Dean uses diversity of Faculty research to illustrate lecture

Tuesday, 27 November 2012

part of 'a dream and a more complex dream' by University Fine Art Masters Graduate, Bernard Yeung

Professor Hugo Tucker recently represented the University of Reading at the world's leading centres in the field of Humanism and Early Modern Latin, when at the start of this academic year he gave the Seventh Jozef Ijsewijn Lecture at the Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven.

Professor Tucker, Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Science lectured on a form of composition in prose, poetry, the visual arts and music called a Cento - a ‘patchwork' composed of fragments taken from other authors, disposed in a new order - a form of compositional improvisation akin to modern rapping, but sometimes thought of (wrongly) as an early form of plagiarism- in order to generate new meanings for social satire, literary parody, political thought, theological debate, didactic or lyric poetry, even the first description in verse of The Gun Powder Plot's discovery, just ten days after the event!

Professor Tucker's lecture, From rags to riches: the Early Modern Cento form, was illustrated by the work of a University Fine Art Masters Graduate, Bernard Yeung, which Professor Tucker hit upon while visiting the Fine Art Department in his capacity as Dean. 

Bernard's work A dream and a more complex dream is based on the origami crease patterns for making a butterfly, and highlights the process of composition itself on the way to an end result. It also mirrors the ‘patchwork' effect of the Cento form which overtly ‘stitches' together pieces of text, image or music from different sources, explicitly acknowledged, to form a new whole in a different cultural context.

"I am proud to have had the honour of delivering this major international lecture in my field, and so representing internationally the University of Reading. This is the seventh lecture of ten in honour of the late Professor Jozef IJsewijn who founded in 1966 Leuven's Seminarium Philologiae Humanisticae, a research group for the study of works and documents written in Latin worldwide from the 14th century to the present", said Professor Tucker.

 "While visiting the Fine Art end of year Exhibition I found the perfect image to illustrate my talk, and spoke at length to Bernard about his art work. I used the image to explain visually what my lecture was about to an academic and public audience in Belgium. This is a gratifying example for me personally of how my own role as Dean of FAHS has made me further aware of the links across the disciplines in a large, diverse Faculty, to the enrichment of my own research, but also reflecting the creative mix and dynamic potential of our new Faculty of the Arts & Humanities and the various Social Sciences."