Bio

Albert Lloret is an associate professor of Spanish and Catalan at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he specializes in the literature of the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. He is the author of Printing Ausiàs March and coauthor of The Classical Tradition in Medieval Catalan. His current research projects include a study of the printing of chivalric romance Tirant lo Blanc, in collaboration with Jaume Torró, and two monographs.

Lloret's first book project is dedicated to the politics of printing medieval Catalan historiography in Habsburg Spain. His second book manuscript explores the spatiality of medieval and early modern lyric, and is tentatively entitled Invisible Strings: Topographies of the Lyric in Late Medieval and Early Modern Iberia. Lloret is one of the founding editors of Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Cultures and a general editor of open access journal Translat Library.

Project

Albert Lloret will discuss with his colleagues a concise version of a chapter of his book manuscript on lyric and space. His talk will be entitled: "Espai, lírica i presència." In it he will explore what Sepp Gumbrecht called effects of presence—ways in which texts manifest beyond a straightforward construction of meaning. After addressing recent theoretical approaches to the lyric, Lloret will examine in heuristic terms two defining spatial features of the genre (apostrophe and deixis) and will argue that a third (the documentary aura of presence-making texts) functions as a counterpoint to universalizing claims modernly tied to lyric poetry. He will then identify certain subgenres that were more prone to creating presence and argue that such was one of the central poles of interest in early modern writing about ruins.