The Medieval Studies Certificate Program and the Department of Music, CUNY Graduate Center, Present:

Sarah Kay

Professor of French Literature, Culture and Thought, NYU

“How Opera Taught Me to Read”

Friday, March 15, 4:00

CUNY Graduate Center, 365 5th Avenue

Room 6494

Now that medievalists read most of their works more on screen than in books, more in

manuscript than in print, we need to reimagine the act of reading as responding not just

to a text but also to the sight and sound of the page. Reading like this requires

imagination that is not oriented mainly toward the image as a visual phenomenon but

combines the inner reflexes of all the senses. We could think of such reading as the

process of watching, listening to, and participating in an inner theater; except what is

being played on that inner stage is not a play but an opera. Drawing on French and

Occitan songbooks and works with inserted lyrics, this paper outlines a way of thinking

about a medieval imagination that can conjure sound as well as image, and time as well

as space.

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