Verdad, mentira y poesía en la historia de Timbrio y Silerio en La Galatea

The story of Timbrio and Silerio is the only one openly presented as a story of courtiers in La Galatea. The two Spanish courtiers and the two Italian ladies star a plot where poetry has a fundamental role. In this story, poetry exceeds the possibilities it has in the bucolic tradition. The courtier’s compositions oscillate between the spontaneous and self-referential characteristics of pastoral poetry and tailor-made poetry. Both possibilities intertwine unexpectedly to arrive at a paradoxical ending: tailor-made poems recited in Naples anticipate the outcome this story has in the middle of the arcadia, while spontaneous and sincere poetry ends up being part of a staging which aims to artificially generate an archetypal scene of recognition between the four characters.

John Pomfret’s “The Choice”, or (Re)Inventing Empire

The present paper intends to re-read the popular neoclassical poem “The Choice”, written by (the now forgotten) John Pomfret at the dawn of the eighteenth century, and to demonstrate how it both fulfils and subverts several requirements of its genre. The paper contends that eighteenth-century pastoral poetry often served the purpose of recommending, rather than condemning the “vulgar” concerns of public and city life. The poetry of “retirement”, popular in an age of growing commerce, industry and Empire, was meant to assuage the guilt of enterprising spirits and give a gentlemanly varnish to an England hungry for consumption and expansion. While Pomfret’s poem certainly plays its part in such a narrative and comforts the anxieties of a business-oriented society, it also undermines the illusion of its “gentility”, an aspect which will be exposed in a deconstructive close-reading of the text, employing Derrida’s concept of aporia. The paper will also look at the poem from a socio-cultural perspective, relying on the ideas of eighteenth-century scholars such as Ian Watt, John Sitter, Ros Ballaster, Paula R. Backscheider and others.

Alexis Kagame

Alexis Kagame (b. 1912–d. 1981) was a Rwandan philosopher, theologian, linguist, historian, poet, translator, and Catholic priest. He belonged to a long lineage of historians affiliated to the pre-colonial Rwandan royal court. After attending a missionary school, he studied at the Nyakibanda Regional Seminary and was ordained a priest on 25 July 1941 at the age of twenty-nine. In this capacity, he became the editor of a Rwandan Catholic newspaper, Kinyamateka, in which he published his first literary essays. His publications of the late 1940s were deemed too political to the colonial authorities, who pressurized the diocese to repost him in Rome. While there, he studied at the Pontifical Gregorian University and took his doctoral degree in philosophy. The publication of his thesis arguably made him one of the first sub-Saharan Africans to professionally publish a book in the field of modern philosophy. Just before leaving Rome, Kagame joined Les Prêtres Noirs, a group of African priests who employed Christianity as a basis for African nationalist aspirations. After returning to Rwanda in 1958, he became professor of philosophy, Kinyarwanda, and history at various Rwandan Catholic seminaries. In 1967, he became professor of history at the newly formed National University of Rwanda. He also held a post of visiting professor at the National University of Zaïre (Lubumbashi). Throughout this time, Kagame was often at odds with the European clergy (for works that were deemed not Catholic enough) and with the newly formed Rwandan republic (for works that did not specifically adhere to the government’s ideologies). Kagame died in 1981 after being honored with the title of prelate by Pope John Paul II. Overall, Kagame is the author of dozens of books and numerous articles published in French, another twelve books written in Kinyarwanda, either transcriptions of oral literature or works of poetry, including a biblical epic of more than 35,000 verses in the style of Rwanda’s pastoral poetry. His work of poetry is often tinged with a subtle dry humor. His works have proved to be widely influential both in African philosophy and across various disciplines within the wider humanities and social sciences, including African theology, Rwandan history, poetry of the Great Lakes Region, and ethnographic studies. Interest in Kagame’s thought continues to grow and expand forty years after his death, especially in the field of African oral literature and poetry.

Finding Ovid in Kandahar: The Radical Pastoral as Resistance to Empire in the Classic and Contemporary Worlds

Prevailing scholarship on pastoral literature often overlooks its political and radical dimensions, relegating the form to particular manifestations of the pastoral in Elizabethan England. World literature, however, exhibits a wider range of the pastoral in which poets contest social injustice and serve as voices of resistance against oppression. This paper explores the existence of and connection between the radical pastoral in both the East and West, as exemplified by the classical poetry of Ovid and Pashto pastoral poetry emanating from contemporary Afghanistan. It argues that, despite differences in time and space, both genres of poetry offer forceful criticisms of empire and consider pastoral values, aesthetics, and landscapes as a means of resistance against it. This paper thus examines pastoral poetics’ contribution to social commentary on empire in both imperial Rome and the imperialist present encapsulated by America’s post 9/11 political-military interventions in the Middle East.

Sigmund von Birken, der Literaturbetrieb, Netzwerke und Werkpolitik

Sigmund von Birken belongs to the »Trio of poets from Nürnberg«, together with Georg Philipp Harsdörffer and Johann Klaj whose posthumous fame is mainly due to their pastoral poetry with fullsounding verses in praise of peace and love. Birken started his career with an enormous upshot as organizer of multi-media spectacles during the peace ceremony in Nürnberg in 1650. Apart from his hymns and pastoral love poems, Birken’s poetry does not belong to the canon of early modern literature in Germany. If he had lived longer, he would probably have edited later all those poems which he had written on demand for special occasions and immediately published as separate brochures or leaflets in at least four huge volumes. He would have properly arranged love poems, odes in praise of friendship, poems dedicated to noblemen and civilians, hymns and secular songs, starting like his famous predecessors with his Latin verses. This ambitious publication project is outlined in his manuscript collections, but was not realized during Birken’s lifetime. To correct for this oversight, the commented edition of Birken’s complete poetic manuscripts, which was recently finished by Hartmut Laufhütte, gives a broad impression of his talents as a playful virtuoso in all kinds of genres, teacher of poetry, advisor, ›ghostwriter‹ and promotor of young poets, male and female alike. His diaries and correspondence account for his enormous productivity and versatility, thus enabling modern readers to watch him during the creative procedure more closely than any other German poet of his time. The edition of Birken’s manuscripts is on the same scale as a few other recently completed long term editions of early modern German ego-documents and poetry and sets high standards for further editions.

Flowers of Time

The literary lineage of postapocalyptic fiction — stories set after civilization's destruction — is a long one, spanning the biblical tale of Noah and Hesiod's Works and Days to the works of Mary Shelley, Octavia Butler, Cormac McCarthy, and many others. Traveling from antiquity to the present, this book reveals how postapocalyptic fiction differs from other genres — pastoral poetry, science fiction, and the maroon narrative — that also explore human capabilities beyond the constraints of civilization. The book places postapocalyptic fiction into conversation with such theorists as Aristotle, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Carl Schmitt, illustrating how the genre functions as political theory in fictional form. It shows that rather than argue for a particular way of life, postapocalyptic literature reveals what it would be like to inhabit that life. It considers the genre's appeal in our own historical moment, contending that this fiction is the pastoral of our time. Whereas the pastoralist and the maroon could escape to real-world hills and fashion their own versions of freedom, on a fully owned and occupied Earth, only an apocalyptic event can create a space where such freedoms are feasible once again. The book looks at how fictional narratives set after the world's devastation represent new conditions and possibilities for life and humanity.

Performing Custom

Chapter 4 focuses on the relationship between writing and authority within common law. It argues that Philip Sidney’s Old Arcadia reflects on debates about whether to codify England’s unwritten customs that were taking place during this period. He makes use of the tension those debates generate to explore the nature of Renaissance authorship. From the idea of unwritten custom, rooted in practice and performance rather than code and decree, Sidney develops an authorial persona that runs counter to our usual association of the Renaissance artist with loss and melancholy: the aporia or doubt that Sidney’s narrator creates throughout the prose romance and within its pastoral poetry allows him to construct a notion of authorship based on custom and rooted in a connection to an inaccessible past that, ironically, he has no desire to recuperate.