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HUM-Fagkomiteen for humaniora

The Mirror of the Sun King: Literature, Politics and the Seventeenth-Century Crisis of Exemplarity

Tildelt: kr 2,6 mill.

Renaissance culture was a culture of exemplarity, in the sense that ancient examples were at the heart of the humanist project as a source of both ethical and esthetic models. This project will study an important shift away from this framework in the cons truction of the exemplarity of Louis XIV. The scholarship is unanimous in its depiction of a reflexive turn in the way Louis XIV is represented through the early part of his reign, the weight shifting from past models to the king's own exploits. Emblema tic for this turn is the decoration of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, which was originally planned to reflect the examples of Apollo and Hercules, not the new royal Exemplar himself. At first glance it may seem counter-intuitive to perceive such a dis location as a crisis of exemplarity, since the King is constructed as the incarnation of the centralized absolutist power which here, maybe for the first time, constitutes its own example, a closed self-reflexive and self-sufficient sign. A closer scrutin y will however reveal certain cracks in this mirror of the Sun King, his fragile body natural being unable to carry the increased burden of his splendid body politic, in a way that may seem to demystify and thereby undermine the theologico-political under pinning of the absolutist project itself. The core of the project is thus the study of the auto-exemplarity of the King, which will be pursued in both literary and political texts from the period. In this way the project will throw new light on an inher ent contradiction in the construction of absolutism itself, thereby improving our understanding of an important stage in the formation of modern statehood. The project is firmly anchored academically at the University of Oslo as part of the crossdiscipli nary project "Dislocations", and participates in a dialogue with leading international scholars (cf. attached invitations from Princeton University and Université Paris Sorbonne).

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HUM-Fagkomiteen for humaniora