Preceded by 16h30 book launch by Prof. Merritt Bucholz of ‘Fieldworks: From Place to Site in Postwar Poetics’ by Lytle Shaw.
The Dutch Golden Age painter Meindert Hobbema lavished attention on oak trees, rutted paths, checkerboard cottages and swamps, while radically downplaying the human figures that typically “animate” landscape painting.  Recuperating this reversal of perspective as a major event in the history of painting, this talk develops a cultural and philosophical basis for Hobbema’s enterprise. Following talks on Jan van Goyen (2012), and Jacob van Ruisdael (2013), this lecture is the last chapter of a book in progress, New Grounds for Dutch Landscape, which reframes Dutch landscape painting not merely as a representational project, but as a matter of re-staging, within the medium of painting, the physical processes of Dutch land reclamation.

Lytle Shaw is Associate Professor of English and Director of Graduate Admissions for English at The Department of English at New York University. He was awarded his Ph.D. 2000 (English) from The University of California, Berkeley and his Bachelor of Arts 1991 (English) from Cornell University. He currently teaches two elective modules at SAUL, Radical Description and Experimental Research. His work centers on twentieth- and twenty-first century poetry and art. He is interested in how texts and art objects mediate, transform, and disrupt (rather than simply “reflect”) the cultural and social possibilities of their moments. His teaching and writing continue to focus on how recent poetry and art might not just relate to but in a sense become experimental versions of historicism, ethnography, documentary and landscape aesthetics.