The Stories Things Tell: Early Modern Decorative Arts as Gateways to Literary Engagement
Lecture: 29 October at 9h15 in Seminarrom 4, Sophus Bugges hus.
When everyday objects carry stories, they do more than illustrate them or serve as souvenirs: they are invitations to talk about those stories, to question them, to interpret them and to reinvent them. Mylène Garin traces this back to the salons of seventeenth-century France, where objects could become starting points for conversation. In a passage from Madeleine de Scudéry’s Conversations morales (1686), a group of friends discuss friendship around a fan, described in detail, whose verses and imagery rework an allegorical map from one of Scudéry’s own novels. In examining, debating and reinterpreting the fan, the friends carry out a series of operations that Mylène Garin turns into a five-step method that teachers can use to connect objects and literary texts in their own classrooms. The lecture then shows the method at work on a real object: an engraved fan leaf featuring a scene and couplets from Nicolas Isouard’s 1810 opera Cendrillon (Cinderella), itself an adaptation of Charles Perrault’s fairy tale.
Register for the lecture here.