Please join the Affect and the Emotions Workshop, online, on
Monday, October 25th when
Srikanth (Chicu) Reddy
Professor, Department of English, University of Chicago
presents his paper:
“Wonder, A Syzygy:
A Poetics of Wonder in The Iliad, Paradise Lost, and Radi Os”
Discussant: Emily Austin, Assistant Professor, Department of Classics and the College
the event will take place, on zoom:
Description: This talk ventures a literary archaeology of wonder as a way to begin thinking about poetry and the affects. Beginning with Homer’s description of the shield of Achilles in Book 18 of the Iliad, then turning to Milton’s description of Satan’s shield in Paradise Lost, I conclude with a reading of Ronald Johnson’s erasure of Milton in Radi Os to begin conceptualizing poetry as a ‘technology of feeling.’ My aim is to counter descriptions of poetry (and art) as ‘useless’ with an account of some ways that poetry from various contexts and periods might be viewed as an affective technology—which enables us to experience, register, and share our emotions. Affective and figurative correspondences from Homer to Milton to Ronald Johnson allow us to track, over a long history of feeling, how technologies like shields, telescopes, and radios mediate and project wonder in these poets’ work.
Image credit: Philip Rundell. Shield of Achilles. 1821-22. Silver Gilt. Royal Collection Trust.
