of service.