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  • Tuesday, April 21, 2015 - 4:30pm to 5:30pm

401 Fisher-Bennett Hall


Join us for the next Departmental Lecture Series event, featuring Roland Greene (Stanford) giving a talk titled "Inceptions of the English Baroque: Donne and Milton."

The Baroque is a highly mobile concept in early modern studies that names a development in the arts after 1600. Despite its prevalence in scholarship, however, it remains difficult to observe and define. How can we record the Baroque in process as an extension, a correction, or an alternative to the high Renaissance world-view that preceded it? In what transitional episodes does it find an inception? Moreover, under what semantics did the Baroque appear—in other words, what did its practitioners call it? The lecture concerns several such instances of both semantics and inception in John Donne’s poetry and prose and Milton’s Paradise Lost.

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Roland Greene's research and teaching are concerned with the early modern literatures of England, Latin Europe, and the transatlantic world, and with poetry and poetics from the Renaissance to the present. His most recent book is Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes (Chicago, 2013). Five Words proposes an understanding of early modern culture through the changes embodied in five words or concepts over the sixteenth century: in English, blood, invention, language, resistance, and world, and their counterparts in French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese.

Other books include Unrequited Conquests: Love and Empire in the Colonial Americas (Chicago, 1999), which follows the love poetry of the Renaissance into fresh political and colonial contexts in the New World; and Post-Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations of the Western Lyric Sequence (Princeton, 1991), a transhistorical and comparative study of lyric poetics through the fortunes of the lyric sequence from Petrarch to Neruda. Greene is the editor with Elizabeth Fowler of The Project of Prose in Early Modern Europe and the New World (Cambridge, 1997). His recent essays deal with topics such as the colonial baroque, Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene and Amoretti, Sir Thomas Wyatt's poetry, and Shakespeare's The Tempest.

Greene is editor in chief of the fourth edition of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, which was published in October 2012. Prepared in collaboration with the general editor Stephen Cushman and the associate editors Clare Cavanagh, Jahan Ramazani, and Paul Rouzer, this edition represents a complete revision of the most authoritative reference book on poetry and poetics.

Greene is the founder and director of Arcade, a digital salon for literary studies and the humanities.

In 2015-16 he serves as President of the Modern Language Association, the largest scholarly organization in the world.