New Voices in Renaissance Research
Thursday, October 18, 2007

ABSTRACTS

“Classical Amnesia: Forgetting Differences in Seventeenth-Century France”
Andrea Frisch, Department of French and Italian

The book I am currently working on seeks to draw attention to a series of gestures of explicit, willful forgetting in late-sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France that stand in sharp contrast to Renaissance humanist attempts to recover the past. The book’s main thesis is that the political and legislative process of forgetting explicitly undertaken after the civil wars of the sixteenth century leads to a suppression of both historical and cultural difference within the aesthetics of literary classicism in France, and that this suppression is a necessary prelude to the elaboration of the notion of French cultural universalism that emerges in the seventeenth century.