Friday 13th June 2025, 11am. University College, Goodhart Seminar Room, Logic Lane
In the early modern period, empiricism often took the form of detached description: in order to study things as they are, what Francis Bacon called “things in themselves,” antiquarians and naturalists attempted to bracket off their own subjectivities and simply describe the object before them—free of their own imaginative or bookish projections. At the same time, poets were using a classical literary form, ekphrasis, to construct a very different kind of description: one that blends subjective and objective modes of thought.
In this workshop, we’ll experiment with the difference between empiricist description (which often underlies our own modern scholarly methods) and ekphrasis. Working from the same painting, we’ll explore what it might mean to think about the image objectively, from a position of detachment, and, to think about it subjectively—that is, to think about ourselves thinking about it.
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Rachel Eisendrath is Professor of English and Director of the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program at Barnard College, New York. She is the author of Poetry in a World of Things: Aesthetics and Empiricism in Renaissance Ekphrasis (University of Chicago Press, 2018) and Gallery of Clouds, a creative meditation on Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, which was published by New York Review Books in 2021.
