Say It with Flowers – Oriental Style

No Valentine’s Day goes by without countless billboards and online ads from floral companies urging us – and with the same success every year – to ‘say it with flowers’. Apparently, we still attribute to flowers a latent ability to ‘say’ things felt to defy verbal articulation on account of their coming ‘straight from the heart’. The lecture traces our persistent trust in flowers as a medium for expressing the ineffable back to what was known in the 19th century as the “Oriental Language of Flowers”, a then ubiquitous practice of communicating through ‘talking’ bouquets. Analysis shows that the principles underlying this practice (and the wealth of popular writings on the subject) were largely the result of the workings of a contemporary dispositif that combined botany, semiotics and hermeneutics with concepts of eroticism and affect poetics in an attempt to overcome a veritable language crisis. The Language of Flowers not only played an important part in the shaping of the still prevalent idea that the ‘flowery language’ of lyrical poetry was the natural vehicle of implied, hidden meanings, and the genre itself practically tantamount to oblique speech, but also inspired the notion that “symbols” could act as somehow universal signs. The lecture aims to explore the interconnections between these phenomena and to shed light on the vital role played by oriental topoi, scenarios, and export products in this particular context.

Andrea Polaschegg teaches Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Bonn and conducts research on media and genre poetics, German Orientalism, transformations of antiquity, and transformations of the Bible.

*Light reception to follow

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Deutsches Haus at Columbia University, 420 West 116th Street, New York, United States