As writers like Dares, Dictys, Benoît de SainteMaure, Guido delle Colonne, Giovanni Boccaccio, Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare and as scribes, illustrators, and printers translate, adapt, illuminate, and transform the Troy story—in different languages, genres, media—the reception history of Troy becomes, amongst other things, a history of touch. The Troy story serves as an imaginative site where cultural and literary relations are structured by contiguity, proximity, and materiality, as readers and audiences attempt to get in touch with Troy. Touch is understood here as an affective and transformational epistemological category, as a way of knowing, of apprehending, of understanding entities, but also as one of forming new relations, of producing new knowledge, of generating innovation and of expressing a desire for bridging the gap between past and present.

“Touching Troy” aims to explore this tactile dimension of—and within—the Troy story and its medieval and early modern transmission, to study how Troy touches medieval and early modern subjects—and how medieval and early modern subjects touch Troy: How do experiences of material objects, tactile or otherwise, as well as visual and narrative representations of such experiences structure relations between texts, artifacts, and audiences? What kind of affective responses are generated by way of touch? How do tactile experiences and representations of tactile experiences unfold across time, that is, within and across different temporalities, different periods?

Programme

Thursday, 25 August 2022

Friday, 26 August 2022

Saturday, 27 August 2022