Well, from this book at lunch time event on imitating authors written by Professor
Colin Burrow. My name's Wes Williams and I'm the knowledge exchange champion here at Torch,
which is why I'm introducing this. I'm also replicating myself as one of the speakers.
And I'll explain later that there's a further replication involved in that process, too. But
mainly, I'm delighted to welcome Colin here today to speak about his book on behalf of torture. I extend the welcome
on behalf Torch. You look forward to chairing this discussion as well as having my five minutes in.
With me on the panel today are Professor Katherine Myrth Murphy. Katie Murphy and Professor Stephen
Helliwell. It's a great pleasure then to be able to introduce
this book at lunch time, which I think is the seventh of the academic year so far. Book
at lunchtime is Torture's flagship event series, taking the form of a fortnightly bite
sized book, discussions with a range of commentators. One of the commentators
is themselves the author. And that's in a sense part of the point of this, to do not
so much grill, but give the author a chance to listen to critiques and readings
of and then respond in turn. Please do take a look at our website,
a newsletter for the full programme for the rest of this term and next.
In this book, Colin Burrow presents a fascinating account of how orphans from the earliest stages of Western
literature to the present day have imitated each other. The book covers,
as I mentioned, will go on to talk about in a bit of detail an impressive range of such
authors, including Plato, Virgil, Lucretius, Petrakis of unfairest Ben Johnson, Milton
Pope Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, and towards the end, because Wil
Ishiguro Buhrow offers and indeed various
robots as well. Towards the end, Buhrow offers a clear explanation of difficult, complex
concepts and complex histories and explains and brings into discussion
a number of both ancient and modern writings which have enabled texts to have an influence
on later texts and brings the discussion up to date. By studying contemporary fictions
about clones and imitation human beings and indeed the future of imitation.
A read a section from the book in a minute, but first a few words of introduction to the panel members
and indeed myself. Colin himself is professor of English and Comparative Literature in the faculty of English
and a senior research fellow of All Souls College in Oxford. His research interests focus
on Renaissance literature. Early Tudor writing. Shakespeare. Ben Johnson
and classical literatures. And broadly speaking, that influence and reception as well as
editing. He also reviews contemporary poetry, novels and a wide range of other books,
most often for the London Review of Books. He's presently, it says here, working on a history
of Elizabethan literature for the Oxford English literary history.
Catherine Murphy is associate professor in the faculty of English. She's also largely
an early modernist and is a literary critic and scholar with interest in several key
areas, including literature and philosophy in the 17th century, in particular, the genre of
the essay from all 10 to the present. Here's another of her interest. Lectures and alphabet. The
production of images in relation to ways of representing knowledge and the
relationships between poetic form, rhetorical figure and theological and philosophical
ideas. If you'd even dipped into this book, you'll know that Katie is an ideal reader for
it. She herself is currently writing a book called The Tottering Universal
Metaphysical Prose in the 17th century, which addresses many of the
points you just raised. Stephen Helliwell, who will speak directly after Cullen,
is professor of Greek and the law professor of classics at the University of San Andrews in Scotland.
His published research ranges widely both across Greek literature, from homo to lay time particularly
and Greek philosophy from Plato to New Platonism. It also deals with the interface between
literature and philosophy more broadly. Professor Halliwell's main project
now is on a new edition with introduction, text and commentary of Longinus
is on the Sublime. I myself will speak last. And professor of French
in the Faculty of Money and Modern Languages, my main research interests are also in the field
of Renaissance and early modern studies. My first book was about pilgrimage writing
and I still work on various kinds of travel. And so the metaphor of the path
which runs through this book is that of era also is very interesting to me. I also
wrote a book about monsters and their meanings from roughly Rabelais to Rasheen.
And now I'm writing a book about the long history of the idea of voluntary servitude
or willing subjection. As Nicholas Parsons
much lamented, used to say, our panel.
Let's start then with a reading from Colin of passage from the book. You're right to say
something as well as read if you like. Come on. Yes, it's very kind. What
I say. Thank you very much for having me and for introducing me. So I believe
it's a book about the imitation of authors rather than about the
imitation of reality. And copies of it are available outside
if you want to pay for your lunch. So do you feel free to buy them? It's
what book I say myself, which covers an awful lot of ground. But
the key argument of it really is that imitation of one author by another should
not be thought of as verbal theft or appropriation. Rather, it should
be thought of as a process of learning from the past, of seeing practises in earlier text, which
you can then put into practise yourself in new ways. And
I establish this view of imitation over about 400 pages,
talking about all kinds of authors. And so and
then I say on page 445, 404, the bit that I'm about to
read. So you have to imagine yourselves having been already bludgeoned into submission by a huge amount of data.
Before I start waving my hands around in the way I see here. So the notion
that imitation, chiefly in his in learning practises from prior examples could be formulated in the form of
four propositions which are quite easy to state, but very hard to believe equally. And at the same time,
the propositions are these one human beings resemble and learnt from other human beings
to human beings become distinctive by learning from other human beings. Three.
What human beings learn from each other may be an ability to perform an act which does not resemble any
act performed by the exemplar for imitating earlier authors can in
all these respects, resemble imitating other human beings. And those propositions sound
very simple. But they suggest the most of what we think we know about imitation. We do not,
in fact, know authors acquire neither preformed identities nor sections
of texts from what they read and imitate. Rather, they acquire a complex blend of words,
habits, forms, figures of speech and ways of proceeding. This doesn't make the act
of imitating simple or simply a cold matter requiring a set of techniques
because learning from another author, like learning from another person, is partly an evaluative activity.
It might entail making judgements about the work of earlier authors and about which aspects of them are good and
which are bad as well. The late 18th century
effective turn in the history of imitation illustrates that can generate
complexes of emotion in relation to prime examples of admiration turning
into a desire to be like someone or of a growing aversion to a person or a text.
One is considered M.B and in whom one comes to see weaknesses who has not experienced
that. It can even mean that the imitator engages in a dialectical revulsion
from the object of imitation and creates a vengeful replicant of Vme tand which
might either in actuality or desire destroy or overturn will transform the
thing imitated as happens in Frankenstein. The imitator can share
the powerful hostility of the destructive parodist or the disillusion pupil, or
alternatively experienced the abjection of a lover who fails to see the evident faults
in the loved object. The imitator can also become a narcissist to self
identification with the object of imitation, enables love for the exemplar to be carried
over into the imitators own creations like a new Pygmalion.
The desire to imitate might derive from a sense of endangered or to cultural authority that threatens
the imitator or even the autonomy of the imitators nation and might prompt her to produce
a rebellious double of that authority which might destroy it. Imitation can also lead to
the conflicts of affects of aspiration and envy and desire that come from
being drawn to someone who is capable of something of which one wants oneself to be capable
and imitated, may be amazed by the skill manifested in an earlier work, and then painstakingly analyse
and seek to replicate that skill, the skill that made that object of amazement. And this might lead
either to a recognition that the imitating author can do it a newer and a better way.
A recognition that he cannot. Imitation is a practise surrounded with both
opportunities and hazards. But the wider consequence of recognising the temptation is principally
a matter of acquiring a set of habituated ways of doing a practise. And
that this is some. All language users necessarily do, whether they want it or not, is to accept
that we are partly other people and we are also partly what we have read.
Accepting that doesn't entail any loss of autonomy or the unfreedom, which has been a repeated
source of anxiety throughout the wider history of thinking about imitation. Human beings
are skilful and self conscious learners who continually adapt the practises they've learnt from
others to new uses. The imitating author. Indeed may radically misunderstand
the object of imitation and remake a version of it. On the basis of that mistake or a new cultural
context may make old words seem to mean something new. And so even a devoted literal
imitator may, like Don Quixote, find that an attempt at exact replication
produces an entirely new kind of text. Recognising
that the Persia's, which have built up in later modernity not to be a clone, not to be a copy, but be to
but to be an original products of a larger history should remind us
that those pressures can be resisted because between the sharp opposition of originality
and replication, on the other hand, is a huge zone occupied by the acquisition of practises
of learning skills and the wider, while the more emotionally turbulent uplands
of influence. And there is a very strange definition of imitation in the outer cranium,
which appears at first to be no meekly evasive. But actually, I think does convey a large truth
in little. The outer Adiam says imitation is that by which we are impelled
in accordance with a careful method to flourish in speaking by being
like others. And that statement implies that imitation is an urge
which results in a fusion of emotion and practise a desire to be like
in which emotion and practise are constantly feeding each other. And following that urge
offers the prospect of flourishing new thoughts, new worlds. New texts
could be produced by the labour of understanding and mastering the practises of earlier examples,
because the practises manifested in those ancient examples are rules
or finite injunctions, but ways of doing things which could be extrapolated
into ways of doing new things. Imitation produces transformation
rather than replication, and it always leaves open the question what will
happen next? A question which of course is a bit terrifying when the next person speak is
a proper classicist. And I think that Plato. But there we go.
Thank you. Colin Burroughs book is a tour de force of historical scholarship
and political thought. Though I didn't myself feel it bludgeoned by, it is to
say it employs immense erudition in reframing what was traditionally called
in the old Latin term IMME Tato, a storeroom which is here converted
to the syntactically ambiguous phrase, imitating authors
I found especially rewarding the rich analysis of metaphors running through the book of
the I'm sorry, the rich analysis running through the book of the competing metaphors
by which perceptions as well as practises of literary imitation have been mediated and
inflected. Colin Burrows exploration of the landscape of Amy Tateo,
combining as it does large vistas with exquisitely fine inspection of individual features,
conveys a sense of a territory with no hard borders. How, then, one
wonders, could T.S. Eliot have tried to define a boundary even between imitation and influence,
claiming that while influence can FT.com date? And that's one of the key family
of metaphors adopted in this book. Imitation I'm quoting especially
unconscious imitation. An interesting parenthesis can only sterilise
no doubt if pressed. Elliott would have defined his terms in such a way as to create a self
reinforcing circle of evaluation, since that is the prerogative of critics.
Colin Burrows enterprise avoids such limiting categorisations. But where does it
leave me, Tateo, in relation to the idea of into text duality, understood as a web
of only partially traceable connexions? This book actually holds the
notion of into text duality at arm's length. But Colin Barren nonetheless calls Amy Tateo
a moving target and states at one point that when practised with a bit educated
facility, it may not even appear to be imitation at all.
It's tempting to add the opposite paradox, which was observed with delicate irony
by Jack Mondale, partly in his extraordinary notebook's, that an author like Petrarch
has been imitated so much that when you read him, he seems himself. This
is their party's judgement to be an imitator. Perhaps one might say a selfish imitator.
Actually, Colin, burrowing in his book argues that Petrarch was indeed an imitator. But he's
thinking along different lines from Labour Party for classicists
like myself. The whole domain of Amy Tateo, including areas beyond literature,
is so important that it has been partly constitutive not only of the disciplines subject matter,
but to some extent the disciplines self image. And that is changing these days.
Well, Kassis certainly have much to ponder in this book and much to learn from it.
Its pursuit of the reception history of ancient texts and ideas is consistently
stimulating and indeed eye opening quintillion. To cite just one salient example turns
out to be almost as significant as anyone else for the whole trajectory of the argument.
And I found it almost symbolic that he was the very last person mentioned in the text
of the book. I myself found Colin Burrows book particularly valuable in
helping me to discern, though Colin may not entirely agree with this certain asymmetries in the roots
of Amy Tateo within ancient critical theory. From my perspective, there is a striking
disparity. Especially on the Greek side. Between the place of Amy
Tato or in Greek, my missus in the poetic and the rhetorical strands of ancient
criticism. Poetic criticism by which I mean criticism of poetry is
far more fixated on the axis between the work and the world than on that between
text and text. Author and author. Whereas it's rhetorical theory
for reasons embedded in educational practises, as Colin Burwell knows, that makes Amy
Tato as a relationship between texts or authors a central concern and sometimes
an obsession. And even rhetorical theory started, as I see it, from
the principle of internalising schema ties to types or patterns
of form and style. Before it came to treat individual authors as paradigms
for imitation. In early Greek rhetorical theory models, speeches
written by teachers and related practises are foundational.
Plato's Phaedrus, which perhaps surprisingly, Colin doesn't mention in this book,
throws an interesting sidelight on this intellectual culture. Imitation
of authors, as I see it, is only superimposed on this foundation at a later date and as a
result of two Hellenistic developments, the first of them the emergence of a nostalgically
post classical sensibility, which sets up a corresponding programme of classes
sizing recuperation, and the second, the Alexandrian invention
of canon necessity. The assimilation of Greek culture by Rome
adds, of course, further layers of complexity to this whole processes. Colin Burrard does not need to
be told yet. It continues to be the case. At any rate, too late antiquity. That poetic
criticism rarely gives into authorial in imitation. The degree of prominence
that rhetorical criticism does. And one might want to ponder why that was so
well of partial exceptions to the sweeping claim I've advanced. One of the most intriguing is the treatise
on the Sublime, whose own author is probably anonymous, but we call him Longinus.
Colling Burrow has some very interesting things to say about this work, not least about its revivification
of the platonic metaphore of pregnancy of mind. Or so
that's in Chapter 13 of the treatise, where creative imitation is heavily trooped
as inspiration, breathing in the spirit of one's ancestors,
one's great predecessors. But I'd like very quickly to say something about what
follows in Chapter 14, after Longinus has emphatically equated imitation with
agonistic rivalry as epitomised for him by the relationship
of Plato to Homer Platers competition with Hope Homer,
Chapter 14, posits a three stage thought process which is unique in ancient criticism
for the channelling of any Tardio as a creative impulse. Ambitious
writers of the present are told they must ask themselves a trio
of questions. Firstly, how would Homer or Plato have said? What I am trying to
say and the great authors of the past here are imagined as looming up, I
think before the mind and in a quail's I ghostly fashion, which very much chimes
with a leitmotif of Colin Boros book. Secondly, they must ask, what would they make of my work
if they were present here as my judges so that the Predecessors' now become
a critical super ego? And thirdly, what will posterity make of
my work? Where will it rang me? In the agon of authors,
Longinus adds that the products of a mind afraid to write for posterity are bound
to be abortive. And that's his metaphor. It is clear, however, that this anxiety
inheres in the whole psychology of creative imitation so that what we have
here is a Proteau Bloomy and mentality are not accidentally,
I would say. The young Harold Bloom was once told by William Wims that the new critic
the trouble with you, Bloom, is that you're a Longinus and not an Aristotelian.
Burrow gives Bloom rather short shrift in this book. Perhaps justifiably. My endpoint
point is the beneath Bloom's Freudianism. There is an ancient layer, partly submerged
of indebtedness, and this prompts the larger reflection, which is as good a place as any to
end these mere marginalia to Colin's superb book. The critics themselves
can be and perhaps cannot but be imitating authors.
Thank you. Thank you.
I'm on page 307 of this extraordinary book. Colin cites
Pope in his pending batho saying, When we sit down to write, let us bring some great
authors to our mind and ask ourselves this question. How words in this instance,
ironically, Sir Richard Blackmore have said this, and this is something that Stephen has just
yesterday. So I did wonder and sitting down to write this talk with our shoes hazard's
Peruvian ambulation. And I asked myself W-W CBD what we'd
call and do. I tried to list for myself
characteristics that words mark Peruvian performance.
Stunning Free's making would be amongst them erudition. And Steven has already mentioned range, a reference
and an ability to move deftly between deep. But lately, war in classical and humanist learning
and YouTube, YouTube, YouTube, YouTube and Battlestar Galactica. That's something I cannot toggle
definitely between evidently with an eye to aptness and topicality, but
something I also know about Colin from having heard him lecture on Hajis. Recent LRB talk
on fiction and lying is that you also have to have in your repertoire an excellent
Bruce Stalin or Brummie accent to pull out in the imitation in the reading of other people's
quotations, and that along with these other characteristics. I certainly do not have. So I abandoned
my plan not only for that reason, because to do so would run against the spirit of one of the threads
that runs through this book very clearly, which is precisely
to avoid the recipe like addition of elements as the model of imitation and
something that Paup parodies in Perry, both those in his receipt's to make
an epic poem as if the worst set of ingredients that one could draw together in order to produce an imitation
or producer, an authentic rendition of a particular genre, rather
as Quintiliano as many of the theorists that Colin mentions in the book and indeed
in the passage that he was just reading. Imitation, paradoxically,
persists in a deep, long acquired, well digested, well metabolised
acquaintance with the authors one wants to imitate. That becomes a Hexis or a habitus
or a disposition which enables you to produce as if you wear Koban, Burrow
or Cicero. There is a further paradox arising from the book's fundamental
question, which appears in the very first page and which is repeated.
And in those four points that Colin Wright himself recently. That question, in Colin's
words, is how do human beings learn sophisticated usage of language from others and
yet end up sounding like themselves? And there's
something very interesting. And I mean, it galvanises the
whole book. Interesting to me about this particular paradox and the book, both in spite
and because it is about imitation, is also a history of originality and implicitly
also of genius and its slippery sibling in.
I want to quote a couple of lines from Robert Britten,
which touches on precisely this paradox and draw out from them some of the ways that intersects
with themes in Colin's book that I think raise questions. And
Burton says and in his Democritus junior to the reader in
the anatomy melancholy stealer's we room argue it our style Brisas
and a man's genius is described by his works. I
find this interesting for a variety of reasons, and I will draw them out as the questions that I want
to raise for for Colin as we as we proceed. The first of these is that
in Berton's pun on the Steelers, something that occurs frequently
in common spook the Steelers as the pain and the Steelers as the style or the bodkin
as the sharp, satirical and implement Steelers. We will argue it's
our style Brisas. There's something about our style, intrinsic,
idiosyncratic, inimitable thing of ourselves that is something we produce automatically
or despite ourselves, that betrays us in various senses. That gives us a way
that's a kind of power. Arrogant or attent intentions are produced only by an incidental
effect of a running stylus or pen. So
while in Guinea, on the one hand operates at several points in this book as that idiosyncratic
particular quiddity, as I think Colin uses the word quiddity once the particularity
of an author and in Ghanim is also something. She is not within our control,
something that is not a part of our wills and plotted
machinations, machinations as an appropriate word here, because in
in Guinea or in Guinea are also engines, precisely a kind of automata the
Colin devotes a chapter to towards the end of the book. So how does this nexus of deliberation
and accident work? The second
point that I want to draw from this is that a person in this passage translates
what, as far as we know, as his own Latin tag into English
and producing a polyglot pun, but also a shift from the singular to the plural.
Colin is very down on one of Sir John Davison's puns on Farmer in one
of his chapters where Davis uses the Latin senses of a farmer,
both fame or Remar and Farmer's hunger
in an English poem to make a joke. But it seems to me that the practises of double translation
in the period which takes up the bulk of the English section of this book and the
kind of early, modern and 17th century sections practises where people are educated by
translating Latin into English and then English into Latin, meaning that writing in English
is in a sense, writing in and out of Latin, always an echo, at least until the late
18th century. And his own ninth chapter
is a feature of parrots, which, along with bees, are two of the presiding geniuses
of the animal kingdom and this book, and that they practise a kind of pretty polyglot ism, as
in John Skelton Speak Parrots and my favourite footnotes in this book. And there is a list of favourite
fruit notes. My favourite fruit noted is footnote number two in Chapter one, annotating
print Pretty Polly and epigraph to the chapter with Parrots Passim.
And I wonder if we could think about the ways in which this is also a story
about the English language and English literature finding its own genius
in relation to its classical predecessors. So John Florio and his friends, in
the introduction to his translation of Montane, talks about the genius and inseparable form of individual
languages, which mean in metaphors, which are also everywhere in this book and
in the study of imitation, that a translation can only ever be a picture of a body,
a shadow of a substance, says Florian. But if languages have geniuses, how far
is the effort to imitate the the the Latin patrimony
or the Greek patrimony? An effort to learn and sophisticated use of language
on behalf of the language itself and yet end up sounding like
English, like English literature? Because in lots of ways and canon is the words that Stephen already brought up.
This is also a book about the emergence of an English canon, of an English list
of who it is appropriate to imitate and how to imitate them.
Finally, I just want to raise the question of recognition in a couple of senses.
Burton's phrase suggests that our own idiosyncrasies in our own style is something that is unknown
even to ourselves and something that really strikes me about. The opening question
that I quoted earlier is that the phrase appears there
that we find that it's the way that I have no much to lose here.
How do we end up sounding like? How do authors end up sounding like themselves?
And on one hand, this is a colloquialism which we use all the time, but it also seems slightly
ontologically weird how what is it to write like oneself?
At the beginning of Henry the Fifth, it said of war like Harry, like himself, that
he will assume the ports of Mars. What does it mean to say that somebody is like themself?
Colin quotes the example of Pope writing imitations in the manner of Pope.
So one can evidently imitate one's own manner. One can also evidently
failed to imitate. One owns one's own manner. Stephen cited the example of Petrarch.
A less elevated example is the fact that I suppose the fact that both Charlie Chaplin
and Dolly Parton apparently came second in Look-Alike contests for their
own persons. So one good one can fail to be sufficiently
like oneself in order to be recognised. Now, this is obviously a relatively frivolous
example, but it's a different version of even Narcissus gazing at their own reflection.
What one encounters as other as an ex is belatedly recognised as a self in that moment and
the moment in which Milton takes even. Encounter with herself and with herself
and in the pool, her opening kind of self recognition as an imitation of of it
and was subsequently imitated, a portion of English literature is is key
to lots of the chapters in this book. What is it to recognise that one is
indeed like oneself? Emerson in reading Montand in
a slightly different mood, said, It seemed to me as if I had myself written the book.
What is it to recognise? Not that the that the book is an imitation of something
else, but to recognise that you yourself are in some sense that were author who has
written something which somebody else claims as their own. And this last example
suggests another sense of recognition. And this is my final my final point.
This is a book about writers imitating underbite, writers reading in order to imitate what
they are reading. But I'm interested also in the question of how we recognise
an imitation, how how we actually and or inaptly
count something is being imitated. I think of this partly because of a book that I read many years ago
called Imitating Thomas Brown, which started out as
a series of examples of people who claimed to be imitating Thomas Brown. And then the second half
checked whether they were really imitating Thomas Brown by putting the text through a computer and
seeing if they did indeed matches stylistic exploits. And
I think that example I mean, certainly the computer can pick up on concealable idiosyncrasies,
which are nonetheless not consciously produced by the writer or consciously registered
by the reader. And it might seem that it can then tell us something that we
do not know about ourselves or cannot detect about ourselves. But really, I think we want to place
the recognition of imitation and the reception of imitation as something that is interpersonal, that
happens, that between us as habituated and idiosyncratic readers
connexions, that we are able to make analogies to the recognition of faces
or to the recognition of our of of other people. And that facial recognition
metaphor also runs all the way through this book and reading and Greek is anagnorisis.
Can you confirm or recognition? So there's a sense in which
there is a kind of recognising principle at work and reading anyway.
This book is on the part of calling himself a dazzling display of writerly recognitions,
and many of the pleasures are wonderful readings and which and imitations and concealed
imitations and half imitations are picked out. And I wonder if we
could think a bit about the Ingeniousness book, both of the writer, but also of the ingenious reading
of imitation that Cole himself exemplifies. Thank you. Thank you. We didn't
plan it this way, but your talk of your concluding with recognitions enables me to say that
I'm here really just as a ghost or a Republican. Terence Cain was going to be
another respondent, literally can't come because he's stuck in Paris for various reasons. So I'm here as a sort
of version of parents from the outset.
It seems to me that one of the exciting things about this book is the number of defining
structure, structuring observations, and sometimes claims that concern
not only recognition and imitation, the recognition of imitation, but the movement
kind of movability of imitation across borders as being said
across languages in times. This capacity, which imitation has to shift
to shift shape, gear and even scale isn't affordance of
terms would say generated by what Coquelin calls on several occasions the conceptual
obscurity of this notion. The history of imitation as theory
and practise is one that quote I'm quoting here page six, six and seven that combines conceptual
obscurity with metaphorical vividness and quote from
the weakness of the concept, you might say, is drawn forth the strength of its metaphors.
One of the real and significant contributions of this book, I think both for scholars and for
undergraduate readers and others more broadly, is its tracking
of a whole host of metaphors, some animal, some vegetable and some a mineral
all the way through the history of imitation. One to go to sort of what would Colin
do? I would suspicious towards the end when I first read the final section of this book
to encounter an author whose main seemed to me to be too much like an author. The Colin
might have made up the Canadian poet whose name is Christian
book. Now, this particular Canadian poet on page 422
is said to have worked for this Canadian poet
Christian book, had a project called The Zino Text book began with a radical aim to embed
a poem within the genetic code of the extremely durable bacterium
in a caucus radio. Durand's, which, as its name suggests, could even survive
a nuclear holocaust. In some ways, I was disappointed to discover on the Internet and
elsewhere that Christie looked as if this wasn't one of Colin's
metaphorical fictions, because these metaphorical elaborations
throughout this book actually give a figure for the history of imitation as
it works its way from the Greeks to the Greeks, from Aristotle all the way through to
A.I. based bodies, buildings and brass unfreedom
agency and originality, Hexis and Hectors ghost. And then
finally, Shalabi takes Milton Sin and sad cyborgs.
All these and more to be found in the rich treasure trove of metaphors. Examples that run through
this book as it moves from mimesis to imitation between rhetoric and poetics
transformation. Dream station through to the operative category to the middle
half of the book, which are then developed in the second half adaptive and formal imitation.
As a French early modernist or an early modernist, working mainly in the French tradition and therefore
consciously eccentric to this book in reasons that in ways that Colin elaborates on
the opening page, actually, where he said his participation in the Montane really and often
convinced him that he wasn't going to talk about French stuff. It's a great change.
There we are. I want to explore the strength and the salience of the notion of subjunctive
imitation, in particular as a way of thinking of imitation, as a kind of generative
grammatical principle, because imitation in the subjunctive enables us to see
the author as, quote, an adaptive principal which might speak or
write in a different way. In response to changing circumstance from page 176
in relation to early modern readers, then imitative might on one hand be, quote, a script
for the self-determination of an ASP ference aristocratic class in a sort of
self fashioning mode that's now become very strongly explored
in any modern studies. But it might also be thought of
through its very key words and terms as a means to, quote, express.
And Colin does a good deal of work on the on the term express to express
the deep mutual involvement between a new sense of authorship in the early modern period and the practises
of print sculpture. Or again. And this is an example not in Colin's
book, for reasons that I've just explained, but I think it's sort of virtually present.
It might, through more pain, be a way in which an author can think of themselves as
being in some place and time altogether different from their own, but
somehow still themselves. There are two ways that operate with which that
operates. In more than that, I want to draw attention to very quickly what is in the essay 140 on
some considerations on Cicero. When Milton uses the image of the seedbed.
To not and also put some kind of vener time thing going on. But you know what to say
to anticipate that in sometimes to say that anybody who reads his essays, if they read carefully enough,
might find themselves, in a sense inspired. He doesn't use the word inspired. He says
pushed through peeling the text. Appreciate
peeling the text to generate for themselves. Quote and funny essay.
Infinite essay. Now for us to move and nudge the fact that Milton has there
mentioned the word essay with a big E means that he's also referred to his
own book as printed object. In other words, that his, if you like self-expression
as a writer might generate further copies of himself by readers,
which themselves would be called essays. It's one of those moments where imitation
has a particular charge to a particular moment in the history of authorship. As of print,
another one is when Milton writes in the margin. And if you will know this, and it takes us back
to the late and take a little to the Latin
writing. Milton writes in the flyleaf of his copy of Lucretius. The following
letters translate saying that the movement of atoms is so diverse
it would not be unbelievable if the atoms once
came together or come together in the future so that a mother multiengine
might be born. Now, this is a recasting of a fantasy in
Lucretius himself, reimagined by Molton to imagine a Montane
in the future, but nonetheless knows itself to be more pleasant. We're back
to Katie's question about how can you, in a sense, imitate yourself? And what's it like
to be like an. Petrak persona
and print, meantime, movement, masterful and monsters and love
about monsters, and there are some great monsters in this book. There's a lot more to ponder about all of these things
in relation to the French tradition. But I want to continue with one final example.
One which concerns precisely the matter of imitation as example.
In other words, something that sort of shadows this book but never quite takes
on full form. And that's the question of imitation, both as Pearla poetic, logical
practise and as an ethical question, whereby it becomes a kind of model
or pattern for behaviour, as in the passage which in fact coming right out right at the beginning.
And so in thinking about this, I want to return then one last time to taxpayers work
and to his translation of this, published anonymously in 16 78,
but set in fifteen fifty nine. The process, the Clave, is, amongst other things,
an imitation of the hat. Tamron. By written by Margaret Queen
of Islam, first published in 15 59.
The back page in the Oxford Class World Classics translation says it's a turning point
in the history, the novel and a landmark in the history of women's writing. And that's all true.
It's also a searing, powerful and passionate account of the question of imitation
posed as an ethical dilemma. Its author, Madame de Lafayette,
practice's image out here, and in fact transposes imitative into the ethical question
of eggs and clarity. And she does so all the way through the last sentences of the novel.
I'm not going to be a spoiler alert except to tell you that it ends with the princess leaving
the court. Leaving the court, marriage ability, intrigue and gallantry
behind the princess, quote, adopted a way of life which dispelled any thought
that she would ever return. And then here's the final sentence. In
the last two sentences in Terrance's translation, she spent part of the year in the convent.
The rest she spent at home, though, in profound retreat and in occupations more
saintly than those of the most austere houses of religion. In the final
sentence, her life, which was quite short, left in the imitable
examples of virtue. If that notion of
example in me, Fadela, that this book turns around
and I'm not going to say that clinician inimitable example, but I will say that one of the
questions this book raises is precisely this relation between its declared subject.
Fourth is imitating other authors and the wider question, which in fact, as I say, he alluded
to in the passage that he read out, which is people imitating
other people. The degree to which authors are a special kind of imitation
or whether, in fact, we all do this. Most of the time,
the word now goes back to college. Well, thank you very much.
I recognise I recognise the the faults, but not necessarily the nice things he said.
But it's very kind of you all. And there are lots of things to
address. I mean, particularly helpful to hear from Stephen
about the, uh, the ways in which imitation
is treated differently with within the study of poetics and rhetoric
in the classical world. And I suppose I'd respond to that by
saying that in early modernity, the poetic
and the rhetorical were thought about together. And that's why I've tended to
retro ject, as it were, concerned with the imitation of texts
into some of what Plato says about the imitation of of of the world.
And so my vision in that respect, I'm sure, is included or shaped by the fact that I'm principally an early modernist
and I would see those two things as necessarily becoming meshed. Whereas,
of course, as you say, quite rightly early on, that they're rather separate.
I don't talk a lot about into textual Lassy, I, I don't do that. I avoid that largely
because I share junior Chris Davies own discomfort with the way in which that
term came to be used, just to describe any kind of verbal echo when what she originally
means by it is a is a transposition of the the generic characteristics
of one form into another in order to create a new form. And I think that that's a sufficiently strong idea
to be deserve to deserve preserving.
But I also don't go there because really I want to talk about
texts as being potentially things that you could regard
as people or as patterns of behaviour that could be regarded as as as people inside.
I'm more interested, really, in the interpersonal than in the interaction. And that's partly because I did a lot
of reading, which mostly gets buried in the book itself. I did it
in experimental psychology and discussions about the ways in which people learn
from other people and the distinction that experimental psychologist makes between
make between a crude distinction between imitation
by which they mean gestural replication and what they call emulation, which is
the extrapolation of a task from a particular set of behaviour.
And you then emulated by doing the same task in a slightly different way. And that's
a behavioural psychologists would say that what I'm mostly talking about is emulation rather than
than imitation. But, you know, I began, as it were, thinking really about
how people learn. And that's that's that's why intersexuality
is not quite very much. I don't talk about doing very much. What I do at one point
say rather snarkily that if you knew anything about intellectual history, he'd understand where
the notion of Lumin rivalry comes from. It comes from copyright debates in the 18th century.
Really. The reason I'm so snarky about him and push him to the side is
because in 1968 nine, my family lived in his house. I was five. He
was our landlord. And we trashed the place and he was not very nice about it.
So, you know, I thought that something like that explains all that.
But, you know, it's a long time ago. But I have a long memory. I did review
his his last book, and he died between my finishing review and
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
in the past tense. So, yeah, you're quite right. But that was a really
eye opening discussion of of what I didn't know about.
And that's. Here. And the idea that critics themselves
can be imitating is identifying tropes, figures and shapes in
early attacks. I think he's absolutely right or the critics like horribly and perhaps get bit
carried away. Bye bye bye. That idea. So I wouldn't
put that was very, very helpful. And
Katie, again, so much to think about. I mean,
the point you raise about how we become conscious of
ourselves as distinctive stylistic agents, I think is it is
a really crucial one. And in the course of the book.
I mean, there are lots of different metaphors, reputation. But the two that I particularly
zoom in on is the sort of closely coupled set of
artifices between the imitation as a live re recreation
of a living, breathing, independent body as against an imitation, as a
ghost or double or shadowy semblence. And it does
seem to me a significant fact that theorists and practitioners of imitation throughout
its history haven't really been able to drive a wedge between those two things. But,
you know, the point where you become a distinctive stylistic an age might also be the point
at which you become a parody of yourself. And way, way you sort of lose that
thinness and energy that you do that that that that's support both
of the energy that you thought you had. And that's why,
although I'm not talking about intersexuality in and probably not being very French,
there is at the core of the book not a simple conception of a person as an agent
articulating their own stylistic register, which can then be replicated by
others. But there is a much more duplicitous representation of
rights to the agency as simultaneously something that you know about in which you feel,
I feel, to be an independent being, but which is also potentially
a sort of shadow shadowy replica of what's come before. And it seems to me that what you say about the
emergence of English literature and the canon of English literature from Latin
City is relatable to that, because one
of the biggest chapters in the book is about Milton, who is often accused of
being too Latin to be fully English. And his particular
kind of style, which is defiantly his own and yet
also deeply Latinate. It seems to be exactly. Points to the to
the area that you're drawing attention to. I'm sort of polyglot
ism that turns into a distinctive idiolect
which can claim its own autonomous space. So that was really help me
a great sort of helpful angle to take on the whole book. And I felt that
I had been there was a sort of well, you
know, I'd be flattering myself if I said I'd been well understood.
It seems to me that you brought out something which I hadn't really brought out myself. Thank
you very much. And the point. And I suppose
much of what I've said already leads into what Wes was saying about
excellent clarity and the notion that the person or
the behaviour has an object of imitation and
inspiration of subsequent practise. Because.
You know, the inimitable example is in some ways another version of
the paradox of the thing which is simultaneously itself and also
another thing, and that, I suppose, is what I think human beings and authors
are. And I think the process of literary well, the
literary traditions generally unfold through a sort of peristaltic relationship
between exam clarity and an intimate ability.
So those are my responses. But thank you very much. They were really very stimulating indeed. Your comments,
and I feel I've done them justice. Thank you.