Event Date
Beyond the Five Senses: Early Modern Poetry of Interoception
"Interoception," a term that has attracted a significant amount of attention over the past few years, refers broadly to the ability to sense what goes on inside the body: the rhythm of circulation, pangs of hunger, breathing patterns, fluctuations in mood, the movements of a child in the womb, and countless other processes with different levels of accessibility to the conscious mind. This talk argues that attention to the inside of the body is a vital part of the experience of poetry in early modernity, and that poetic language can be a key part of the cultural training that shapes the perception of visceral landscapes. The argument for a “poetry of interoception” is tied to the idea that a number of cultural factors align in the seventeenth century and sharpen the interest for the inside of the body, as changing medical paradigms meet the old vehicle for attention to subjectivity that is the lyric mode. These factors operate across Europe and Colonial America, and thus the poems that are used as examples belong to different languages and national traditions. This talk will be in English.
Lorena Uribe Bracho is Assistant Professor at Wilbur Wright College, City Colleges of Chicago. Her research offers an interdisciplinary approach to poetic and musical cultures of early modern Spain and colonial Latin America. Her most recent article, “Orphans of Orpheus: Music Lost and Regained in Spanish Golden Age Poetry” (Hispanic Review, 2021) explores how poetic texts move away from music and back towards it as poets and early critics seek to define what we now understand as lyric poetry. She has a forthcoming chapter about Lope de Vega’s Arcadia in a collective book about soundscapes in the early modern Iberian world, and is currently working on an article about layers of sound in poems. Her book project addresses how music shapes the soundscapes of poetry.
