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Resisting Allegory: Interpretive Delirium in Spenser's Faerie Queene

Harry Berger

David Lee Miller (ed.)

Resisting Allegory gathers essays from the final two decades of Harry Berger, Jr.’s lifelong engagement with Spenser’s great poem The Faerie Queene, making clear the scope and coherence of the ... More

Resisting Allegory gathers essays from the final two decades of Harry Berger, Jr.’s lifelong engagement with Spenser’s great poem The Faerie Queene, making clear the scope and coherence of the critical vision elaborated in a series of seminal and still-challenging critical arguments. Spenser’s great poem provides the occasion for a searching and comprehensive interdisciplinary exploration of reading practices—those the author advocates as well as those he adapts or criticizes in entertaining a wide range of critical arguments with his celebrated combination of intellectual generosity and rigorous questioning. No one writes the way Berger does; no one can combine theoretical scope with close reading the way he can. His distinctive voice, style, and attention to method offer a model to students and younger scholars and should command attention in courses on the method and theory of criticism.Less

Last Acts: The Art of Dying on the Early Modern Stage

Maggie Vinter

Last Acts: The Art of Dying on the Early Modern Stage argues that the Elizabethan and Jacobean theater offered playwrights, actors, and audiences important opportunities to practice arts of dying. ... More

Last Acts: The Art of Dying on the Early Modern Stage argues that the Elizabethan and Jacobean theater offered playwrights, actors, and audiences important opportunities to practice arts of dying. Early modern plays also engage with devotional traditions that understand death less as an occasion for suffering or grieving than as an action to be performed, well or badly. Active deaths belie the narratives of helplessness and loss most often used to analyze representations of mortality and instead suggest ways that marginalized and constrained subjects might participate in the political, social, and economic management of life. Some of these strategies for dying resonate with ecclesiastical forms or with descriptions of biopolitics within the recent work of Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito. Yet the art of dying is not solely a discipline imposed upon recalcitrant subjects. Since it offers suffering individuals a way to enact their deaths on their own terms, it discloses both political and dramatic action in their most minimal manifestations. Rather than mournfully marking what we cannot recover, the practice of dying reveals what we can do, even in death. By analyzing representations of dying in plays by writers including Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson alongside both devotional texts and contemporary biopolitical theory, Last Acts shows how theater reflects, enables, and contests the politicization of life and death.Less

Unknowing Fanaticism: Reformation Literatures of Self-Annihilation

Ross Lerner

We may think we know what defines religious fanaticism: violent action undertaken with dogmatic certainty. But the term “fanatic,” from the European Reformation to today, has never been a stable ... More

We may think we know what defines religious fanaticism: violent action undertaken with dogmatic certainty. But the term “fanatic,” from the European Reformation to today, has never been a stable term. Then and now it has been reductively defined to justify state violence and to delegitimize alternative sources of authority. Unknowing Fanaticism rejects the simplified binary of fanatical religion and rational politics and turns to Renaissance literature to demonstrate that fanaticism was integral to how both modern politics and poetics developed, from the German Peasant Revolts of the 1520s to the English Civil War in the mid-seventeenth century. This book traces two entangled approaches to fanaticism in the long Reformation: the targeting of it as a political threat and the engagement with it as an epistemological and poetic problem. In the first, thinkers of modernity from Martin Luther to Thomas Hobbes and John Locke positioned themselves against fanaticism to dismiss dissent and abet theological and political control. In the second, the poets of fanaticism investigated the link between fanatical self-annihilation—the process by which one could become a vessel for divine violence—and the practices of writing poetry. Edmund Spenser, John Donne, and John Milton recognized in the fanatic’s claim to be a passive instrument of God their own incapacity to know and depict the origins of fanaticism. This crisis led these writers to experiment with poetic techniques that would allow them to address fanaticism’s tendency to unsettle the boundaries between reason and revelation, human will and divine agency.Less

Exterranean: Extraction in the Humanist Anthropocene

Phillip John Usher

Exterranean is a book about the extraction of stuff from the Earth, a process in which matter goes from being sub to exterranean. By opening up a rich archive of specifically nonmodern texts and ... More

Exterranean is a book about the extraction of stuff from the Earth, a process in which matter goes from being sub to exterranean. By opening up a rich archive of specifically nonmodern texts and images, this work offers a bracing riposte to several critical trends in ecological thought. Eschewing the self-congratulatory claims of posthumanism, instead engineering conceptual clashes between the materially situated homo of nonmodern humanism and the abstract and aggregated anthropos of the Anthropocene, arguing against the omnipresence of Earthrise-like globes in attempts to think at planetary scales, and shifting emphasis from emission to extraction, this book pleads for an alertness to the material and immaterial connections between the Earth from which we extract, the human and nonhuman agents of extraction, and the extracted matter with which we live daily. Divided into three sections (“Terra Global Circus,” “Welcome to Mineland,” and “Hiding in Exterranean Matter”), each of which approaches this entanglement from a different perspective, this book gives shape to a sense of the exterranean via readings of authors from France, Germany, Poland, and elsewhere as well as via discussion of mines, objects, engravings, and architecture. In dialogue with Michel Serres, the recent thought of Bruno Latour, and the interdisciplinary turn to the Environmental Humanities more generally, both historicist and speculative in approach, Exterranean lays the groundwork for a comparative ecocriticism that reaches across and untranslates theoretical affordances between periods and languages.Less

Indecorous Thinking: Figures of Speech in Early Modern Poetics

Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld

Indecorous Thinking is a study of artifice at its most conspicuous: it argues that early modern writers turned to figures of speech like simile, antithesis, and periphrasis as the instruments of a ... More

Indecorous Thinking is a study of artifice at its most conspicuous: it argues that early modern writers turned to figures of speech like simile, antithesis, and periphrasis as the instruments of a particular kind of thinking unique to the emergent field of vernacular poesie. The classical ideal of decorum described the absence of visible art as a crucial precondition for the rhetorical act of persuasion, the regulation of civilized communities, and the achievement of beauty. To speak well in early modern England, one spoke as if off-the-cuff. In readings of three major poets—Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and Mary Wroth—this book argues that one of early modern literature’s richest contributions to the history of poetics is the idea that open art—artifice that rings out with the bells and whistles of ornamentation—celebrates the craft of poetry even as it expands the range of activities we tend to attribute to poetic form. Against the social and aesthetic demands of sprezzatura and celare artem, artifice at its most conspicuous asserts the value of a poetic style that does not conceal either the time or labor of its making.Less

Futile Pleasures: Early Modern Literature and the Limits of Utility

Corey McEleney

Futile Pleasures examines the contradictory role that pleasure played in early modern English writers’ attempts to justify the utility and value of poetry. Drawing on the methodological resources of ... More

Futile Pleasures examines the contradictory role that pleasure played in early modern English writers’ attempts to justify the utility and value of poetry. Drawing on the methodological resources of deconstruction and queer theory, the book offers close readings of works by William Shakespeare, Roger Ascham, Thomas Nashe, Edmund Spenser, and John Milton, exploring the ambivalence these writers displayed toward the possibility of poetry’s vain futility. Tracing that ambivalence forward to the modern era, the book also shows how contemporary critics have recapitulated Renaissance humanist ideals about aesthetic value. Against a longstanding tradition that defensively advocates for the redemptive utility of literature, the book both theorizes and performs the pleasures of futility. Without ever losing sight of the costs of those pleasures, the book argues that playing with futility may be one way of moving beyond the impasses that modern humanists, like their early modern counterparts, have always faced.Less

Light and Death: Figuration in Spenser, Kepler, Donne, Milton

Judith H. Anderson

Death, light, figuration, and, especially, analogical expressions of figuration are the primary subjects of this book. They generate associated interests: the relation of literature and science, the ... More

Death, light, figuration, and, especially, analogical expressions of figuration are the primary subjects of this book. They generate associated interests: the relation of literature and science, the methodology of thought and argument, and the processes of narrative, discovery, and interpretation. Creativity, optics, and rhetoric come into focus as well. Anderson’s book begins as an intellectual process that employs mathematical science, semantics, rhetoric, grammar, and major poems inclusively as a single culture, not as C. P. Snow’s cultural opposites. It explores the figuration of Sin and Death in Spenser, Donne, and Milton, then turns to light because of its inseparability from the figuration of life, death’s other. Accordingly, Anderson examines the history and structure of analogical figuration and the bearing of analogy on light in physics and metaphysics. Analogy, a type of metaphor also called proportion, has always been the connector of the known to the unknown, the sensible to the subsensible and infinite. The perceptual opposites of light and its intermediating forms are likewise focal: blackness, darkness, shade, twilight, and night. Traditionally, light also implies vision and imagination, light being essential to optics, creation, and the figuration of Being. Chapters on Kepler’s studies of light and optics, on Donne’s epic Anniversaries of personal death and cultural loss, and on analogy, night, and light in Paradise Lost conclude the book.Less

The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature

Andrew Hui

When we think of ruins and literature, we usually think of Romanticism. The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature dislodges this critical commonplace by locating European literature’s ... More

When we think of ruins and literature, we usually think of Romanticism. The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature dislodges this critical commonplace by locating European literature’s fascination with architectural decay in the aesthetic culture from Petrarch to Spenser. The Renaissance was the Ruin-naissance, the birth of the ruin as category of discourse, one that inspired voluminous poetic production. The ruin thus became the material sign—the broken cipher—that marked the rupture between the world of the humanists and their idealized classical past. In the first full-length book to document this cultural phenomenon, Hui explains how the invention of the ruin propelled poets into creating works that were self-aware of their absorption of the past as well as their own survival in the future. To make this case, Hui embraces a philological method, a venerable tradition that has recently undergone a resurgence of interest. Philology is particularly appropriate to the study of ruins, since philology and ruins are both fundamentally about imagining the whole through its parts. Specifically, the book traces three words in three authors as semantic case studies: vestigia in Petrarch, cendre in Du Bellay, and moniment in Spenser. By starting from the smallest unit of linguistic speech—the word—and enlarging our view to its larger cultural context, The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature not only revises some of our most basic ideas about early modern texts and how they came to be, but also offers a new way for understanding the fundamental theme of survival in the classical tradition at large.Less

This Distracted Globe

Marcie Frank, Jonathan Goldberg, and Karen Newman (eds)

Worldmaking takes many forms in early modern literature and thus challenges any single interpretive approach, including historicism. The essays in this collection investigate the material stuff of ... More

Worldmaking takes many forms in early modern literature and thus challenges any single interpretive approach, including historicism. The essays in this collection investigate the material stuff of the world in Spenser, Cary and Marlowe; the sociable bonds of authorship, sexuality and sovereignty in Shakespeare and others; and the universal status of spirit, gender and empire in the worlds of Vaughan, Donne and the dastan (tale) of Chouboli, a Rajasthani princess. Together, these essays make the case that to address what it takes to make a world in the early modern period requires the kinds of thinking exemplified by theory.Less

Renaissance Posthumanism

Joseph Campana and Scott Maisano (eds)

This collection of essays argues that contemporary “critical posthumanisms,” even as they distance themselves from particular iconic representations of the Renaissance (e.g. Leonardo da Vinci’s ... More

This collection of essays argues that contemporary “critical posthumanisms,” even as they distance themselves from particular iconic representations of the Renaissance (e.g. Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man), may in fact be moving ever closer to ideas of “the human” as at once embedded and embodied in, evolving with, and de-centered amid a weird tangle of animals, environments, and vital materiality in works from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century. Too often contemporary work in posthumanism presents itself as a rejection of Renaissance humanism when what it rejects is a straw man—albeit a straw Vitruvian Man—that bears little, if any, resemblance to Renaissance humanism qua the skeptical, critical, and irreverent close readings of ancient texts and cultures. Ironically what is being repressed, fantasized, and evaded in these accounts is nothing other than Renaissance humanism itself. Reducing Renaissance humanism to a handful of icons and caricatures risks diminishing its potential theoretical purchase on the past, in addition to the present and future. Renaissance Posthumanism, too, reconsiders traditional languages of humanism and the human but it does so not by nostalgically enshrining or triumphantly superseding humanism’s past but rather by revisiting and interrogating them. Seeking those patterns of thought and practice that allow us to reach beyond the pre- and post- of recent thought, the contributors to this collection focus on moments where Renaissance humanism seems to depart and differ from itself.Less