The Department of French & Italian presents a lecture by
Todd W. Reeser
Setting
Plato Straight:
The Hermeneutics
of Homosexuality in Bruni,
Eramus, and Rabelais
Tuesday February
12, 2008
5:30 pm
College Arts & Humanities
Institute
1211 E. Atwater Ave.
Abstract: Writing as a Christian-Humanist, Rabelais was positioned in an intellectual and cultural framework in which the issue of reading or of re-reading Platonic same-sex sexuality could not be avoided. When Rabelais engages with Plato and the Neoplatonic tradition, he can be viewed as commenting not only on ancient sexuality, but also on how Platonic sexuality has been and should be read. Unlike some Renaissance translators and commentators, Rabelais’s view on Platonic sexuality is complex and diffuse, reflecting his sophisticated view of the reading act itself. Mostly notably, the famous opening to the prologue of Gargantua evokes Plato’s Silenic image from the Symposium and articulates a relation between the instabilities of hermeneutics and those of same-sex sexuality. But in doing so, Rabelais is responding to a much larger Renaissance critical tradition of re-reading Platonic sexuality. In this paper, I will focus on how hermeneutics and Platonic sexuality function together in three Renaissance texts: Leonardo Bruni's fifteenth-century translation of the end of the Symposium (the first Renaissance translation of the text), Erasmus's Adages, and the prologue to Rabelais's Gargantua. This paper is part of a book in progress treating the various relations between hermeneutics and Platonic sexuality in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe from Leonardo Bruni to Michel de Montaigne.
About the Speaker: Todd Reeser is Associate Professor of French in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of Moderating Masculinity in Early Modern Culture (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2006) and co-editor of “Entre hommes”: French and Francophone Masculinities in Theory and Culture, with Lewis Seifert (University of Delaware Press, 2008).
Sponsored by the Mary-Margaret Barr Koon Fund of the Department of French & Italian and the Renaissance Studies Program.
If you have a disability and need assistance, accommodations can be made to meet most needs. Please call 855-5458.
