Symposium information
This event in now fully booked.
This two-day international symposium we will trace how the concept of literary difficulty develops through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, following the first use of the term as meaning ‘hard to understand’. Our conference brings together literary scholars, historians, biographers, editors and translators to discuss ‘difficulty’ as an aesthetic, critical and ideological category in early modern literature and thought.
We ask why authors might deliberately write works which are difficult to understand; whether difficulty is always élitist; and whether complexity-seeking scholars might create difficulty, forming a puzzle so that they can be the ones to solve it.
Sessions will also address how difficulty can be understood in the work of particular authors; how the category might be debated theoretically and conceptually; how difficulty resides in considerations of form and linguistic medium; and how it motivates and complicates archival, editorial and pedagogical work in early modern studies.
Confirmed speakers include: Peter Auger, Eoin Bentinck, Gilles Bertheau, Warren Chernaik, Miles Dawdry, Daniel Derrin, Jeff Dolven, Nicholas Hardy, Islam Issa, Kevin Killeen, Mary Ann Lund, Dianne Mitchell, Joe Moshenka, Victoria Moul, Kathryn Murphy, Edward Paleit, Jennifer Richards, Elizabeth Scott-Baumann and Nigel Smith.
Click here for programme.
The symposium has been generously funded by the Society for Renaissance Studies and by the London Shakespeare Centre.
We shall be holding a conference dinner on the evening of Friday 26th October at Fernandez and Wells, Somerset House, Strand. The venue is just next to King’s. You will be asked to confirm if you wish to attend the dinner during the booking process.
On Difficulty in Early Modern Literature - Project Overview
This project is an ongoing research collaboration between Dr Hannah Crawforth of KCL’s English Department and Professor Sarah Knight in the School of Arts at the University of Leicester which brings together scholars working on different aspects of difficulty in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writing. Our work traces how the concept of difficulty develops through the early modern period, following the first use of ‘difficulty’ as meaning ‘hard to understand’.
The Latin difficultas, Anglo-Norman difficultee and Italian difficoltà occur much earlier, but ‘difficulty’ meaning ‘the quality of being hard to understand’ is not attested in English before the late fourteenth century, in Chaucer’s ‘Friar’s Tale’. The early modern period witnessed an impressive, contended range of applications of the word across very different types of writing. We find it applied to theological controversy in Thomas More’s argument that the ‘dyffyculte’ of St Paul’s ‘wrytyng’ leads readers to find ‘sumtyme some mater of contencyon’ (Supplication of Souls; 1529). In his practical manual The art or crafte of rhetoryke (1532), Leonard Cox argues that ‘all excellent & commendable thyng be hard & of difficulty’. At the other end of our chronological span, in Of Education (1644) Milton writes of learning other tongues that ‘if the language be difficult, so much the better’, and of the riches available to students once they have mastered Greek and Latin, ‘the difficulties of grammar being soon overcome’. Clearly authors of the period had to think about and tackle the question of difficulty in their writing.
We live in an era when the intellectual value and political importance of raising and discussing difficult topics, thinking through difficult ideas, and teaching our students to think through difficult problems are all crucial. We are organising three events in 2018 both to encourage wider conversation and debate. 2018 is also the fortieth anniversary of George Steiner’s influential essay ‘On Difficulty’ (1978), an attempt to provide a taxonomy of difficulty and to argue for its central importance in literature and philosophy (first published in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 36: 3 (Spring 1978): 263-276). Steiner’s article, together with more recent critical studies such as Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique (Chicago, 2015) and James Longenbach’s The Resistance to Poetry (Chicago, 2004), have all contributed to our thinking about early modern difficulty.
We ask why authors might deliberately write works which are difficult to understand; whether difficulty is always élitist; and whether complexity-seeking scholars might create difficulty, forming a puzzle so that they can be the ones to solve it. We are especially interested in exploring the following research questions:
- How is difficulty to be understood in the work of particular authors?
- How can we most effectively teach difficult early modern texts?
- How can the category be debated theoretically and conceptually?
- Where does difficulty reside in considerations of literary form and linguistic medium?
- How does difficulty motivate and complicate archival and editorial work?
- Are we in a historial moment when reading and teaching difficult literature is particularly under threat?