Christopher Wood, Ph.D.
Professor of German
New York University
Born in 1961, Boston, Mass., USA
Studied History, Literature, and Fine Arts at Harvard University
Arbeitsvorhaben
Popular Antiquities: The Sunken Cities (Folklore and Folk Art Reassessed)
I propose a reinterpretation of early modern European culture (fifteenth to eighteenth centuries) based on local legends and so-called folk art. These underexploited and not unproblematic bodies of material will yield an unfamiliar picture of the collective memory and vernacular or unofficial dreams and fears. Cognizant of the historiographical and ideological hazards, I will work along the borderlands between literary history and art history, tracking symbols, motifs, plots, characters, and etymologies. Encoded in the legends are troubled, clouded recollections of the European past; preoccupations with suffering and conflict, with secrecy and access to knowledge; anxieties about food and climate; erosion of confidence in rituals, sacrifices, curses, and incantations; suspicions that the past was fuller and more real than the present; and the persistence of incompletely mourned pasts and undead bodies.At the core will be abyssal, speluncar, and hypogean imagery, for example the many local legends involving doomed cities sucked back into the earth or the waters. The legends interpret dimly recalled records of catastrophe and accidents in moral terms: a “people’s morality” and a people’s eschatology emerges outside of Christianity. There is often an anti-establishment or socially subversive quality to the legends. The unburied past reproached elite, promulgated histories, just as folk art reproached the authored yet rule-based art cultivated in the art academies. I present the vernacular material with its negative aura not as low or underdeveloped culture but rather as a form of counterculture, as a riposte to and parody of emerging academic, clerical, and bureaucratic narratives and archives.
Recommended Reading
Wood, Christopher S. Forgery, Replica, Fiction: Temporalities of German Renaissance Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
Nagel, Alexander, and Christopher S. Wood. Anachronic Renaissance. New York: Zone Books, 2010.
Wood, Christopher S. A History of Art History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019.
Publikationen aus der Fellowbibliothek
Wood, Christopher (Princeton, 2023)
The embedded portrait : Giotto, Giottino, Angelico
Wood, Christopher (México, 2019)
Wood, Christopher (Petersberg, 2018)
Landscapes by Wolf Huber and Domenico Campagnola, invented, copied, and replicated
Wood, Christopher (New York, 2018)
Public and private dimensions of votive giving
Wood, Christopher (Bielefeld, 2018)
Wood, Christopher (Baltimore, Md, 2017)
Figure and ground in Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre