Vessels of Passage: Reading the Ritual of the Late-Medieval Ship of Fools

My paper explores the late-medieval image of the ship of fools. The metaphor originates in the fifteenth-century carnivals of Europe and was depicted in Sebastian Brant’s 1494 compilation, Das Narrenschiff. The paper explores the underlying dynamic of the imagery and its origins in carnivalesque rituals as well as how the motif was exploited by Brant, becoming a literary force at the turn of the sixteenth century

Vessels of Passage: Reading the Ritual of the Late-Medieval Ship of Fools

My paper explores the late-medieval image of the ship of fools. The metaphor originates in the fifteenth-century carnivals of Europe and was depicted in Sebastian Brant’s 1494 compilation, Das Narrenschiff. The paper explores the underlying dynamic of the imagery and its origins in carnivalesque rituals as well as how the motif was exploited by Brant, becoming a literary force at the turn of the sixteenth century

Metamorphosis and Identity – “Cinetheatrical” Spaces in Peter Greenaway’s The Baby of Mâcon

In his interviews, Peter Greenaway infamously claims that we have never seen films, only literature or theatre put on screen. He, being a painter himself, mostly characterises his construction of film-narrative as image-centred, a position in opposition to that of traditional plot-centred movies based on verbal narration. He wanted to make a cinema of ideas and not of plots, trying to use the same aesthetics as painting, which always paid great attention to formal devices of structure and the composition of framing (Woods 18). Not only is there a competitive relationship between the plot and the visual narration, but in his films the mediums used also vary. This contributes to the multi-layered structures of his movies, which are not limited by artificially imposed boundaries, but are centred on notions such as the place and space of performance and the self-reflective nature of art. The framework of intermediality, consequently, gains crucial significance within the discourse on Greenaway’s movies. On the one hand, it includes various mediums, allowing the interweaving of late-twentieth century visual arts (cinema and television) with theatre; on the other hand, it presupposes flexibility and a need for artistic fusion, creating a profusion of texts, images, and sounds within the given artistic constellation. This variability of expression requires variable spaces and this paper seeks to substantiate the interrelation between the metamorphosis of locations and identity in Peter Greenaway’s The Baby of Mâcon

“Border Liners”. The Ship of Fools Tradition in Sixteenth-Century England

This paper investigates the effect of Sebastian Brandt’s The Ship of Fools in sixteenth-century England. My starting point is Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization and I attempt to trace the philological background and the way Brandt’s text determined early-Renaissance satire and later ’fool literature’ in England. My goal is to articulate the fact that the transgression of the ship does not manifest itself merely in the act of translation but also in the liminal position of the fool and the transgression among generic boundaries as well.En el ensayo estudio el efecto de la obra de Sebastian Brandt, titulada La nave de los locos, en la Inglaterra del siglo XVI. Mi estudio presenta el desarrollo del texto de Brandt en Inglaterra, partiendo del libro de Michael Foucault, La locura y la sinrazón, y destaca cómo el texto mencionado determina la sátira renacentista temprana y la literatura bufa de los finales del siglo. Espero que hasta el final de mi estudio pueda convencerles que el que el barco cruza la frontera no se encarna sólo en la existencia errante de los locos o en el acto de la traducción, sino se refiere a la interconexión de los géneros literarios también