“Global Temporalities Under Construction: Petrarch at Work”
9 July
Presented in Panel 3: “Temporalities of the Global”, moderated by Anna Degler. 14:00-16:30 (Berlin time).
The paper deals with Francesco Petrarca ’s efforts to create a transtemporal, transnational intellectual community. The focus is primarily on Petrarch’s two large collections of letters (Familiares and Seniles), on which he has worked for decades. As an example, the beginning and the end of the two collections will be briefly analyzed: Petrarcha ’s aim here is writing as a means of community building, and we shall take a closer look at its motivation, its strategies and its specific goals. It turns out that writing letters serves a program that is supposed to counteract the experience of threat, death, frailty and loss, an experience determining the past, the present and also the future of the humanistic author and his texts. It is ideologically founded in three ways: through Christian skepticism towards the secular world, through the programmatic distance of ancient (especially stoic) moral philosophy from the world, but also through the much more direct personal experience of the precarious status of all human life in a time that is characterized by manifold political, social and physical dangers.
Introduction by Anna Degler, Postdoctoral Researcher RA 2 “Travelling Matters”
Bernhard Huss is Full Professor for Romance Philology (literary studies) at Freie Universitaet of Berlin, where he heads the Center for Italian Studies and is spokesman of the DFG research group 2305 “Discursivisations of the New. Tradition and innovation in medieval and early modern texts and images”. Huss is primarily concerned with the literature and poetology of the early modern period (Italy and France), with questions of the reception of antiquity and early modern knowledge transfer, with the history and theory of literary genres as well as with the literature of the French classical period, the romantic period and with contemporary Italian narrative literature. Numerous publications, especially on the literature of the Italian Renaissance (Lorenzo de‘ Medicis Canzoniere und der Ficinianismus, 2007; Literaturtheorie(n) der italienischen Renaissance, 2012 [co-author]), most recently on the epics of the early modern period (Chronotopik und Ideologie im Epos, 2016 [co-author]), on the Latin work of Francis Petrarch (co-editor of bilingual annotated editions of Secretum meum and Africa; edition of De remediis utriusque fortune forthcoming) and on Petrarcha ’s Italian texts, especially on the Trionfi, with a particular focus on intermedial relations between text and image (illustration).
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