SEM Modernités 16 18 / PEARL, 03/12/2025, 17 h 30: Supriya Chaudhuri (Jadavpur University): “Errant Signs: Knowing and Not-Knowing in Shakespeare and Jonson”, Maison Recherche Sorbonne

VALE : Voix Anglophones Littérature et Esthétique (UR 4085)

SEM Modernités 16 18 / PEARL, 03/12/2025, 17 h 30: Supriya Chaudhuri (Jadavpur University): “Errant Signs: Knowing and Not-Knowing in Shakespeare and Jonson”, Maison Recherche Sorbonne

Publication publiée :28 novembre 2025
Post category:Séminaire

Nous avons le plaisir de vous inviter au prochain séminaire conjoint Modernités 16-18 / PEARL sur le thème de « Littératures, savoirs, savoir-faire », qui se tiendra à la Maison de la Recherche de Sorbonne Université (28 rue Serpente, 6e), salle D 421, le mercredi 3 décembre à 17 h 30.

Nous aurons le plaisir d’entendre l’intervention suivante:

Supriya Chaudhuri (Jadavpur University)

“Errant Signs: Knowing and Not-Knowing in Shakespeare and Jonson”

Abstract: It was Hilary Gatti who, as long ago as 1989, used the phrase The Renaissance drama of knowledge as the title for a book on Giordano Bruno, and it is slightly surprising that the phrase has not acquired greater currency in relation to the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, which are all about knowing and not knowing – or disowning knowledge, as Stanley Cavell’s celebrated book suggests. This presentation will consider some features of Shakespeare and Jonson’s drama of knowledge, focusing especially upon the errancy and mistaking of signs, given their precarious and arbitrary relation to their referents. I will begin with a knowledge “inscribed” in and on the body, the physical violence inflicted on the Ephesian slave Dromio in The Comedy of Errors, who claims categorically that “I know what I know,” and yet fails to recognize his master’s “handwriting” – that is, his blows. I will then go on to discuss the function of mistaken, errant or misplaced signs in Othello and Volpone, two plays that stand in an ironic relation to each other.

Supriya Chaudhuri is Professor Emerita in the Department of English, Jadavpur University, India. Her research ranges over Shakespeare and Renaissance literature, Indian cultural history, modernism, theory, cinema, sport and urban studies. Among recent publications are her edited books, Envisioning the Indian City: Spaces of Encounter (2025); Religion and the City in India (2022) and Commodities and Culture in the Colonial World (2018). Recent journal articles have appeared in Études Anglaises (2024) Spenser Studies (2024, 2023), BioScope (2023), Thesis 11 (2021), and Postcolonial Studies (2021). Published book-chapters include contributions to Crossings: Migrant Knowledges, Migrant Forms (Punctum, 2025), The Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures (2024), the Bloomsbury Handbook of Postcolonial Print Cultures (2023), The Form of Ideology and the Ideology of Form (OBP 2022), Asian Interventions in Global Shakespeare (Routledge 2021), Machiavelli Then and Now: History, Politics, Literature (CUP 2022), The Cambridge History of Travel Writing (2019), Eastern Resonances in Early Modern England(Palgrave 2019), and Blind Spots of Knowledge in Shakespeare and his World (Medieval Institute Publications 2019). Her translations appear in the Oxford Tagore Translations series and The Essential Tagore (Harvard UP). She writes on issues of intellectual freedom and higher education in India.