This dissertation argues that emphases on self-knowledge and duty within friendship discourse of the early modern period repudiates a common assumption that friendship is primarily a private, ...selfless, apolitical affair separate from public life. This discourse largely highlights fashioning the self as an ethical and political subject while the friend per se remains of secondary concern. As the Early Modern Research Group observes, “the commonwealth…acts as a language to articulate personal and public vices and virtues” (Early Modern Research Group 670). An emphasis on obligation and reciprocity for the common good or bonum commune, the importance of social hierarchy, obedience, and subordination, as well as a belief in moral discipline as the anodyne to social ills prove to be recurring components of this “language.” Some major concerns within friendship discourse and practice include: the realization of membership in a larger community; the importance of measure and mean to both individual and community well-being; the obligation to admonish community members who fail to uphold duties and shared moral standards; and the necessity of social concord across various classes. Moreover, period conceptions of friendship demonstrate that the formation of “good” and “dutiful” does not proceed without cognitive, moral, and emotional struggles, particularly, as regards indifference, selfishness, flattery, and resentment. Each chapter explores a specific facet of early modern friendship discourse and practice and places it in conversation with the “language” of the commonwealth: self-knowledge, the care of the self, frank speech, and gender. My first chapter argues that Tudor friendship pamphlets and Tottel’s Songs and Sonnets exploit the sentiment that self-knowledge fosters concord, where one learns to fashion the self into a dutiful subject to God and man. As I delineate in this chapter, discussions of self-knowledge frequently focus on the possibility of sedition arising from a lack of knowledge about one’s duty and obedience to the commonwealth. The second chapter examines the disciplinary function of self-knowledge and duty within friendship discourse and The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Concerns surrounding self-love and temperance in friendship focus on the potential for disaster when one does not know the extent of their duties to the commonwealth. As I demonstrate in my third chapter, which focuses on Plutarch and King Lear, the sense of duty to authority that guides self-fashioning in friendship and buttresses self-knowledge also highlights the necessity of fashioned speech, particularly the tactful articulation of one’s conscience in order to preserve ethical bonds and duties within the community. However, as regards the practice of tactful antagonism, that is, “parrhesia” or frank speech, concerns surface because it potentially disrupts social hierarchies and so closely resembles the very thing it supposedly combats: flattery. In my final chapter, I examine themes discussed in earlier chapters (i.e., self-knowledge, temperance, and admonishment) through the lens of gender and class. Amelia Lanyer’s poems, and early modern culture and literature in general, depict caritas, or friendship between the self and others mediated by Christ, as one way to cultivate private virtue and public concord that surpasses social divisions. As I argue, divisions and faultlines that are mostly class-based, along with visions of a lack of social mobility, pressure the utopian idea of friendship among women put forth by Lanyer as well as general discussions of social concord among all classes in the commonwealth.
Gioia was recognized during his term as head of the National Endowment for the Arts for his focus on reawakening interest in classic forms and figures, for the wave of renewed interest in Shakespeare ...in the schools his programs have brought about, for his workshops for war participants, and for many other programs that seek to revitalize interest in serious literature on a broad-based level. In his essay "Can Poetry Matter?" he argues for a number of techniques and devices that could help bring poetry back to the reading public, including a shift away from the professorial type of reading toward mixed evenings of poetry and music, poetry and art, poets reading others' work as well as their own, and a general opening wide of the narrow room he believed the art had stuffed itself into by the mid-1980s.
Updating the concept of genres as associational complexes, this paper analyzes the key role in formation played by metaphors and other figures. These work to evoke the genre’s associational domain. ...The figures may be deployed by the writer even before the genre has become an explicit convention recognizable by name. Some such figures (like the reed of pastoral) are well known. But the paper shows that the main genres all have their characteristic tropes.
In the Wilderness is a poetry manuscript depicting the synthesis of science and spirituality. Though scientific and spiritual viewpoints are conventionally posed in a dialectic, this manuscript is a ...deconstruction in three sections that reveals physics and metaphysics to be complementary or even synonymous. Interconnectedness is envisioned through poetry. The first section poses competing metaphysical perspectives, the second section accentuates science, and the third section portrays a harmonious whole.The variety of poetic forms in this manuscript respond to discoveries in science, and either figuratively or symbolically emulate phenomena identified by scientists and physicists as they intersect with spiritual perspectives, with reference to matters such as the big bang, particle wave theory, quantum mechanics, the Fibonacci sequence, entropy, and energy, among others. The fluency of shifting discourses depicts growing human awareness of our place in the universe as revealed through both physics and metaphysics.
Reading "Coryats Crudities" (1611) Craik, Katharine A.
Studies in English literature, 1500-1900,
2004, Letnik:
44, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Coryats Crudities, Thomas Coryat's account of his five-month tour of Europe, was published in 1611. This article argues that Coiyat's "crudities" resist ideals of humanist pedagogy, where rhetorical ...digestio involved the proper organization and assimilation of knowledge. Coryat and his mock panegyrists explore connections between writing and intemperance, discussing the painful effects of pleasurable reading experiences on the bodies of aristocratic men. In so doing, they coin a new generic position for Crudities as a travelogue that resists truth telling but is nevertheless not quite a traveler's tall tale.
From Donne's standpoint, then, the tolling of a death knell may be understood literally to refer to the death of someone else, even though it "be of no use to him"; but its real meaning can only be ...properly understood, its buried treasure "as gold in a Mine" properly utilized, if someone hearing the bell translates its meaning "digs out, and applies that gold" by perceiving it to be a warning of his or her own death.
By applying the concept of anamorphosis to the logical structures of John Donne's poetry, this essay extends the concept of anamorphosis from the visual peculiarity of an obscured image whose ...revelation requires finding an eccentric point of view to the epistemological process experienced by the viewer. An encounter with anamorphosis possesses its own strict logic; likewise, anamorphic constructions engender a rhetoric specific to their needs. Riehl argues that literary criticism should extend the study of anamorphosis in early modern literary texts in a new direction: both visual and verbal anamorphic models are engendered by the habits of thought, patterns of thinking that, by the seventeenth century, pervade various media and modes of representation. Even in the absence of explicit references to perspective, seeing, or painting, a text may nevertheless operate according to the rules of anamorphic logic and rhetoric. Aiming the anamorphic lens at Donne, this essay unravels anew the complex argument of “The Extasie” and reveals the sparkling drama of the verse letter “To M. M. H.” Extending the anamorphic concepts from visual to verbal representation, from verbal imagery to thinking processes not only unfolds of the logic of “The Extasie” and explains stark contradictions and inconsistencies in the argument, but also follows the pattern laid by Donne himself, who allows the anamorphic principles to seep from the poem's narrative to its argument, from philosophical and erotic illustrations to insistent logical persuasion. “To M. M. H.,” on the other hand, displays a distinctive self‐awareness that is crucial to the poem's fantastical plot and that is analogous to the visual makeup of anamorphosis. The poem's concern with epistemological reliability, its communicative disasters, its rhetorical tricks are shaped by the distinctly anamorphic doubleness that allows two different images or meanings to inhabit the same textual space.
Scodel reasserts that a desire for freedom of thought and action is the central impulse in John Donne's poetry. Details of his contention are presented.
