Abstracts
Abstracts
The ''popular philosopher'':
Plato, Poetry, and Food in Tudor Aesthetics
Efterpi Mitsi
University of Athens
"He is turned a ballad-maker":
Broadside Appropriations in Early Modern England
Joshua B. Fisher
Wingate University
Monuments in Late Elizabethan
Literature: A Conservatory of Vanishing Traditions
J.Y. Michel
Université de Metz
"That vain Animal":
Rochester's Satyr and the Theriophilic Paradox
Nancy Rosenfeld
University of Haifa
The ''popular philosopher'':
Plato, Poetry, and Food in Tudor Aesthetics
Efterpi Mitsi
University of Athens
Sixteenth-century arguments on the role of poetry reveal the ambiguous popularity of Plato in the aesthetic programme of the Reformation. Paradoxically, Plato figures in both attacks and defenses of poetry: on the one hand, he functions as its main "adversary," and on the other he is redeemed as its "patron," himself "the most poetical" of all philosophers (Sidney, Apology). Stephen Gosson's tract The Schoole of Abuse uses Plato to attack literature, arguing that poetry and drama are morally disruptive, and therefore should be banned from "a reformed commonwealth". Gosson's attack prompted direct replies such as Thomas Lodge's A Reply to Stephen Gosson's Schoole of Abuse in Defence of Poetry, Musick, and Stage Plays, as well as Sidney's Apology for Poetry. This essay examines the uses of Plato in Tudor aesthetics by connecting the references to the ancient philosopher with the food metaphors, omnipresent in the three texts. It argues that the use of alimentary discourse, which involves questions of appetite, desire, consumption and pleasure, addresses Plato's famous challenge against poetry, that it "nourishes' our worst part, and "it feeds and waters the growth of passions that should be allowed to wither away" (Republic 605c6-8), and places aesthetics in the context of the body. After associating nourishment, poetry and Plato in an attempt to emphasize the moral and social of literature, Sidney concluded that those employing Plato in their assault against literature, have actually misread his arguments, since Plato "banish[ed] the abuse not the thing." Plato's Republic Book 10 emerges as a "map of misreading," a site of a contest between opposing views on literary reform, evoking what Joyce describes as the "babbling pumpt of platinism" (Finnegans Wake).
"He is turned a ballad-maker":
Broadside Appropriations in Early Modern England
Joshua B. Fisher
Wingate University
Responding to an enduring critical heritage that often restricts ballads to the hermetic and inferior realm of the popular sphere, I argue that appropriations of the broadside ballad across lines of social class and genre underscore the limitations of treating "popular" and "elite" categories as isolated spaces that exist solely in opposition to one another. While it is impossible to attribute any kind of unified intentionality to these appropriations within the space of drama, poetry, and coterie collections, I suggest that all share a certain degree of indeterminacy with regard to distinguishing between subversive uses and those uses that reiterate the authority of dominant hierarchies. Such indeterminacy stands as a complex response to the burgeoning print culture, whereby an author's position is marked both by the anxiety provoked by a rapidly emerging (and less discriminating) reading and writing public and by a desire to announce at least some degree of artistic autonomy. Because the broadside ballad epitomizes both the anxieties and the possibilities that surround the growing print culture, the medium is an ideal site within which to explore the contradictory forces inherent in shaping literary and cultural identities.
Monuments in Late Elizabethan Literature:
A Conservatory of Vanishing Traditions
J.Y. Michel
Université de Metz
Although the word "monument" seems very straightforward, it has a
complexity of its own in the context of the English Renaissance. The memento
mori themes, which were extraordinarily important in the Elizabethan and
Jacobean age, were represented by a vast number of monuments tombs, rings adorned
with death's heads, portraits, and even genuine skulls. They were all meant
to perpetuate the memory of the deceased and to remind the observers of their
own mortality. They also acted as symbols of political order and religious coherence.
Still, beyond the themes of rememberance, piety and civic obedience, monuments
also had more disquieting undertones. From a cultural point of view, they may
well have suggested that the Queen's new religion and Catholicism were still
fighting against each other in order to put a name on the face of death. From
an anthropological viewpoint, all these monuments clearly stood for two opposed
visions of death what Philippe Ariès calls "wild death" and
"tame death". Therefore, they enclosed (or rather tried to enclose)
a fundamentally unspeakable and horrible phenomenon. Whitney's Choice of
Emblems, as well as Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and Hamlet,
make use of this semantic complexity in different ways.
"That vain Animal": Rochester's
Satyr and the Theriophilic Paradox
Nancy Rosenfeld
University of Haifa
The Satyr against Reason and Mankind by John Wilmot, second Earl of
Rochester (1647-1680), is a development of the theriophilic paradox, the idea
that the human being occupies a lower rung than the beast in the moral-cosmic
hierarchy.
Reports of voyages to so-called "newly-discovered" parts of Asia,
Africa and the New World led a number of seventeenth-century writers to rethink
the centrality of the human within the known universe. Liminal figures such
as Rochester, whose short life spanned the English Civil War and the Restoration,
were conscious of living in a period characterized by the questioning of accepted
axioms vis-a-vis the place of the human animal. John Milton's Paradise Lost
and Lycidas may have encouraged Rochester in his questioning of familiar
views of hierarchy. An examination of theriophilic threads in Rochester's Satyr
and his Upon Nothing, including a look at possible Miltonic influences,
can contribute to twenty-first century examinations of the way "the human"
is defined in relation to other animals.
© 2003-, Lisa
Hopkins (Editor, EMLS).