2021/2022

Anthony Ossa-Richardson, PhD

Lecturer in English Literature

University College London

Born in 1981 in London
Studied Philosophy at Bristol University, English Literature at the University of York, and Intellectual History at the Warburg Institute, University of London

Arbeitsvorhaben

The Typical in Renaissance Literature

The project, which marks the start of my work on a monograph, is about the nature of the "type" (Typus) in the Renaissance - and also in the modern study of literature and history. It asks, among other questions: What is typical and what less typical in the literary works of the Renaissance? How can we ascertain which is which? Which scholarly tools are capable of, or appropriate to, dealing with each? How do forms, ideas, and phrases become and cease to be typical? Why does an author reach for the typical, and why not?
I teach in a department of English Literature, but my background is in intellectual history, and much of my current thinking is an effort to find ways to combine these two disciplines, a project that is particularly difficult for the Renaissance. While my study of typicality will focus on literary and quasi-literary works, then, it will be rooted in early modern modes of thought about typicality. For instance, the word "typical" itself (or Latin "typicalis") did not denote, as it does now, the relationship of an object to a set that it represents; rather, it meant something like "figurative" or "symbolic", dependent on a particular concept of the kinship between the two biblical Testaments. My aim will be to probe how the genealogy of this idea, and related terms such as "figure" and "character", can help us to understand modes of reference in and around works of what we now call "literature", an idea with its own distinctive ancestry.
My hope is to find a new way (or newly to recover an old way) to connect literary texts - tragedies, satires, sacred drama, sonnet cycles, translated epics, and perhaps fine prose - to the rich corpus of humanist writing from the sixteenth century, most of which is in Latin. But it is also my hope to historicise literary criticism as a current intellectual practice, by thinking about how and why the idea of typicality has changed since the Renaissance.
While at the Wissenschaftskolleg, I also hope to complete my translation of Leo Africanus's "Description of Africa", a 1526 account of the geography, history, culture, flora, and fauna of North Africa.

Recommended Reading

Ossa-Richardson, Anthony. "The Idea of a University and its Concrete Form." In The Physical University: Contours of Space and Place in Higher Education, edited by Paul Temple, 131-158. London: Routledge, 2014.
-. "Sir Thomas Browne, Paolo Giovio, and the Tragicomedy of Muleasses, King of Tunis." Studies in Philology 113, no. 3 (2016): 668-693. https://doi.org/10.1353/sip.2016.0017.
-. A History of Ambiguity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019.

Kolloquium, 08.02.2022

Die Konkretion des Bildes: Eine Gespenstergeschichte

Mit düsterem Blick sah John Ruskin in den 1850er Jahren einer Zeit entgegen, „in der alle Monumente, die nur erhalten wurden, weil es zu teuer war, sie zu zerstören, von den Kräften der neuen Welt zermalmt sein werden“ – wenn „sich die stolzen Nationen des 20. Jahrhunderts auf den Ebenen Europas umschauen, entlastet vom Marmor ihrer Denkmale, und endlich von der Lähmung des Überkommenen und der Verstrickung der Erinnerung befreit“ wären. Dieser Moment war nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg gekommen. Angewidert von der Geschichte und all dem Grauen, das sie mit sich gebracht hatte, machten sich junge Architekten und Architektinnen in Großbritannien und auf der ganzen Welt daran, neue Grundlagen für ihre Kunst zu entwickeln. In meinem Vortrag untersuche ich eine dieser Grundlagen: das Bild, das als Befreiung von der Vergangenheit durch die reine Form verstanden wurde. Mit dieser Idee, wie auch mit anderen, erreichte die Moderne die nationale und tatsächlich weltweite Vorherrschaft, während sie gleichzeitig in zwei Lager zerbrach, deren Differenzen unüberbrückbar waren.