Date/Time
Date(s) - 01/16/2025
3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Location
4010 JFSB
Category(ies)
The BYU Humanities Center’s first colloquium of the year will feature Aldo Scaglione and Marie M. Burns Distinguished Professor, Timothy Hampton, from UC Berkeley.
His presentation will focus on the interplay between joy and cheerfulness in European Renaissance literature. We hope you will join us on Thursday, January 16th at 3:00 pm in 4010 JFSB. Refreshments will be served.
Title: “Make a Cheerful Noise: Joy and the Literature of Modest Passions”
In this talk I will offer an analysis of the twin emotions of “joy” and “cheerfulness” as they shape the emotional life of readers in the European Renaissance. Through discussions of such authors as Shakespeare, Rabelais, and Montaigne, I will argue that “joy,” as a literary construct, is haunted by instability and contradiction. I will show how these writers seek to moderate or shape the disruptive power of joy by setting it against the more modest emotional quality of “cheerfulness,” or what the French call “gaiety.” I will offer an account of emergence of literary modernity through the interplay of these two “positive emotions” that have only recently begun to attract the attention of scholars.
In addition to his Thursday colloquium, Professor Hampton will join us for a more informal conversation earlier in the day on Thursday at 11:00 am in the Humanities Center (4101 JFSB) to discuss his current project, a study of voice and form in the work of Bob Dylan. He has shared with us a short draft of a work in progress: “Missteps: notes on Rhythm and Voice,” and a brief essay by Steven Rings, “Speech and/in Song” from The Voice as Something More: Essays Toward Materiality, edited by Marth Feldman and Judith T. Zeitlin (Chicago, 2019). Lunch will be served.
