6 questions to… Rodolphe Gasché

On the occasion of this year’s Histories and Theories of Reading, GEMS welcomes six interesting and inspiring academics: we’ll offer them a coffee, have a chat, and ask the same six questions to each of them.
In May, Rodolphe Gasché (State University of New York at Buffalo) visited us. Here is how he answered:

6 questions to… Jonathan Culler

On the occasion of this year’s Histories and Theories of Reading, GEMS welcomes six interesting and inspiring academics: we’ll offer them a coffee, have a chat, and ask the same six questions to each of them.
Just before the easter holidays, Jonathan Culler (Cornell University) visited us. Here is how he answered:

6 questions to… Neil Badmington

On the occasion of this year’s Histories and Theories of Reading, GEMS welcomes six interesting and inspiring academics: we’ll offer them a coffee, have a chat, and ask the same six questions to each of them.
In December, Neil Badmington (University of Cardiff) visited us. Here is how he answered:

GEM: What made me want to write

In Sweden, where I was forced to speak a language that was foreign to me, I understood that I could inhabit my language, with its sudden, particular physiognomy, as the most secret but the most secure residence in that place without place that is the foreign country in which one finds oneself. Finally, the only real homeland, the only soil on which we can walk, the only house where we can stop and take shelter, is language, the one we learned from infancy. For me it was a question of reanimating that language, of constructing for myself a kind of small house of language where I would be the master and whose nooks and crannies I was familiar with. I think that’s what made me want to write.

Foucault is speaking here. It is a passage from an interview that was conducted by Claude Bonnefoy in 1968. The interview was never broadcast, but a typed manuscript stored in the archives of Foucault, was published in 2011, together with an introduction by Philippe Artières, under the title Le beau danger. In 2013, an English translation was published as Speech Begins after Death.

In the interview, Foucault seems to be surprisingly open about himself. He talks about the time he has spent in Sweden, about the loneliness that he experienced there; he even talks about his father, that is to say, about what shaped him – ‘I am the son of a surgeon’, as he confesses.

GEM: Amsterdam, therefore I am

‘And yet, as ambitious and single-minded as Descartes was in the pursuit of his philosophical projects, he was not the aloof, solitary, and misanthropic genius that his contemporary critics and some later commentators have made him out to be. Far from shutting himself off from human contact in order to carry out his researches in rural isolation, Descartes had a broad and diverse circle of personal and professional acquaintances – French and Dutch; Catholic and Protestant; philosophers, mathematicians, scientists, diplomats, and theologians.‘

With those words Steven Nadler concludes his latest book, The Philosopher, the Priest and the Painter. A portrait of Descartes. In this book, Nadler makes use of a painted portrait of Descartes (painted by Frans Hals or not – that is the question the book starts with) to shed some light on Descartes’s life in the Netherlands. By sketching out the different people and places that Nadler regards as conditions of possibility for the painted portrait of Descartes, Nadler gives us insight in who Descartes was and how Descartes conceived of himself. Especially interesting (I think) are the sections Nadler wrote about Golden Age cities Haarlem and Amsterdam, as relatively tolerant societies. Descartes considered for a long time Amsterdam the place where life was at its best. In a letter to a friend who was thinking about a quiet retreat in the countryside, he explains why he prefers the bigger city:

‘By contrast, in this great city where I am, there is no one, except myself, who is not engaged in commerce. Everyone is so consumed with the pursuit of his own profit that I could live my whole life without ever being seen by anyone. I go out walking every day among the confusion of a great many people, with as much liberty and quiet as you can find in your alleys; and I look at the people I see here not otherwise than as the trees found in your forests, or as the animals that pass through. Even the noise of their disturbances does not interrupt my reveries any more than would the sound of a small stream.‘

GEM: in the margins

A few weeks ago Annotated Books Online added a fascinating item on its website: a translation by Erasmus of the New Testament with some serious fighting in the margins. “Du bist nicht from”; “Stirb, Bestie, vide nequam!”; “Was darffs solchs gewessch?” are some of the attacking notes that Maarten Luther added to the text. After Luther’s death the theologian Regnerus Praedinius wrote his annotations in the margins, frequently shouting back at Luther in defence of Erasmus.

See Annotated Books Online for many more interesting books that contain all sort of comments by early-modern readers: a Vitruvius with annotations by Scaliger, Gabriel Harvey’s notes in editions of Livy and Machiavelli, annotated editions of Plutarch, Boccacio, Ovid, Vondel, Virgil, Homer, Newton, and so on… Annotated Books Online gives full open access to these unique copies. The website enables users to examine the annotations, to transcribe them, and to discuss them with other users. If you have a suggestion for an annotated book (from the first three centuries of print), please contact Annotated Books Online or GEMS (who is partner of the project).

GEM: It is Dante all the time

Always wanted to learn more about Dante? The time is now. Or, actually, the time is also tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, or next month and the weeks after that… Open Yale Courses makes it possible to attend several class lectures whenever, wherever you like. The course on Dante is given by Guiseppe Mazzotta, Sterling Professor of Humanities in Italian at Yale University, who is a specialist in medieval literature but addresses all periods of Italian literature and culture in his writings. Open Yale Courses provides not only videos of Mazzotta’s sessions, but also text transcriptions, visual resources, a syllabus, suggestions for paper topics, and even a midterm and final exam (although I wonder who evaluates these).

GEM: To examine our examination of ourselves

The exhibition ‘De anatomische les. Van Rembrandt tot Damien Hirst‘, which opened a few weeks ago in the Gemeentemuseum The Hague, brings together all of the ten ‘anatomy lessons’ that have been painted in the Netherlands during the seventeenth century. By showing also seventeenth-century chirurgical instruments and items like anatomical preparations, a connection is made between these paintings and the medical practice of the seventeenth century. However, a more challenging confrontation is created by the contemporary art objects that the exhibition also features. Art objects by Atelier van Lieshout, Francis Bacon, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Matthew Day Jackson, Lucio Fontana, Mona Hatoum, Paul Thek, Marc Quinn and Damien Hirst show how the seventeenth-century question about ‘who we are’ is still one that haunts us. Now, in The Hague, we can see how art reflects and has reflected on this question.

(picture:  Rembrandt van Rijn, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Jan Deijman (fragment), 1656, oil on canvas, 113 x 135 cm, Amsterdam Museum)

GEM: How Hooft wrote his sonnets

Although they had another function then the outline charts like that of Joseph Heller for his Catch-22 (see GEM of the Week of August the 6th), the ‘Rijmkladboeken’ of Hooft can give us some insight in the way the seventeenth-century poet wrote his poetry. The University of Amsterdam, which owns all three examples of these scribble-books, scanned them and made them accessible online.

GEM: Atlas De Wit

Always wanted to know what the world of Hooft, Huygens, Vondel or Revius looked like? This Atlas De Wit will give some perspective.
Cartographer Frederick De Wit made in the seventeenth century 158 prints of towns of the Northern and Southern Netherlands, like Amsterdam and The Hague, Leiden and Deventer, Antwerp and Ghent, but also of Muiden, Diksmuide and Kamerijk and many more, and collected these prints in his Theatrum ichnographicum omnium urbium.
In 2012 Lannoo published in cooperation with the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in The Hague a facsimile edition of this Atlas De Wit, which sold out in very short time. Luckily, a new edition will arrive in October 2013.
In the meantime, you can skim digitally through the Atlas on this website.