Archives par mot-clé : Measure

Colloque 2014: La mesure et l’excès

COLLOQUE INTERNATIONAL ORGANISÉ PAR LA SEAA XVII-XVIII

« La mesure et l’excès / Measure and Excess »

Paris, 17-18 Janvier 2014

 

Université Paris 4

Maison de la Recherche, 28 rue Serpente 75006 Paris

Salle D35

 

Vendredi 17 janvier 2014

Accueil à partir de 9h

 

Séance 1 : Esthétique (1)

Président : Guillaume Coatalen

9h15 Gisèle Venet (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3), La mesure et l’excès: Horace et Ovide en conflit dans les esthétiques maniéristes et baroques?

9h45 Claire Bardelmann (Université de Lorraine), Un excès de mesures : complexité terminologique et constellation métaphorique de la « mesure » musicale anglaise au 17è siècle

10h15 Rémi Vuillemin (Université de Strasbourg), “Love with excess of heat”: reassessing Petrarchan excess in the late-Elizabethan and early-Jacobean periods

10h45 – 11h15 discussion et pause

 

Séance 2 : Esthétique (2)

 Présidente : Marie-Madeleine Martinet

11h15 Christine Sukic (Université de Reims Champagne Ardenne), “a true signe of a readie wit” : la colère entre mesure et excès

11h45 Aurélie Griffin (Université d’Angers, doctorante Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3), Melancholic Excess and Poetic Measure in Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus

12h15 Anne-Marie Miller-Blaise (Université Paris Sorbonne), Vehement Poesy : L’élégie et les codes de l’excès

 

12h45-14h30 Déjeuner libre

 

Vendredi 17 janvier 2014 (après-midi)

 Président : Jean Viviès

 

14h30 Conférence de Abigail Williams (St Peter’s College, Oxford):

A Brief History of Eighteenth-Century Modesty

 

15h30 – 16h pause

 

16h Assemblée générale

 

18h30 cocktail (lieu à confirmer)

 

Samedi 18 janvier 2014

 

Séance 1 : La Jeune Amérique (politique)

Présidente : Marie-Jeanne Rossignol

9h30 Anne-Claire Faucquez-Merlin (docteur Université Paris 8 – Vincennes Saint-Denis), La fondation de la Nouvelle-Néerlande : entre la mesure des excès et excès de mesures

10h Élodie Peyrol-Kleiber (docteur Université Paris 8 – Vincennes Saint-Denis), L’engagement : un système servile poussant à l’excès

10h30 Lauren Working (Durham University), Violating the Body and the Law: Cannibal Discourses in Jacobean England and America

11h discussion et pause

 

Séance 2 : La Jeune Amérique (esthétique)

Présidente : Isabelle Bour

11h30 Juliette Dorotte (doctorante Université Paris Sorbonne), Le premier roman américain, entre autocensure et excès

12h00 Michael Burden (New College, University of Oxford), Opera and the discourse of Luxury in 18th-Century England and America

 

Déjeuner libre

 

Après-midi

 

Séance 1

Présidente : Madeleine Descargues

14h Christophe Hausermann (docteur Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3), “Of our Measure we have been debar’d” : De la démesure dans les récits d’apprentissage de Thomas Deloney, Richard Head et Francis Kirkman

14h30 Alexandra Sippel (Université Toulouse – Le Mirail), “Under a perfect government […] the earth would soon be overstocked”: measure and excess of population in a few eighteenth-century utopias

 15h Jeffrey Hopes (Université d’Orléans), Dating the world: the science of biblical chronology

 

15h30-16h discussion et pause

 

Séance 2

Président : Jeffrey Hopes

16h Nathalie Zimpfer (docteur Université Lyon 2), La mesure de l’excès : l’esthétique swiftienne de la satire

16h30 Damian Grant (University of Manchester), Smollett’s Travels between Measure and Excess

 

17h : clôture du colloque

CFP: Measure and Excess in 17th and 18th-Century England and America

CALL FOR PAPERS

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE HOSTED BY SEAA XVII-XVIII (SOCIETE D’ETUDES ANGLO-AMERICAINES DES XVIIe ET XVIIIe SIECLES)

 

Paris, 17-18 January 2014

 

Measure and Excess in 17th and 18th-Century England and America

The idea of measure is inseparable from the idea of excess, since the one governs the other. Excess always exceeds a measure, that is to say a norm. According to Littre, excess is ‘that which goes beyond ordinary limits, the mean.’

However, these terms are of course highly unstable; what is measure for some represents excess for others. The dialectics of measure and excess seems to be at the heart of preoccupations in the 17c and 18c in England as well as in the new world, whether concerning theoretical or practical issues.
Explorers set out to claim the world and make their fortunes, but also to measure its dimensions. Apart from the multiplication of instruments of measurement (charts, globes, and other maritime devices) the unit of measurement itself became a matter of state; one recalls that the queen confirmed the measurement of the English foot in 1588, which was reaffirmed in 1758. This desire to discipline the prodigality of nature characterizes the work of taxonomist John Ray, who classified innumerable animal and plant species by measuring them.

In politics, measure is to be understood as that which prevents or contains unrest. Largely influenced by ancient philosophy, early modern English philosophers regard[ed] measure as the touchstone of civil harmony as well as of personal wisdom, as opposed to the excesses of civil war and immoral behaviour. For Francis Bacon, the lesson to be drawn from the fall of Icarus in The Wisdom of the Ancients is that ‘the path of virtue lies straight between excess on the one side, and defect on the other.’

The complex links which bond our ideas of measure and excess also inform theological debate, religious tension and sectarian persecution. To give one example, the Anglican faith, conceived by its founding fathers and lived out by its faithful as a middle way, finds itself rejected by the Puritans as excessively Catholic.

Whether in the arts or the humanities, measure and excess inform opposed aesthetic positions which only make sense through this very opposition. Cicero’s rhetoric, featuring a measured style, rebukes two kinds of excess: the overblown Asiatic style on the one hand, and Attic dryness on the other. In architecture and music, measure—in a literal sense, as it creates spatial and temporal structures—can also run into excess. In verse, measure (that is to say, metre) contains the excesses of feeling, thus rendering them more striking; as John Donne reminds us (‘For he tames grief, that fetters it in verse.’) In painting, the term mensura may well refer to accurate proportions, but this does not stop many celebrated painters from evading constraint by invoking another system of proportions, more tolerant of excess. Baroque excess could only have arisen as a counter-movement to classical measure. Likewise, the lucidity so valued by English neo-classical writers (one thinks of John Dryden, and Alexander Pope who wrote: ‘Between excess and famine lies a mean;/ Plain, but not sordid; though not splendid, clean’ [Horace II, Satire 2]) was at least partly a reaction to the elaborate style from before the civil war, perceived as excessively obscure.

Papers will address the numerous links between measure and excess in the 17c and 18c in Britain and America, in the various fields of politics, theology, literature, architecture, painting, and music; but also in manners, where luxury lives alongside austerity; and not forgetting sciences such as geography, physics and astronomy.
Proposals, plus a selective bibliography and bio-bibliographical CV, may be simultaneously submitted to:

  • Guillaume COATALEN

Contact: guillaumecoatalen [at] hotmail.com

  • Guyonne LEDUC

Contact: presidence [at] 1718.fr

  • Pierre DEGOTT

Contact: secretariat [at] 1718.fr

Deadline for abstract submission: 25 April 2013
Decision of the scientific committee: 30 June 2013