Gender and the Work of Words Armstrong, Nancy; Tennenhouse, Leonard
Cultural critique,
10/1989
13
Journal Article
Recenzirano
An examination of different stages of gendering the division of labor from the seventeenth-century English revolution through the industrialization of the nineteenth century. The division of labor in ...the earlier period was almost ungendered, unlike in the period of nascent capitalism in England, when the masculinization of the laboring class excluded anyone who occupied a position dependent on productive labor, including working women & children. Excerpts from John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) are used as examples of the modern distinction between the spheres of poetics & politics, & between the manipulation of things & working with words, & women's "loss" in these divisions. Economic independence started being seen as contemptible for women, since labor was a masculine sphere; working women were the signs of moral decay of the whole laboring class. A. Devic
Tennenhouse reviews Folded Selves: Colonial New England Writing in the World System by Michelle Burnham and Ways of Writing: The Practice and Politics of Text-Making in Seventeenth-Century New ...England by David D. Hall.
Modern national cultures developed in response to the dominance of written over spoken thoughts. The idea of nation developed as European businessmen produced print vernacular information for their ...colonies in Dutch, English, Spanish, French and Portuguese. The development of a print culture coincided with the rise of a class influenced by norms conveyed through literature. European culture thus emerged governed by those who controlled the production and distribution of information.
The puzzling allusion to Balaam and Saul in II Tamburlaine (II.i.49—59) becomes clear when one reads the appropriate passages in Numbers and I Samuel and the accompanying glosses in the Geneva Bible. ...The glosses show Balaam was indeed like Saul in that both men sinned because they would not kill or curse at God's command. When Frederick holds up the example of Balaam and Saul convincing Sigismund to break the treaty with the Turks, he falsely sees divine instruction in human events. Sigismund makes the same error in II.iii.1-9 following the defeat of his forces. Both men err in thinking they live in a theocentric universe. Through the use of dramatic irony, Marlowe explicitly demonstrates that the world the Christians and the Moslems inhabit is not like the political and historical world of Balaam and Saul, rather it is a world now controlled by the workings of an amoral Fortune.
Revisiting "A New World of Words" Tennenhouse, Leonard
Early American Literature,
03/2007, Letnik:
42, Številka:
2
Book Review, Journal Article
Recenzirano
Spengemann is quite explicit: when we look at the colonial period as language, the pressure of America will reveal itself in everything from an increase in vocabulary having to do with America, to ...persistent allusions, tropes, and figures, as well as specific literary references, representations, and character types. Another chapter compares Franklin's Autobiography, Blake's "Marriage of Heaven and Hell," and Austen's Northanger Abbey as the work of authors who stand at the "threshold of the Nineteenth Century, that period in the American history of English literature during which the energies emanating from the New World would gradually displace the fixed forms of the Old World" (206).
