Archives for May 2007
Rabelais
30 May 2007 | Uncategorized
Rabelais’ polemics, though embedded in satirical plays, interest us because they influenced numerous subsequent invective writers. In the 1995 essay collection François Rabelais: Critical Assessments, Thomas Greene contributed an article on “Rabelais and the Language of Malediction.” He writes that Rabelais himself drew on invective tradition, whose origins Greene dates to the seventh-century B.C. Archilochus, [...]
Sexing Up (Or Down) Your French Translation
30 May 2007 | Uncategorized
I have been slowly translating into English several French texts that will feature prominently in my dissertation, revising them again and again over time. An essay by Benjamin Jacob in a recent issue of French Studies Bulletin (n. 101) illustrates how little the translator can take for granted; even words that have been consistently translated [...]
Read ‘Sexing Up (Or Down) Your French Translation’
Renaissance Invective
30 May 2007 | Uncategorized
Born in 1304, Petrarca is sometimes considered the father of humanism, and sometimes considered the father of humanistic invective, the reviver of the classical invective tradition. In the introduction to his 2003 edition of Petrarca’s Invectives, David Marsh writes
Petrarca’s literary and social success did not come without a price, and he came under attack from [...]
Getting Medieval
30 May 2007 | Uncategorized
“The Middle Ages were no less rich in works of an invective nature,” according to Ennio Rao, in “The Humanistic Invective as Literary Genre” (in the 1989 volume of the Selected Proceedings of the Pennsylvania Foreign Language Conference, pp. 261-7). “Suffice it to mention the invectives of Berengarius in defense of his master Abelard against [...]
Greece and Rome, Part III: Genres
30 May 2007 | Uncategorized
In his 2005 book Early Renaissance Invective and the Controversies of Antonio da Rho, David Rutherford notes that in antiquity invective was used in several genres. Judicial rhetoric was of course the most common venue for invective. There,
The thrust of persuasive invective was ad hominem attack, and its essence was malicious caricature and ridicule. The [...]
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