1 00:00:12,540 --> 00:00:17,960 Well, from this book at lunch time event on imitating authors written by Professor 2 00:00:17,960 --> 00:00:23,210 Colin Burrow. My name's Wes Williams and I'm the knowledge exchange champion here at Torch, 3 00:00:23,210 --> 00:00:29,420 which is why I'm introducing this. I'm also replicating myself as one of the speakers. 4 00:00:29,420 --> 00:00:34,490 And I'll explain later that there's a further replication involved in that process, too. But 5 00:00:34,490 --> 00:00:39,650 mainly, I'm delighted to welcome Colin here today to speak about his book on behalf of torture. I extend the welcome 6 00:00:39,650 --> 00:00:45,710 on behalf Torch. You look forward to chairing this discussion as well as having my five minutes in. 7 00:00:45,710 --> 00:00:50,900 With me on the panel today are Professor Katherine Myrth Murphy. Katie Murphy and Professor Stephen 8 00:00:50,900 --> 00:00:56,060 Helliwell. It's a great pleasure then to be able to introduce 9 00:00:56,060 --> 00:01:01,100 this book at lunch time, which I think is the seventh of the academic year so far. Book 10 00:01:01,100 --> 00:01:06,170 at lunchtime is Torture's flagship event series, taking the form of a fortnightly bite 11 00:01:06,170 --> 00:01:11,630 sized book, discussions with a range of commentators. One of the commentators 12 00:01:11,630 --> 00:01:16,790 is themselves the author. And that's in a sense part of the point of this, to do not 13 00:01:16,790 --> 00:01:21,950 so much grill, but give the author a chance to listen to critiques and readings 14 00:01:21,950 --> 00:01:26,990 of and then respond in turn. Please do take a look at our website, 15 00:01:26,990 --> 00:01:32,680 a newsletter for the full programme for the rest of this term and next. 16 00:01:32,680 --> 00:01:37,960 In this book, Colin Burrow presents a fascinating account of how orphans from the earliest stages of Western 17 00:01:37,960 --> 00:01:43,120 literature to the present day have imitated each other. The book covers, 18 00:01:43,120 --> 00:01:48,270 as I mentioned, will go on to talk about in a bit of detail an impressive range of such 19 00:01:48,270 --> 00:01:53,710 authors, including Plato, Virgil, Lucretius, Petrakis of unfairest Ben Johnson, Milton 20 00:01:53,710 --> 00:01:58,720 Pope Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, and towards the end, because Wil 21 00:01:58,720 --> 00:02:03,730 Ishiguro Buhrow offers and indeed various 22 00:02:03,730 --> 00:02:09,040 robots as well. Towards the end, Buhrow offers a clear explanation of difficult, complex 23 00:02:09,040 --> 00:02:14,380 concepts and complex histories and explains and brings into discussion 24 00:02:14,380 --> 00:02:19,870 a number of both ancient and modern writings which have enabled texts to have an influence 25 00:02:19,870 --> 00:02:25,420 on later texts and brings the discussion up to date. By studying contemporary fictions 26 00:02:25,420 --> 00:02:32,660 about clones and imitation human beings and indeed the future of imitation. 27 00:02:32,660 --> 00:02:38,410 A read a section from the book in a minute, but first a few words of introduction to the panel members 28 00:02:38,410 --> 00:02:44,080 and indeed myself. Colin himself is professor of English and Comparative Literature in the faculty of English 29 00:02:44,080 --> 00:02:49,270 and a senior research fellow of All Souls College in Oxford. His research interests focus 30 00:02:49,270 --> 00:02:54,510 on Renaissance literature. Early Tudor writing. Shakespeare. Ben Johnson 31 00:02:54,510 --> 00:02:59,560 and classical literatures. And broadly speaking, that influence and reception as well as 32 00:02:59,560 --> 00:03:05,170 editing. He also reviews contemporary poetry, novels and a wide range of other books, 33 00:03:05,170 --> 00:03:10,270 most often for the London Review of Books. He's presently, it says here, working on a history 34 00:03:10,270 --> 00:03:15,770 of Elizabethan literature for the Oxford English literary history. 35 00:03:15,770 --> 00:03:20,780 Catherine Murphy is associate professor in the faculty of English. She's also largely 36 00:03:20,780 --> 00:03:25,940 an early modernist and is a literary critic and scholar with interest in several key 37 00:03:25,940 --> 00:03:31,010 areas, including literature and philosophy in the 17th century, in particular, the genre of 38 00:03:31,010 --> 00:03:36,050 the essay from all 10 to the present. Here's another of her interest. Lectures and alphabet. The 39 00:03:36,050 --> 00:03:41,120 production of images in relation to ways of representing knowledge and the 40 00:03:41,120 --> 00:03:46,310 relationships between poetic form, rhetorical figure and theological and philosophical 41 00:03:46,310 --> 00:03:51,470 ideas. If you'd even dipped into this book, you'll know that Katie is an ideal reader for 42 00:03:51,470 --> 00:03:56,810 it. She herself is currently writing a book called The Tottering Universal 43 00:03:56,810 --> 00:04:02,930 Metaphysical Prose in the 17th century, which addresses many of the 44 00:04:02,930 --> 00:04:08,270 points you just raised. Stephen Helliwell, who will speak directly after Cullen, 45 00:04:08,270 --> 00:04:13,640 is professor of Greek and the law professor of classics at the University of San Andrews in Scotland. 46 00:04:13,640 --> 00:04:18,860 His published research ranges widely both across Greek literature, from homo to lay time particularly 47 00:04:18,860 --> 00:04:23,870 and Greek philosophy from Plato to New Platonism. It also deals with the interface between 48 00:04:23,870 --> 00:04:29,130 literature and philosophy more broadly. Professor Halliwell's main project 49 00:04:29,130 --> 00:04:34,390 now is on a new edition with introduction, text and commentary of Longinus 50 00:04:34,390 --> 00:04:39,430 is on the Sublime. I myself will speak last. And professor of French 51 00:04:39,430 --> 00:04:44,560 in the Faculty of Money and Modern Languages, my main research interests are also in the field 52 00:04:44,560 --> 00:04:50,470 of Renaissance and early modern studies. My first book was about pilgrimage writing 53 00:04:50,470 --> 00:04:55,960 and I still work on various kinds of travel. And so the metaphor of the path 54 00:04:55,960 --> 00:05:01,090 which runs through this book is that of era also is very interesting to me. I also 55 00:05:01,090 --> 00:05:06,280 wrote a book about monsters and their meanings from roughly Rabelais to Rasheen. 56 00:05:06,280 --> 00:05:12,080 And now I'm writing a book about the long history of the idea of voluntary servitude 57 00:05:12,080 --> 00:05:17,330 or willing subjection. As Nicholas Parsons 58 00:05:17,330 --> 00:05:27,070 much lamented, used to say, our panel. 59 00:05:27,070 --> 00:05:32,250 Let's start then with a reading from Colin of passage from the book. You're right to say 60 00:05:32,250 --> 00:05:37,380 something as well as read if you like. Come on. Yes, it's very kind. What 61 00:05:37,380 --> 00:05:42,750 I say. Thank you very much for having me and for introducing me. So I believe 62 00:05:42,750 --> 00:05:47,760 it's a book about the imitation of authors rather than about the 63 00:05:47,760 --> 00:05:52,900 imitation of reality. And copies of it are available outside 64 00:05:52,900 --> 00:05:57,990 if you want to pay for your lunch. So do you feel free to buy them? It's 65 00:05:57,990 --> 00:06:03,090 what book I say myself, which covers an awful lot of ground. But 66 00:06:03,090 --> 00:06:08,250 the key argument of it really is that imitation of one author by another should 67 00:06:08,250 --> 00:06:13,410 not be thought of as verbal theft or appropriation. Rather, it should 68 00:06:13,410 --> 00:06:18,450 be thought of as a process of learning from the past, of seeing practises in earlier text, which 69 00:06:18,450 --> 00:06:23,730 you can then put into practise yourself in new ways. And 70 00:06:23,730 --> 00:06:29,010 I establish this view of imitation over about 400 pages, 71 00:06:29,010 --> 00:06:34,290 talking about all kinds of authors. And so and 72 00:06:34,290 --> 00:06:39,720 then I say on page 445, 404, the bit that I'm about to 73 00:06:39,720 --> 00:06:44,830 read. So you have to imagine yourselves having been already bludgeoned into submission by a huge amount of data. 74 00:06:44,830 --> 00:06:49,920 Before I start waving my hands around in the way I see here. So the notion 75 00:06:49,920 --> 00:06:54,930 that imitation, chiefly in his in learning practises from prior examples could be formulated in the form of 76 00:06:54,930 --> 00:07:00,690 four propositions which are quite easy to state, but very hard to believe equally. And at the same time, 77 00:07:00,690 --> 00:07:06,150 the propositions are these one human beings resemble and learnt from other human beings 78 00:07:06,150 --> 00:07:11,790 to human beings become distinctive by learning from other human beings. Three. 79 00:07:11,790 --> 00:07:16,860 What human beings learn from each other may be an ability to perform an act which does not resemble any 80 00:07:16,860 --> 00:07:22,020 act performed by the exemplar for imitating earlier authors can in 81 00:07:22,020 --> 00:07:27,300 all these respects, resemble imitating other human beings. And those propositions sound 82 00:07:27,300 --> 00:07:32,430 very simple. But they suggest the most of what we think we know about imitation. We do not, 83 00:07:32,430 --> 00:07:37,440 in fact, know authors acquire neither preformed identities nor sections 84 00:07:37,440 --> 00:07:42,910 of texts from what they read and imitate. Rather, they acquire a complex blend of words, 85 00:07:42,910 --> 00:07:48,060 habits, forms, figures of speech and ways of proceeding. This doesn't make the act 86 00:07:48,060 --> 00:07:53,130 of imitating simple or simply a cold matter requiring a set of techniques 87 00:07:53,130 --> 00:07:58,710 because learning from another author, like learning from another person, is partly an evaluative activity. 88 00:07:58,710 --> 00:08:03,750 It might entail making judgements about the work of earlier authors and about which aspects of them are good and 89 00:08:03,750 --> 00:08:09,000 which are bad as well. The late 18th century 90 00:08:09,000 --> 00:08:14,100 effective turn in the history of imitation illustrates that can generate 91 00:08:14,100 --> 00:08:19,560 complexes of emotion in relation to prime examples of admiration turning 92 00:08:19,560 --> 00:08:24,840 into a desire to be like someone or of a growing aversion to a person or a text. 93 00:08:24,840 --> 00:08:30,060 One is considered M.B and in whom one comes to see weaknesses who has not experienced 94 00:08:30,060 --> 00:08:35,310 that. It can even mean that the imitator engages in a dialectical revulsion 95 00:08:35,310 --> 00:08:40,350 from the object of imitation and creates a vengeful replicant of Vme tand which 96 00:08:40,350 --> 00:08:45,390 might either in actuality or desire destroy or overturn will transform the 97 00:08:45,390 --> 00:08:50,400 thing imitated as happens in Frankenstein. The imitator can share 98 00:08:50,400 --> 00:08:55,410 the powerful hostility of the destructive parodist or the disillusion pupil, or 99 00:08:55,410 --> 00:09:00,570 alternatively experienced the abjection of a lover who fails to see the evident faults 100 00:09:00,570 --> 00:09:05,910 in the loved object. The imitator can also become a narcissist to self 101 00:09:05,910 --> 00:09:10,980 identification with the object of imitation, enables love for the exemplar to be carried 102 00:09:10,980 --> 00:09:16,110 over into the imitators own creations like a new Pygmalion. 103 00:09:16,110 --> 00:09:21,420 The desire to imitate might derive from a sense of endangered or to cultural authority that threatens 104 00:09:21,420 --> 00:09:26,580 the imitator or even the autonomy of the imitators nation and might prompt her to produce 105 00:09:26,580 --> 00:09:31,590 a rebellious double of that authority which might destroy it. Imitation can also lead to 106 00:09:31,590 --> 00:09:36,690 the conflicts of affects of aspiration and envy and desire that come from 107 00:09:36,690 --> 00:09:42,120 being drawn to someone who is capable of something of which one wants oneself to be capable 108 00:09:42,120 --> 00:09:47,400 and imitated, may be amazed by the skill manifested in an earlier work, and then painstakingly analyse 109 00:09:47,400 --> 00:09:52,830 and seek to replicate that skill, the skill that made that object of amazement. And this might lead 110 00:09:52,830 --> 00:09:58,020 either to a recognition that the imitating author can do it a newer and a better way. 111 00:09:58,020 --> 00:10:03,150 A recognition that he cannot. Imitation is a practise surrounded with both 112 00:10:03,150 --> 00:10:08,700 opportunities and hazards. But the wider consequence of recognising the temptation is principally 113 00:10:08,700 --> 00:10:13,780 a matter of acquiring a set of habituated ways of doing a practise. And 114 00:10:13,780 --> 00:10:19,290 that this is some. All language users necessarily do, whether they want it or not, is to accept 115 00:10:19,290 --> 00:10:25,170 that we are partly other people and we are also partly what we have read. 116 00:10:25,170 --> 00:10:30,330 Accepting that doesn't entail any loss of autonomy or the unfreedom, which has been a repeated 117 00:10:30,330 --> 00:10:35,640 source of anxiety throughout the wider history of thinking about imitation. Human beings 118 00:10:35,640 --> 00:10:40,710 are skilful and self conscious learners who continually adapt the practises they've learnt from 119 00:10:40,710 --> 00:10:46,350 others to new uses. The imitating author. Indeed may radically misunderstand 120 00:10:46,350 --> 00:10:51,690 the object of imitation and remake a version of it. On the basis of that mistake or a new cultural 121 00:10:51,690 --> 00:10:56,970 context may make old words seem to mean something new. And so even a devoted literal 122 00:10:56,970 --> 00:11:02,850 imitator may, like Don Quixote, find that an attempt at exact replication 123 00:11:02,850 --> 00:11:07,890 produces an entirely new kind of text. Recognising 124 00:11:07,890 --> 00:11:13,290 that the Persia's, which have built up in later modernity not to be a clone, not to be a copy, but be to 125 00:11:13,290 --> 00:11:18,360 but to be an original products of a larger history should remind us 126 00:11:18,360 --> 00:11:24,210 that those pressures can be resisted because between the sharp opposition of originality 127 00:11:24,210 --> 00:11:30,300 and replication, on the other hand, is a huge zone occupied by the acquisition of practises 128 00:11:30,300 --> 00:11:35,490 of learning skills and the wider, while the more emotionally turbulent uplands 129 00:11:35,490 --> 00:11:41,310 of influence. And there is a very strange definition of imitation in the outer cranium, 130 00:11:41,310 --> 00:11:46,530 which appears at first to be no meekly evasive. But actually, I think does convey a large truth 131 00:11:46,530 --> 00:11:51,540 in little. The outer Adiam says imitation is that by which we are impelled 132 00:11:51,540 --> 00:11:56,700 in accordance with a careful method to flourish in speaking by being 133 00:11:56,700 --> 00:12:01,860 like others. And that statement implies that imitation is an urge 134 00:12:01,860 --> 00:12:07,530 which results in a fusion of emotion and practise a desire to be like 135 00:12:07,530 --> 00:12:12,810 in which emotion and practise are constantly feeding each other. And following that urge 136 00:12:12,810 --> 00:12:17,880 offers the prospect of flourishing new thoughts, new worlds. New texts 137 00:12:17,880 --> 00:12:23,730 could be produced by the labour of understanding and mastering the practises of earlier examples, 138 00:12:23,730 --> 00:12:29,370 because the practises manifested in those ancient examples are rules 139 00:12:29,370 --> 00:12:34,710 or finite injunctions, but ways of doing things which could be extrapolated 140 00:12:34,710 --> 00:12:40,170 into ways of doing new things. Imitation produces transformation 141 00:12:40,170 --> 00:12:45,330 rather than replication, and it always leaves open the question what will 142 00:12:45,330 --> 00:12:50,370 happen next? A question which of course is a bit terrifying when the next person speak is 143 00:12:50,370 --> 00:12:56,760 a proper classicist. And I think that Plato. But there we go. 144 00:12:56,760 --> 00:13:02,430 Thank you. Colin Burroughs book is a tour de force of historical scholarship 145 00:13:02,430 --> 00:13:07,470 and political thought. Though I didn't myself feel it bludgeoned by, it is to 146 00:13:07,470 --> 00:13:12,690 say it employs immense erudition in reframing what was traditionally called 147 00:13:12,690 --> 00:13:18,930 in the old Latin term IMME Tato, a storeroom which is here converted 148 00:13:18,930 --> 00:13:23,930 to the syntactically ambiguous phrase, imitating authors 149 00:13:23,930 --> 00:13:28,980 I found especially rewarding the rich analysis of metaphors running through the book of 150 00:13:28,980 --> 00:13:34,800 the I'm sorry, the rich analysis running through the book of the competing metaphors 151 00:13:34,800 --> 00:13:39,900 by which perceptions as well as practises of literary imitation have been mediated and 152 00:13:39,900 --> 00:13:45,600 inflected. Colin Burrows exploration of the landscape of Amy Tateo, 153 00:13:45,600 --> 00:13:51,360 combining as it does large vistas with exquisitely fine inspection of individual features, 154 00:13:51,360 --> 00:13:56,490 conveys a sense of a territory with no hard borders. How, then, one 155 00:13:56,490 --> 00:14:02,520 wonders, could T.S. Eliot have tried to define a boundary even between imitation and influence, 156 00:14:02,520 --> 00:14:07,620 claiming that while influence can FT.com date? And that's one of the key family 157 00:14:07,620 --> 00:14:12,930 of metaphors adopted in this book. Imitation I'm quoting especially 158 00:14:12,930 --> 00:14:19,170 unconscious imitation. An interesting parenthesis can only sterilise 159 00:14:19,170 --> 00:14:24,270 no doubt if pressed. Elliott would have defined his terms in such a way as to create a self 160 00:14:24,270 --> 00:14:30,270 reinforcing circle of evaluation, since that is the prerogative of critics. 161 00:14:30,270 --> 00:14:35,310 Colin Burrows enterprise avoids such limiting categorisations. But where does it 162 00:14:35,310 --> 00:14:40,980 leave me, Tateo, in relation to the idea of into text duality, understood as a web 163 00:14:40,980 --> 00:14:45,990 of only partially traceable connexions? This book actually holds the 164 00:14:45,990 --> 00:14:51,360 notion of into text duality at arm's length. But Colin Barren nonetheless calls Amy Tateo 165 00:14:51,360 --> 00:14:56,640 a moving target and states at one point that when practised with a bit educated 166 00:14:56,640 --> 00:15:02,070 facility, it may not even appear to be imitation at all. 167 00:15:02,070 --> 00:15:07,470 It's tempting to add the opposite paradox, which was observed with delicate irony 168 00:15:07,470 --> 00:15:12,570 by Jack Mondale, partly in his extraordinary notebook's, that an author like Petrarch 169 00:15:12,570 --> 00:15:17,700 has been imitated so much that when you read him, he seems himself. This 170 00:15:17,700 --> 00:15:23,160 is their party's judgement to be an imitator. Perhaps one might say a selfish imitator. 171 00:15:23,160 --> 00:15:28,740 Actually, Colin, burrowing in his book argues that Petrarch was indeed an imitator. But he's 172 00:15:28,740 --> 00:15:33,840 thinking along different lines from Labour Party for classicists 173 00:15:33,840 --> 00:15:39,300 like myself. The whole domain of Amy Tateo, including areas beyond literature, 174 00:15:39,300 --> 00:15:45,330 is so important that it has been partly constitutive not only of the disciplines subject matter, 175 00:15:45,330 --> 00:15:51,210 but to some extent the disciplines self image. And that is changing these days. 176 00:15:51,210 --> 00:15:56,250 Well, Kassis certainly have much to ponder in this book and much to learn from it. 177 00:15:56,250 --> 00:16:01,590 Its pursuit of the reception history of ancient texts and ideas is consistently 178 00:16:01,590 --> 00:16:06,780 stimulating and indeed eye opening quintillion. To cite just one salient example turns 179 00:16:06,780 --> 00:16:12,610 out to be almost as significant as anyone else for the whole trajectory of the argument. 180 00:16:12,610 --> 00:16:17,820 And I found it almost symbolic that he was the very last person mentioned in the text 181 00:16:17,820 --> 00:16:22,860 of the book. I myself found Colin Burrows book particularly valuable in 182 00:16:22,860 --> 00:16:28,020 helping me to discern, though Colin may not entirely agree with this certain asymmetries in the roots 183 00:16:28,020 --> 00:16:33,480 of Amy Tateo within ancient critical theory. From my perspective, there is a striking 184 00:16:33,480 --> 00:16:38,640 disparity. Especially on the Greek side. Between the place of Amy 185 00:16:38,640 --> 00:16:43,680 Tato or in Greek, my missus in the poetic and the rhetorical strands of ancient 186 00:16:43,680 --> 00:16:48,720 criticism. Poetic criticism by which I mean criticism of poetry is 187 00:16:48,720 --> 00:16:54,450 far more fixated on the axis between the work and the world than on that between 188 00:16:54,450 --> 00:17:00,510 text and text. Author and author. Whereas it's rhetorical theory 189 00:17:00,510 --> 00:17:05,640 for reasons embedded in educational practises, as Colin Burwell knows, that makes Amy 190 00:17:05,640 --> 00:17:10,890 Tato as a relationship between texts or authors a central concern and sometimes 191 00:17:10,890 --> 00:17:15,900 an obsession. And even rhetorical theory started, as I see it, from 192 00:17:15,900 --> 00:17:21,000 the principle of internalising schema ties to types or patterns 193 00:17:21,000 --> 00:17:26,370 of form and style. Before it came to treat individual authors as paradigms 194 00:17:26,370 --> 00:17:31,380 for imitation. In early Greek rhetorical theory models, speeches 195 00:17:31,380 --> 00:17:36,570 written by teachers and related practises are foundational. 196 00:17:36,570 --> 00:17:41,700 Plato's Phaedrus, which perhaps surprisingly, Colin doesn't mention in this book, 197 00:17:41,700 --> 00:17:47,040 throws an interesting sidelight on this intellectual culture. Imitation 198 00:17:47,040 --> 00:17:52,080 of authors, as I see it, is only superimposed on this foundation at a later date and as a 199 00:17:52,080 --> 00:17:57,930 result of two Hellenistic developments, the first of them the emergence of a nostalgically 200 00:17:57,930 --> 00:18:03,450 post classical sensibility, which sets up a corresponding programme of classes 201 00:18:03,450 --> 00:18:08,550 sizing recuperation, and the second, the Alexandrian invention 202 00:18:08,550 --> 00:18:13,910 of canon necessity. The assimilation of Greek culture by Rome 203 00:18:13,910 --> 00:18:18,960 adds, of course, further layers of complexity to this whole processes. Colin Burrard does not need to 204 00:18:18,960 --> 00:18:24,120 be told yet. It continues to be the case. At any rate, too late antiquity. That poetic 205 00:18:24,120 --> 00:18:29,730 criticism rarely gives into authorial in imitation. The degree of prominence 206 00:18:29,730 --> 00:18:35,850 that rhetorical criticism does. And one might want to ponder why that was so 207 00:18:35,850 --> 00:18:41,700 well of partial exceptions to the sweeping claim I've advanced. One of the most intriguing is the treatise 208 00:18:41,700 --> 00:18:46,910 on the Sublime, whose own author is probably anonymous, but we call him Longinus. 209 00:18:46,910 --> 00:18:52,920 Colling Burrow has some very interesting things to say about this work, not least about its revivification 210 00:18:52,920 --> 00:18:58,440 of the platonic metaphore of pregnancy of mind. Or so 211 00:18:58,440 --> 00:19:03,810 that's in Chapter 13 of the treatise, where creative imitation is heavily trooped 212 00:19:03,810 --> 00:19:09,060 as inspiration, breathing in the spirit of one's ancestors, 213 00:19:09,060 --> 00:19:14,430 one's great predecessors. But I'd like very quickly to say something about what 214 00:19:14,430 --> 00:19:19,680 follows in Chapter 14, after Longinus has emphatically equated imitation with 215 00:19:19,680 --> 00:19:24,960 agonistic rivalry as epitomised for him by the relationship 216 00:19:24,960 --> 00:19:30,090 of Plato to Homer Platers competition with Hope Homer, 217 00:19:30,090 --> 00:19:35,340 Chapter 14, posits a three stage thought process which is unique in ancient criticism 218 00:19:35,340 --> 00:19:40,560 for the channelling of any Tardio as a creative impulse. Ambitious 219 00:19:40,560 --> 00:19:45,630 writers of the present are told they must ask themselves a trio 220 00:19:45,630 --> 00:19:50,760 of questions. Firstly, how would Homer or Plato have said? What I am trying to 221 00:19:50,760 --> 00:19:55,770 say and the great authors of the past here are imagined as looming up, I 222 00:19:55,770 --> 00:20:00,990 think before the mind and in a quail's I ghostly fashion, which very much chimes 223 00:20:00,990 --> 00:20:06,360 with a leitmotif of Colin Boros book. Secondly, they must ask, what would they make of my work 224 00:20:06,360 --> 00:20:11,480 if they were present here as my judges so that the Predecessors' now become 225 00:20:11,480 --> 00:20:16,500 a critical super ego? And thirdly, what will posterity make of 226 00:20:16,500 --> 00:20:21,690 my work? Where will it rang me? In the agon of authors, 227 00:20:21,690 --> 00:20:26,910 Longinus adds that the products of a mind afraid to write for posterity are bound 228 00:20:26,910 --> 00:20:32,190 to be abortive. And that's his metaphor. It is clear, however, that this anxiety 229 00:20:32,190 --> 00:20:37,230 inheres in the whole psychology of creative imitation so that what we have 230 00:20:37,230 --> 00:20:42,240 here is a Proteau Bloomy and mentality are not accidentally, 231 00:20:42,240 --> 00:20:48,210 I would say. The young Harold Bloom was once told by William Wims that the new critic 232 00:20:48,210 --> 00:20:54,090 the trouble with you, Bloom, is that you're a Longinus and not an Aristotelian. 233 00:20:54,090 --> 00:20:59,340 Burrow gives Bloom rather short shrift in this book. Perhaps justifiably. My endpoint 234 00:20:59,340 --> 00:21:05,340 point is the beneath Bloom's Freudianism. There is an ancient layer, partly submerged 235 00:21:05,340 --> 00:21:10,440 of indebtedness, and this prompts the larger reflection, which is as good a place as any to 236 00:21:10,440 --> 00:21:15,630 end these mere marginalia to Colin's superb book. The critics themselves 237 00:21:15,630 --> 00:21:21,610 can be and perhaps cannot but be imitating authors. 238 00:21:21,610 --> 00:21:26,890 Thank you. Thank you. 239 00:21:26,890 --> 00:21:32,110 I'm on page 307 of this extraordinary book. Colin cites 240 00:21:32,110 --> 00:21:37,120 Pope in his pending batho saying, When we sit down to write, let us bring some great 241 00:21:37,120 --> 00:21:42,250 authors to our mind and ask ourselves this question. How words in this instance, 242 00:21:42,250 --> 00:21:47,320 ironically, Sir Richard Blackmore have said this, and this is something that Stephen has just 243 00:21:47,320 --> 00:21:53,770 yesterday. So I did wonder and sitting down to write this talk with our shoes hazard's 244 00:21:53,770 --> 00:21:58,810 Peruvian ambulation. And I asked myself W-W CBD what we'd 245 00:21:58,810 --> 00:22:04,210 call and do. I tried to list for myself 246 00:22:04,210 --> 00:22:09,940 characteristics that words mark Peruvian performance. 247 00:22:09,940 --> 00:22:15,820 Stunning Free's making would be amongst them erudition. And Steven has already mentioned range, a reference 248 00:22:15,820 --> 00:22:21,520 and an ability to move deftly between deep. But lately, war in classical and humanist learning 249 00:22:21,520 --> 00:22:26,780 and YouTube, YouTube, YouTube, YouTube and Battlestar Galactica. That's something I cannot toggle 250 00:22:26,780 --> 00:22:31,810 definitely between evidently with an eye to aptness and topicality, but 251 00:22:31,810 --> 00:22:37,240 something I also know about Colin from having heard him lecture on Hajis. Recent LRB talk 252 00:22:37,240 --> 00:22:43,120 on fiction and lying is that you also have to have in your repertoire an excellent 253 00:22:43,120 --> 00:22:48,340 Bruce Stalin or Brummie accent to pull out in the imitation in the reading of other people's 254 00:22:48,340 --> 00:22:53,770 quotations, and that along with these other characteristics. I certainly do not have. So I abandoned 255 00:22:53,770 --> 00:22:59,020 my plan not only for that reason, because to do so would run against the spirit of one of the threads 256 00:22:59,020 --> 00:23:04,120 that runs through this book very clearly, which is precisely 257 00:23:04,120 --> 00:23:09,130 to avoid the recipe like addition of elements as the model of imitation and 258 00:23:09,130 --> 00:23:14,230 something that Paup parodies in Perry, both those in his receipt's to make 259 00:23:14,230 --> 00:23:19,600 an epic poem as if the worst set of ingredients that one could draw together in order to produce an imitation 260 00:23:19,600 --> 00:23:24,790 or producer, an authentic rendition of a particular genre, rather 261 00:23:24,790 --> 00:23:29,980 as Quintiliano as many of the theorists that Colin mentions in the book and indeed 262 00:23:29,980 --> 00:23:35,340 in the passage that he was just reading. Imitation, paradoxically, 263 00:23:35,340 --> 00:23:40,570 persists in a deep, long acquired, well digested, well metabolised 264 00:23:40,570 --> 00:23:46,090 acquaintance with the authors one wants to imitate. That becomes a Hexis or a habitus 265 00:23:46,090 --> 00:23:51,430 or a disposition which enables you to produce as if you wear Koban, Burrow 266 00:23:51,430 --> 00:23:57,010 or Cicero. There is a further paradox arising from the book's fundamental 267 00:23:57,010 --> 00:24:02,600 question, which appears in the very first page and which is repeated. 268 00:24:02,600 --> 00:24:07,840 And in those four points that Colin Wright himself recently. That question, in Colin's 269 00:24:07,840 --> 00:24:12,880 words, is how do human beings learn sophisticated usage of language from others and 270 00:24:12,880 --> 00:24:17,920 yet end up sounding like themselves? And there's 271 00:24:17,920 --> 00:24:22,960 something very interesting. And I mean, it galvanises the 272 00:24:22,960 --> 00:24:28,120 whole book. Interesting to me about this particular paradox and the book, both in spite 273 00:24:28,120 --> 00:24:33,700 and because it is about imitation, is also a history of originality and implicitly 274 00:24:33,700 --> 00:24:39,310 also of genius and its slippery sibling in. 275 00:24:39,310 --> 00:24:47,020 I want to quote a couple of lines from Robert Britten, 276 00:24:47,020 --> 00:24:52,300 which touches on precisely this paradox and draw out from them some of the ways that intersects 277 00:24:52,300 --> 00:24:57,370 with themes in Colin's book that I think raise questions. And 278 00:24:57,370 --> 00:25:02,500 Burton says and in his Democritus junior to the reader in 279 00:25:02,500 --> 00:25:08,090 the anatomy melancholy stealer's we room argue it our style Brisas 280 00:25:08,090 --> 00:25:13,150 and a man's genius is described by his works. I 281 00:25:13,150 --> 00:25:18,160 find this interesting for a variety of reasons, and I will draw them out as the questions that I want 282 00:25:18,160 --> 00:25:23,260 to raise for for Colin as we as we proceed. The first of these is that 283 00:25:23,260 --> 00:25:28,540 in Berton's pun on the Steelers, something that occurs frequently 284 00:25:28,540 --> 00:25:33,760 in common spook the Steelers as the pain and the Steelers as the style or the bodkin 285 00:25:33,760 --> 00:25:39,010 as the sharp, satirical and implement Steelers. We will argue it's 286 00:25:39,010 --> 00:25:44,200 our style Brisas. There's something about our style, intrinsic, 287 00:25:44,200 --> 00:25:49,840 idiosyncratic, inimitable thing of ourselves that is something we produce automatically 288 00:25:49,840 --> 00:25:55,330 or despite ourselves, that betrays us in various senses. That gives us a way 289 00:25:55,330 --> 00:26:00,550 that's a kind of power. Arrogant or attent intentions are produced only by an incidental 290 00:26:00,550 --> 00:26:05,680 effect of a running stylus or pen. So 291 00:26:05,680 --> 00:26:11,680 while in Guinea, on the one hand operates at several points in this book as that idiosyncratic 292 00:26:11,680 --> 00:26:17,290 particular quiddity, as I think Colin uses the word quiddity once the particularity 293 00:26:17,290 --> 00:26:22,630 of an author and in Ghanim is also something. She is not within our control, 294 00:26:22,630 --> 00:26:28,930 something that is not a part of our wills and plotted 295 00:26:28,930 --> 00:26:34,330 machinations, machinations as an appropriate word here, because in 296 00:26:34,330 --> 00:26:39,610 in Guinea or in Guinea are also engines, precisely a kind of automata the 297 00:26:39,610 --> 00:26:45,070 Colin devotes a chapter to towards the end of the book. So how does this nexus of deliberation 298 00:26:45,070 --> 00:26:50,350 and accident work? The second 299 00:26:50,350 --> 00:26:56,030 point that I want to draw from this is that a person in this passage translates 300 00:26:56,030 --> 00:27:01,170 what, as far as we know, as his own Latin tag into English 301 00:27:01,170 --> 00:27:06,370 and producing a polyglot pun, but also a shift from the singular to the plural. 302 00:27:06,370 --> 00:27:11,380 Colin is very down on one of Sir John Davison's puns on Farmer in one 303 00:27:11,380 --> 00:27:16,450 of his chapters where Davis uses the Latin senses of a farmer, 304 00:27:16,450 --> 00:27:22,090 both fame or Remar and Farmer's hunger 305 00:27:22,090 --> 00:27:28,150 in an English poem to make a joke. But it seems to me that the practises of double translation 306 00:27:28,150 --> 00:27:33,490 in the period which takes up the bulk of the English section of this book and the 307 00:27:33,490 --> 00:27:38,800 kind of early, modern and 17th century sections practises where people are educated by 308 00:27:38,800 --> 00:27:43,810 translating Latin into English and then English into Latin, meaning that writing in English 309 00:27:43,810 --> 00:27:49,570 is in a sense, writing in and out of Latin, always an echo, at least until the late 310 00:27:49,570 --> 00:27:55,520 18th century. And his own ninth chapter 311 00:27:55,520 --> 00:28:00,700 is a feature of parrots, which, along with bees, are two of the presiding geniuses 312 00:28:00,700 --> 00:28:05,770 of the animal kingdom and this book, and that they practise a kind of pretty polyglot ism, as 313 00:28:05,770 --> 00:28:10,850 in John Skelton Speak Parrots and my favourite footnotes in this book. And there is a list of favourite 314 00:28:10,850 --> 00:28:16,800 fruit notes. My favourite fruit noted is footnote number two in Chapter one, annotating 315 00:28:16,800 --> 00:28:24,330 print Pretty Polly and epigraph to the chapter with Parrots Passim. 316 00:28:24,330 --> 00:28:29,440 And I wonder if we could think about the ways in which this is also a story 317 00:28:29,440 --> 00:28:34,930 about the English language and English literature finding its own genius 318 00:28:34,930 --> 00:28:39,970 in relation to its classical predecessors. So John Florio and his friends, in 319 00:28:39,970 --> 00:28:45,220 the introduction to his translation of Montane, talks about the genius and inseparable form of individual 320 00:28:45,220 --> 00:28:50,240 languages, which mean in metaphors, which are also everywhere in this book and 321 00:28:50,240 --> 00:28:55,660 in the study of imitation, that a translation can only ever be a picture of a body, 322 00:28:55,660 --> 00:29:01,390 a shadow of a substance, says Florian. But if languages have geniuses, how far 323 00:29:01,390 --> 00:29:06,430 is the effort to imitate the the the Latin patrimony 324 00:29:06,430 --> 00:29:11,560 or the Greek patrimony? An effort to learn and sophisticated use of language 325 00:29:11,560 --> 00:29:16,690 on behalf of the language itself and yet end up sounding like 326 00:29:16,690 --> 00:29:21,820 English, like English literature? Because in lots of ways and canon is the words that Stephen already brought up. 327 00:29:21,820 --> 00:29:27,250 This is also a book about the emergence of an English canon, of an English list 328 00:29:27,250 --> 00:29:33,250 of who it is appropriate to imitate and how to imitate them. 329 00:29:33,250 --> 00:29:39,280 Finally, I just want to raise the question of recognition in a couple of senses. 330 00:29:39,280 --> 00:29:44,710 Burton's phrase suggests that our own idiosyncrasies in our own style is something that is unknown 331 00:29:44,710 --> 00:29:50,100 even to ourselves and something that really strikes me about. The opening question 332 00:29:50,100 --> 00:29:56,010 that I quoted earlier is that the phrase appears there 333 00:29:56,010 --> 00:30:02,140 that we find that it's the way that I have no much to lose here. 334 00:30:02,140 --> 00:30:07,780 How do we end up sounding like? How do authors end up sounding like themselves? 335 00:30:07,780 --> 00:30:13,060 And on one hand, this is a colloquialism which we use all the time, but it also seems slightly 336 00:30:13,060 --> 00:30:19,070 ontologically weird how what is it to write like oneself? 337 00:30:19,070 --> 00:30:24,070 At the beginning of Henry the Fifth, it said of war like Harry, like himself, that 338 00:30:24,070 --> 00:30:29,650 he will assume the ports of Mars. What does it mean to say that somebody is like themself? 339 00:30:29,650 --> 00:30:35,080 Colin quotes the example of Pope writing imitations in the manner of Pope. 340 00:30:35,080 --> 00:30:40,180 So one can evidently imitate one's own manner. One can also evidently 341 00:30:40,180 --> 00:30:45,290 failed to imitate. One owns one's own manner. Stephen cited the example of Petrarch. 342 00:30:45,290 --> 00:30:50,440 A less elevated example is the fact that I suppose the fact that both Charlie Chaplin 343 00:30:50,440 --> 00:30:55,570 and Dolly Parton apparently came second in Look-Alike contests for their 344 00:30:55,570 --> 00:31:00,670 own persons. So one good one can fail to be sufficiently 345 00:31:00,670 --> 00:31:05,800 like oneself in order to be recognised. Now, this is obviously a relatively frivolous 346 00:31:05,800 --> 00:31:11,860 example, but it's a different version of even Narcissus gazing at their own reflection. 347 00:31:11,860 --> 00:31:17,580 What one encounters as other as an ex is belatedly recognised as a self in that moment and 348 00:31:17,580 --> 00:31:22,770 the moment in which Milton takes even. Encounter with herself and with herself 349 00:31:22,770 --> 00:31:27,890 and in the pool, her opening kind of self recognition as an imitation of of it 350 00:31:27,890 --> 00:31:32,970 and was subsequently imitated, a portion of English literature is is key 351 00:31:32,970 --> 00:31:37,980 to lots of the chapters in this book. What is it to recognise that one is 352 00:31:37,980 --> 00:31:43,230 indeed like oneself? Emerson in reading Montand in 353 00:31:43,230 --> 00:31:48,750 a slightly different mood, said, It seemed to me as if I had myself written the book. 354 00:31:48,750 --> 00:31:53,820 What is it to recognise? Not that the that the book is an imitation of something 355 00:31:53,820 --> 00:31:59,040 else, but to recognise that you yourself are in some sense that were author who has 356 00:31:59,040 --> 00:32:04,170 written something which somebody else claims as their own. And this last example 357 00:32:04,170 --> 00:32:10,020 suggests another sense of recognition. And this is my final my final point. 358 00:32:10,020 --> 00:32:15,120 This is a book about writers imitating underbite, writers reading in order to imitate what 359 00:32:15,120 --> 00:32:20,720 they are reading. But I'm interested also in the question of how we recognise 360 00:32:20,720 --> 00:32:27,240 an imitation, how how we actually and or inaptly 361 00:32:27,240 --> 00:32:33,210 count something is being imitated. I think of this partly because of a book that I read many years ago 362 00:32:33,210 --> 00:32:38,250 called Imitating Thomas Brown, which started out as 363 00:32:38,250 --> 00:32:43,260 a series of examples of people who claimed to be imitating Thomas Brown. And then the second half 364 00:32:43,260 --> 00:32:48,270 checked whether they were really imitating Thomas Brown by putting the text through a computer and 365 00:32:48,270 --> 00:32:54,180 seeing if they did indeed matches stylistic exploits. And 366 00:32:54,180 --> 00:32:59,850 I think that example I mean, certainly the computer can pick up on concealable idiosyncrasies, 367 00:32:59,850 --> 00:33:05,340 which are nonetheless not consciously produced by the writer or consciously registered 368 00:33:05,340 --> 00:33:10,410 by the reader. And it might seem that it can then tell us something that we 369 00:33:10,410 --> 00:33:15,810 do not know about ourselves or cannot detect about ourselves. But really, I think we want to place 370 00:33:15,810 --> 00:33:20,910 the recognition of imitation and the reception of imitation as something that is interpersonal, that 371 00:33:20,910 --> 00:33:25,950 happens, that between us as habituated and idiosyncratic readers 372 00:33:25,950 --> 00:33:31,830 connexions, that we are able to make analogies to the recognition of faces 373 00:33:31,830 --> 00:33:36,990 or to the recognition of our of of other people. And that facial recognition 374 00:33:36,990 --> 00:33:43,050 metaphor also runs all the way through this book and reading and Greek is anagnorisis. 375 00:33:43,050 --> 00:33:48,400 Can you confirm or recognition? So there's a sense in which 376 00:33:48,400 --> 00:33:54,930 there is a kind of recognising principle at work and reading anyway. 377 00:33:54,930 --> 00:34:00,090 This book is on the part of calling himself a dazzling display of writerly recognitions, 378 00:34:00,090 --> 00:34:05,490 and many of the pleasures are wonderful readings and which and imitations and concealed 379 00:34:05,490 --> 00:34:10,530 imitations and half imitations are picked out. And I wonder if we 380 00:34:10,530 --> 00:34:17,070 could think a bit about the Ingeniousness book, both of the writer, but also of the ingenious reading 381 00:34:17,070 --> 00:34:22,200 of imitation that Cole himself exemplifies. Thank you. Thank you. We didn't 382 00:34:22,200 --> 00:34:27,270 plan it this way, but your talk of your concluding with recognitions enables me to say that 383 00:34:27,270 --> 00:34:32,640 I'm here really just as a ghost or a Republican. Terence Cain was going to be 384 00:34:32,640 --> 00:34:37,830 another respondent, literally can't come because he's stuck in Paris for various reasons. So I'm here as a sort 385 00:34:37,830 --> 00:34:43,770 of version of parents from the outset. 386 00:34:43,770 --> 00:34:49,110 It seems to me that one of the exciting things about this book is the number of defining 387 00:34:49,110 --> 00:34:54,450 structure, structuring observations, and sometimes claims that concern 388 00:34:54,450 --> 00:35:00,030 not only recognition and imitation, the recognition of imitation, but the movement 389 00:35:00,030 --> 00:35:05,790 kind of movability of imitation across borders as being said 390 00:35:05,790 --> 00:35:11,100 across languages in times. This capacity, which imitation has to shift 391 00:35:11,100 --> 00:35:16,170 to shift shape, gear and even scale isn't affordance of 392 00:35:16,170 --> 00:35:21,690 terms would say generated by what Coquelin calls on several occasions the conceptual 393 00:35:21,690 --> 00:35:26,880 obscurity of this notion. The history of imitation as theory 394 00:35:26,880 --> 00:35:32,160 and practise is one that quote I'm quoting here page six, six and seven that combines conceptual 395 00:35:32,160 --> 00:35:37,320 obscurity with metaphorical vividness and quote from 396 00:35:37,320 --> 00:35:43,050 the weakness of the concept, you might say, is drawn forth the strength of its metaphors. 397 00:35:43,050 --> 00:35:48,390 One of the real and significant contributions of this book, I think both for scholars and for 398 00:35:48,390 --> 00:35:53,520 undergraduate readers and others more broadly, is its tracking 399 00:35:53,520 --> 00:35:58,740 of a whole host of metaphors, some animal, some vegetable and some a mineral 400 00:35:58,740 --> 00:36:03,790 all the way through the history of imitation. One to go to sort of what would Colin 401 00:36:03,790 --> 00:36:08,820 do? I would suspicious towards the end when I first read the final section of this book 402 00:36:08,820 --> 00:36:13,830 to encounter an author whose main seemed to me to be too much like an author. The Colin 403 00:36:13,830 --> 00:36:18,840 might have made up the Canadian poet whose name is Christian 404 00:36:18,840 --> 00:36:25,650 book. Now, this particular Canadian poet on page 422 405 00:36:25,650 --> 00:36:30,900 is said to have worked for this Canadian poet 406 00:36:30,900 --> 00:36:36,150 Christian book, had a project called The Zino Text book began with a radical aim to embed 407 00:36:36,150 --> 00:36:41,330 a poem within the genetic code of the extremely durable bacterium 408 00:36:41,330 --> 00:36:46,470 in a caucus radio. Durand's, which, as its name suggests, could even survive 409 00:36:46,470 --> 00:36:51,540 a nuclear holocaust. In some ways, I was disappointed to discover on the Internet and 410 00:36:51,540 --> 00:36:56,670 elsewhere that Christie looked as if this wasn't one of Colin's 411 00:36:56,670 --> 00:37:02,300 metaphorical fictions, because these metaphorical elaborations 412 00:37:02,300 --> 00:37:07,410 throughout this book actually give a figure for the history of imitation as 413 00:37:07,410 --> 00:37:12,560 it works its way from the Greeks to the Greeks, from Aristotle all the way through to 414 00:37:12,560 --> 00:37:18,090 A.I. based bodies, buildings and brass unfreedom 415 00:37:18,090 --> 00:37:23,520 agency and originality, Hexis and Hectors ghost. And then 416 00:37:23,520 --> 00:37:28,890 finally, Shalabi takes Milton Sin and sad cyborgs. 417 00:37:28,890 --> 00:37:34,050 All these and more to be found in the rich treasure trove of metaphors. Examples that run through 418 00:37:34,050 --> 00:37:39,300 this book as it moves from mimesis to imitation between rhetoric and poetics 419 00:37:39,300 --> 00:37:44,490 transformation. Dream station through to the operative category to the middle 420 00:37:44,490 --> 00:37:51,220 half of the book, which are then developed in the second half adaptive and formal imitation. 421 00:37:51,220 --> 00:37:56,860 As a French early modernist or an early modernist, working mainly in the French tradition and therefore 422 00:37:56,860 --> 00:38:02,140 consciously eccentric to this book in reasons that in ways that Colin elaborates on 423 00:38:02,140 --> 00:38:07,600 the opening page, actually, where he said his participation in the Montane really and often 424 00:38:07,600 --> 00:38:13,450 convinced him that he wasn't going to talk about French stuff. It's a great change. 425 00:38:13,450 --> 00:38:18,850 There we are. I want to explore the strength and the salience of the notion of subjunctive 426 00:38:18,850 --> 00:38:24,010 imitation, in particular as a way of thinking of imitation, as a kind of generative 427 00:38:24,010 --> 00:38:29,230 grammatical principle, because imitation in the subjunctive enables us to see 428 00:38:29,230 --> 00:38:34,300 the author as, quote, an adaptive principal which might speak or 429 00:38:34,300 --> 00:38:41,170 write in a different way. In response to changing circumstance from page 176 430 00:38:41,170 --> 00:38:46,480 in relation to early modern readers, then imitative might on one hand be, quote, a script 431 00:38:46,480 --> 00:38:51,520 for the self-determination of an ASP ference aristocratic class in a sort of 432 00:38:51,520 --> 00:38:56,680 self fashioning mode that's now become very strongly explored 433 00:38:56,680 --> 00:39:01,750 in any modern studies. But it might also be thought of 434 00:39:01,750 --> 00:39:06,940 through its very key words and terms as a means to, quote, express. 435 00:39:06,940 --> 00:39:12,220 And Colin does a good deal of work on the on the term express to express 436 00:39:12,220 --> 00:39:17,560 the deep mutual involvement between a new sense of authorship in the early modern period and the practises 437 00:39:17,560 --> 00:39:22,600 of print sculpture. Or again. And this is an example not in Colin's 438 00:39:22,600 --> 00:39:28,450 book, for reasons that I've just explained, but I think it's sort of virtually present. 439 00:39:28,450 --> 00:39:34,090 It might, through more pain, be a way in which an author can think of themselves as 440 00:39:34,090 --> 00:39:39,130 being in some place and time altogether different from their own, but 441 00:39:39,130 --> 00:39:44,140 somehow still themselves. There are two ways that operate with which that 442 00:39:44,140 --> 00:39:49,180 operates. In more than that, I want to draw attention to very quickly what is in the essay 140 on 443 00:39:49,180 --> 00:39:55,410 some considerations on Cicero. When Milton uses the image of the seedbed. 444 00:39:55,410 --> 00:40:01,320 To not and also put some kind of vener time thing going on. But you know what to say 445 00:40:01,320 --> 00:40:07,020 to anticipate that in sometimes to say that anybody who reads his essays, if they read carefully enough, 446 00:40:07,020 --> 00:40:12,240 might find themselves, in a sense inspired. He doesn't use the word inspired. He says 447 00:40:12,240 --> 00:40:17,630 pushed through peeling the text. Appreciate 448 00:40:17,630 --> 00:40:23,640 peeling the text to generate for themselves. Quote and funny essay. 449 00:40:23,640 --> 00:40:29,640 Infinite essay. Now for us to move and nudge the fact that Milton has there 450 00:40:29,640 --> 00:40:34,680 mentioned the word essay with a big E means that he's also referred to his 451 00:40:34,680 --> 00:40:39,780 own book as printed object. In other words, that his, if you like self-expression 452 00:40:39,780 --> 00:40:45,120 as a writer might generate further copies of himself by readers, 453 00:40:45,120 --> 00:40:50,460 which themselves would be called essays. It's one of those moments where imitation 454 00:40:50,460 --> 00:40:56,640 has a particular charge to a particular moment in the history of authorship. As of print, 455 00:40:56,640 --> 00:41:01,710 another one is when Milton writes in the margin. And if you will know this, and it takes us back 456 00:41:01,710 --> 00:41:06,930 to the late and take a little to the Latin 457 00:41:06,930 --> 00:41:12,300 writing. Milton writes in the flyleaf of his copy of Lucretius. The following 458 00:41:12,300 --> 00:41:17,460 letters translate saying that the movement of atoms is so diverse 459 00:41:17,460 --> 00:41:22,530 it would not be unbelievable if the atoms once 460 00:41:22,530 --> 00:41:28,530 came together or come together in the future so that a mother multiengine 461 00:41:28,530 --> 00:41:33,660 might be born. Now, this is a recasting of a fantasy in 462 00:41:33,660 --> 00:41:38,790 Lucretius himself, reimagined by Molton to imagine a Montane 463 00:41:38,790 --> 00:41:43,980 in the future, but nonetheless knows itself to be more pleasant. We're back 464 00:41:43,980 --> 00:41:49,500 to Katie's question about how can you, in a sense, imitate yourself? And what's it like 465 00:41:49,500 --> 00:41:54,550 to be like an. Petrak persona 466 00:41:54,550 --> 00:41:59,680 and print, meantime, movement, masterful and monsters and love 467 00:41:59,680 --> 00:42:04,770 about monsters, and there are some great monsters in this book. There's a lot more to ponder about all of these things 468 00:42:04,770 --> 00:42:09,990 in relation to the French tradition. But I want to continue with one final example. 469 00:42:09,990 --> 00:42:15,690 One which concerns precisely the matter of imitation as example. 470 00:42:15,690 --> 00:42:20,820 In other words, something that sort of shadows this book but never quite takes 471 00:42:20,820 --> 00:42:26,100 on full form. And that's the question of imitation, both as Pearla poetic, logical 472 00:42:26,100 --> 00:42:31,170 practise and as an ethical question, whereby it becomes a kind of model 473 00:42:31,170 --> 00:42:39,510 or pattern for behaviour, as in the passage which in fact coming right out right at the beginning. 474 00:42:39,510 --> 00:42:44,830 And so in thinking about this, I want to return then one last time to taxpayers work 475 00:42:44,830 --> 00:42:50,510 and to his translation of this, published anonymously in 16 78, 476 00:42:50,510 --> 00:42:55,840 but set in fifteen fifty nine. The process, the Clave, is, amongst other things, 477 00:42:55,840 --> 00:43:00,930 an imitation of the hat. Tamron. By written by Margaret Queen 478 00:43:00,930 --> 00:43:06,480 of Islam, first published in 15 59. 479 00:43:06,480 --> 00:43:11,670 The back page in the Oxford Class World Classics translation says it's a turning point 480 00:43:11,670 --> 00:43:17,550 in the history, the novel and a landmark in the history of women's writing. And that's all true. 481 00:43:17,550 --> 00:43:23,250 It's also a searing, powerful and passionate account of the question of imitation 482 00:43:23,250 --> 00:43:29,320 posed as an ethical dilemma. Its author, Madame de Lafayette, 483 00:43:29,320 --> 00:43:34,600 practice's image out here, and in fact transposes imitative into the ethical question 484 00:43:34,600 --> 00:43:41,230 of eggs and clarity. And she does so all the way through the last sentences of the novel. 485 00:43:41,230 --> 00:43:46,300 I'm not going to be a spoiler alert except to tell you that it ends with the princess leaving 486 00:43:46,300 --> 00:43:51,640 the court. Leaving the court, marriage ability, intrigue and gallantry 487 00:43:51,640 --> 00:43:57,040 behind the princess, quote, adopted a way of life which dispelled any thought 488 00:43:57,040 --> 00:44:02,860 that she would ever return. And then here's the final sentence. In 489 00:44:02,860 --> 00:44:08,650 the last two sentences in Terrance's translation, she spent part of the year in the convent. 490 00:44:08,650 --> 00:44:13,660 The rest she spent at home, though, in profound retreat and in occupations more 491 00:44:13,660 --> 00:44:18,720 saintly than those of the most austere houses of religion. In the final 492 00:44:18,720 --> 00:44:24,180 sentence, her life, which was quite short, left in the imitable 493 00:44:24,180 --> 00:44:29,630 examples of virtue. If that notion of 494 00:44:29,630 --> 00:44:34,820 example in me, Fadela, that this book turns around 495 00:44:34,820 --> 00:44:39,840 and I'm not going to say that clinician inimitable example, but I will say that one of the 496 00:44:39,840 --> 00:44:45,530 questions this book raises is precisely this relation between its declared subject. 497 00:44:45,530 --> 00:44:50,640 Fourth is imitating other authors and the wider question, which in fact, as I say, he alluded 498 00:44:50,640 --> 00:44:55,860 to in the passage that he read out, which is people imitating 499 00:44:55,860 --> 00:45:00,900 other people. The degree to which authors are a special kind of imitation 500 00:45:00,900 --> 00:45:05,930 or whether, in fact, we all do this. Most of the time, 501 00:45:05,930 --> 00:45:12,430 the word now goes back to college. Well, thank you very much. 502 00:45:12,430 --> 00:45:17,880 I recognise I recognise the the faults, but not necessarily the nice things he said. 503 00:45:17,880 --> 00:45:23,190 But it's very kind of you all. And there are lots of things to 504 00:45:23,190 --> 00:45:28,440 address. I mean, particularly helpful to hear from Stephen 505 00:45:28,440 --> 00:45:33,630 about the, uh, the ways in which imitation 506 00:45:33,630 --> 00:45:39,660 is treated differently with within the study of poetics and rhetoric 507 00:45:39,660 --> 00:45:44,670 in the classical world. And I suppose I'd respond to that by 508 00:45:44,670 --> 00:45:49,920 saying that in early modernity, the poetic 509 00:45:49,920 --> 00:45:55,770 and the rhetorical were thought about together. And that's why I've tended to 510 00:45:55,770 --> 00:46:01,110 retro ject, as it were, concerned with the imitation of texts 511 00:46:01,110 --> 00:46:06,640 into some of what Plato says about the imitation of of of the world. 512 00:46:06,640 --> 00:46:12,590 And so my vision in that respect, I'm sure, is included or shaped by the fact that I'm principally an early modernist 513 00:46:12,590 --> 00:46:17,760 and I would see those two things as necessarily becoming meshed. Whereas, 514 00:46:17,760 --> 00:46:24,030 of course, as you say, quite rightly early on, that they're rather separate. 515 00:46:24,030 --> 00:46:29,370 I don't talk a lot about into textual Lassy, I, I don't do that. I avoid that largely 516 00:46:29,370 --> 00:46:34,430 because I share junior Chris Davies own discomfort with the way in which that 517 00:46:34,430 --> 00:46:39,810 term came to be used, just to describe any kind of verbal echo when what she originally 518 00:46:39,810 --> 00:46:44,970 means by it is a is a transposition of the the generic characteristics 519 00:46:44,970 --> 00:46:50,160 of one form into another in order to create a new form. And I think that that's a sufficiently strong idea 520 00:46:50,160 --> 00:46:55,740 to be deserve to deserve preserving. 521 00:46:55,740 --> 00:47:01,620 But I also don't go there because really I want to talk about 522 00:47:01,620 --> 00:47:07,050 texts as being potentially things that you could regard 523 00:47:07,050 --> 00:47:12,720 as people or as patterns of behaviour that could be regarded as as as people inside. 524 00:47:12,720 --> 00:47:17,760 I'm more interested, really, in the interpersonal than in the interaction. And that's partly because I did a lot 525 00:47:17,760 --> 00:47:23,100 of reading, which mostly gets buried in the book itself. I did it 526 00:47:23,100 --> 00:47:28,290 in experimental psychology and discussions about the ways in which people learn 527 00:47:28,290 --> 00:47:33,630 from other people and the distinction that experimental psychologist makes between 528 00:47:33,630 --> 00:47:39,000 make between a crude distinction between imitation 529 00:47:39,000 --> 00:47:45,340 by which they mean gestural replication and what they call emulation, which is 530 00:47:45,340 --> 00:47:50,420 the extrapolation of a task from a particular set of behaviour. 531 00:47:50,420 --> 00:47:55,550 And you then emulated by doing the same task in a slightly different way. And that's 532 00:47:55,550 --> 00:48:00,600 a behavioural psychologists would say that what I'm mostly talking about is emulation rather than 533 00:48:00,600 --> 00:48:06,120 than imitation. But, you know, I began, as it were, thinking really about 534 00:48:06,120 --> 00:48:11,850 how people learn. And that's that's that's why intersexuality 535 00:48:11,850 --> 00:48:16,980 is not quite very much. I don't talk about doing very much. What I do at one point 536 00:48:16,980 --> 00:48:21,990 say rather snarkily that if you knew anything about intellectual history, he'd understand where 537 00:48:21,990 --> 00:48:27,150 the notion of Lumin rivalry comes from. It comes from copyright debates in the 18th century. 538 00:48:27,150 --> 00:48:32,280 Really. The reason I'm so snarky about him and push him to the side is 539 00:48:32,280 --> 00:48:37,590 because in 1968 nine, my family lived in his house. I was five. He 540 00:48:37,590 --> 00:48:43,110 was our landlord. And we trashed the place and he was not very nice about it. 541 00:48:43,110 --> 00:48:49,570 So, you know, I thought that something like that explains all that. 542 00:48:49,570 --> 00:48:54,870 But, you know, it's a long time ago. But I have a long memory. I did review 543 00:48:54,870 --> 00:48:59,970 his his last book, and he died between my finishing review and 544 00:48:59,970 --> 00:49:05,110 it being published. So I had to make some frantic revisions where I wasn't quite as read about it. And I also put it all 545 00:49:05,110 --> 00:49:10,400 in the past tense. So, yeah, you're quite right. But that was a really 546 00:49:10,400 --> 00:49:15,750 eye opening discussion of of what I didn't know about. 547 00:49:15,750 --> 00:49:20,800 And that's. Here. And the idea that critics themselves 548 00:49:20,800 --> 00:49:25,860 can be imitating is identifying tropes, figures and shapes in 549 00:49:25,860 --> 00:49:30,910 early attacks. I think he's absolutely right or the critics like horribly and perhaps get bit 550 00:49:30,910 --> 00:49:36,100 carried away. Bye bye bye. That idea. So I wouldn't 551 00:49:36,100 --> 00:49:42,610 put that was very, very helpful. And 552 00:49:42,610 --> 00:49:47,650 Katie, again, so much to think about. I mean, 553 00:49:47,650 --> 00:49:52,810 the point you raise about how we become conscious of 554 00:49:52,810 --> 00:49:57,970 ourselves as distinctive stylistic agents, I think is it is 555 00:49:57,970 --> 00:50:04,540 a really crucial one. And in the course of the book. 556 00:50:04,540 --> 00:50:09,760 I mean, there are lots of different metaphors, reputation. But the two that I particularly 557 00:50:09,760 --> 00:50:15,540 zoom in on is the sort of closely coupled set of 558 00:50:15,540 --> 00:50:20,830 artifices between the imitation as a live re recreation 559 00:50:20,830 --> 00:50:25,840 of a living, breathing, independent body as against an imitation, as a 560 00:50:25,840 --> 00:50:31,510 ghost or double or shadowy semblence. And it does 561 00:50:31,510 --> 00:50:36,640 seem to me a significant fact that theorists and practitioners of imitation throughout 562 00:50:36,640 --> 00:50:41,880 its history haven't really been able to drive a wedge between those two things. But, 563 00:50:41,880 --> 00:50:47,170 you know, the point where you become a distinctive stylistic an age might also be the point 564 00:50:47,170 --> 00:50:52,270 at which you become a parody of yourself. And way, way you sort of lose that 565 00:50:52,270 --> 00:50:57,470 thinness and energy that you do that that that that's support both 566 00:50:57,470 --> 00:51:02,710 of the energy that you thought you had. And that's why, 567 00:51:02,710 --> 00:51:08,560 although I'm not talking about intersexuality in and probably not being very French, 568 00:51:08,560 --> 00:51:14,380 there is at the core of the book not a simple conception of a person as an agent 569 00:51:14,380 --> 00:51:19,420 articulating their own stylistic register, which can then be replicated by 570 00:51:19,420 --> 00:51:24,430 others. But there is a much more duplicitous representation of 571 00:51:24,430 --> 00:51:29,770 rights to the agency as simultaneously something that you know about in which you feel, 572 00:51:29,770 --> 00:51:34,780 I feel, to be an independent being, but which is also potentially 573 00:51:34,780 --> 00:51:40,690 a sort of shadow shadowy replica of what's come before. And it seems to me that what you say about the 574 00:51:40,690 --> 00:51:46,090 emergence of English literature and the canon of English literature from Latin 575 00:51:46,090 --> 00:51:51,160 City is relatable to that, because one 576 00:51:51,160 --> 00:51:56,230 of the biggest chapters in the book is about Milton, who is often accused of 577 00:51:56,230 --> 00:52:01,270 being too Latin to be fully English. And his particular 578 00:52:01,270 --> 00:52:06,300 kind of style, which is defiantly his own and yet 579 00:52:06,300 --> 00:52:12,310 also deeply Latinate. It seems to be exactly. Points to the to 580 00:52:12,310 --> 00:52:17,650 the area that you're drawing attention to. I'm sort of polyglot 581 00:52:17,650 --> 00:52:23,050 ism that turns into a distinctive idiolect 582 00:52:23,050 --> 00:52:28,090 which can claim its own autonomous space. So that was really help me 583 00:52:28,090 --> 00:52:33,850 a great sort of helpful angle to take on the whole book. And I felt that 584 00:52:33,850 --> 00:52:38,870 I had been there was a sort of well, you 585 00:52:38,870 --> 00:52:43,870 know, I'd be flattering myself if I said I'd been well understood. 586 00:52:43,870 --> 00:52:48,970 It seems to me that you brought out something which I hadn't really brought out myself. Thank 587 00:52:48,970 --> 00:52:54,120 you very much. And the point. And I suppose 588 00:52:54,120 --> 00:53:01,230 much of what I've said already leads into what Wes was saying about 589 00:53:01,230 --> 00:53:06,270 excellent clarity and the notion that the person or 590 00:53:06,270 --> 00:53:11,340 the behaviour has an object of imitation and 591 00:53:11,340 --> 00:53:19,460 inspiration of subsequent practise. Because. 592 00:53:19,460 --> 00:53:24,630 You know, the inimitable example is in some ways another version of 593 00:53:24,630 --> 00:53:30,330 the paradox of the thing which is simultaneously itself and also 594 00:53:30,330 --> 00:53:35,820 another thing, and that, I suppose, is what I think human beings and authors 595 00:53:35,820 --> 00:53:41,820 are. And I think the process of literary well, the 596 00:53:41,820 --> 00:53:47,340 literary traditions generally unfold through a sort of peristaltic relationship 597 00:53:47,340 --> 00:53:53,010 between exam clarity and an intimate ability. 598 00:53:53,010 --> 00:53:58,480 So those are my responses. But thank you very much. They were really very stimulating indeed. Your comments, 599 00:53:58,480 --> 00:54:04,640 and I feel I've done them justice. Thank you.