MEMS and the School of English are delighted to announce the University of Kent’s 2018 Chaucer Lecture on Thursday 22nd March at 6pm in Grimond Lecture Theatre 2, Canterbury Campus.
Entitled, ‘The Imaginative Syllogism: The Idea of the Poetic in the Middle Ages’ this year’s lecture will be given by Professor Vincent Gillespie, J.R.R. Tolkien Professor of English Literature and Language, University of Oxford.
All are welcome to the lecture and a reception afterwards.
Abstract
Between 1150 and 1450 increasing numbers of commentators showed a heightened interest in the effects of reading poetry on its audience. This interest was not just in the ways those effects were created, but also increasingly in the impact that poetic effects had on the affections, imagination, and understanding of readers and listeners. More than any other medieval mode of discourse, the Poetic required its audience to perform thought experiments.
This lecture will explore the undervalued category of the Poetic, and argue that it needs to be recognised as radically different from the more usually discussed critical category of Rhetoric.