Professor Crawford's lecture on the blazon tradition in poetry began with a brief discussion of the tools and resources she utilized/utilizes while researching and analyzing. The OED and DNB were mentioned along with primary and secondary texts as general reference guides. For the blazon lecture, she utilized the OED, DNB, criticisms by Edie Sedgwick and Nancy Vickers and finally period and contemporary examples of the blazon by Petrarch, Campion, Herrick, Shakespeare, Forché and Toomer.
Her approach was methodical: she began with a discussion of the political conditions and historical context (16th Century France) in which blazons were penned along with a definition of what a blazon is or was: a way of securing relationships of power between men via women. She specifically mentioned the Petrarchan "Laura" poems as models of the blazon and introduced the three main ideas which formed the framework of her analysis:
1) Traffic in Women: As per the ideas set forth by Levi-Strauss that argue that the use of women as commodities or objects have less to do with women than with the cementing of male power.
2) Homosociality: Socializing with people of your own sex.
3) Triangulation: the competition between two men for the attention of a woman.
She continued into the specificities of the blazon anatomique with examples of the type, noting that the poems being read were the ones that "won," hence their survival into the 21st century. As usual, the class was encouraged to ask questions, comment freely, and lend their observations to the discussion.
Professor Crawford is at her strongest when she is free to operate both within the text during close reading and outside of it in its context. Her lectures only seem to slow when the observations that are being made start to stagger the tempo and the energy of the class: in general, when the same observations are repeated or rephrased by others or when the rare inanity comes out of left field.
--K.S. Anthony
Her approach was methodical: she began with a discussion of the political conditions and historical context (16th Century France) in which blazons were penned along with a definition of what a blazon is or was: a way of securing relationships of power between men via women. She specifically mentioned the Petrarchan "Laura" poems as models of the blazon and introduced the three main ideas which formed the framework of her analysis:
1) Traffic in Women: As per the ideas set forth by Levi-Strauss that argue that the use of women as commodities or objects have less to do with women than with the cementing of male power.
2) Homosociality: Socializing with people of your own sex.
3) Triangulation: the competition between two men for the attention of a woman.
She continued into the specificities of the blazon anatomique with examples of the type, noting that the poems being read were the ones that "won," hence their survival into the 21st century. As usual, the class was encouraged to ask questions, comment freely, and lend their observations to the discussion.
Professor Crawford is at her strongest when she is free to operate both within the text during close reading and outside of it in its context. Her lectures only seem to slow when the observations that are being made start to stagger the tempo and the energy of the class: in general, when the same observations are repeated or rephrased by others or when the rare inanity comes out of left field.
--K.S. Anthony
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