Error, Misuse, Failure
Error, Misuse, Failure

Author: Julian Yates

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 424

ISBN-13: 9780816639618

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

If certain objects work well, no one notices them. As with "black boxes, " their success may be gauged by their relative invisibility -- and this was the indirect goal of the objects that Julian Yates considers here: the portrait miniature, the relic, the privy (flush toilet), the printed text, and the priest-hole (a secret hiding place for Catholic priests in Protestant England). Because each of these contrivances was prone to error, misuse, and sometimes catastrophic failure, they become in Yates's analysis an occasion for recasting the history of the English Renaissance as object lessons -- "knowing from the point of view of the known." It is through such lapses -- the texts and stories generated to explain away a relic that is too easily faked, a miniature that is too curiously real, the stench of a failing privy, a book that persistently sheds its pages, or the presence of so much "papist trash" in an ostensibly reformed England -- that Yates recovers the silent work of "things" in cultural production. Drawing object lessons from failing technological devices, Error, Misuse, Failure plumbs the foundations of Renaissance culture in England, recovering a curious language of mistakes, dirt, and parasitism that associates the failures of these "things" with the figures of Rome, Catholicism, and Sodom. Yates offers a mode of historical inquiry rooted in material culture, sensitive to the way humans induct nonhumans (animals, plants, and manufactured things) into their communities. Historically, the book offers a new set of stories about the rise of printing, the development of domestic architecture, and England's Catholic community -- stories that remind readers of the ways in whichattending to the history of nonhumans requires a radical rethinking of historical landmarks and boundaries.

Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare
Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare

Author: Jonathan Gil Harris

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2010-11-24

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0812202201

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title The New Historicism of the 1980s and early 1990s was preoccupied with the fashioning of early modern subjects. But, Jonathan Gil Harris notes, the pronounced tendency now is to engage with objects. From textiles to stage beards to furniture, objects are read by literary critics as closely as literature used to be. For a growing number of Renaissance and Shakespeare scholars, the play is no longer the thing: the thing is the thing. Curiously, the current wave of "thing studies" has largely avoided posing questions of time. How do we understand time through a thing? What is the time of a thing? In Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare, Harris challenges the ways we conventionally understand physical objects and their relation to history. Turning to Renaissance theories of matter, Harris considers the profound untimeliness of things, focusing particularly on Shakespeare's stage materials. He reveals that many "Renaissance" objects were actually survivals from an older time—the medieval monastic properties that, post-Reformation, were recycled as stage props in the public playhouses, or the old Roman walls of London, still visible in Shakespeare's time. Then, as now, old objects were inherited, recycled, repurposed; they were polytemporal or palimpsested. By treating matter as dynamic and temporally hybrid, Harris addresses objects in their futurity, not just in their encapsulation of the past. Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare is a bold study that puts the matériel—the explosive, world-changing potential—back into a "material culture" that has been too often understood as inert stuff.

Railing, Reviling, and Invective in English Literary Culture, 1588-1617
Railing, Reviling, and Invective in English Literary Culture, 1588-1617

Author: Maria Teresa Micaela Prendergast

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-08

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 1317071700

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Railing, Reviling, and Invective in English Literary Culture, 1588-1617 is the first book to consider railing plays and pamphlets as participating in a coherent literary movement that dominated much of the English literary landscape during the late Elizabethan/early Jacobean period. Author Prendergast considers how these crisis-ridden texts on religious, gender, and aesthetic controversies were encouraged and supported by the emergence of the professional theater and print pamphlets. She argues that railing texts by Shakespeare, Nashe, Jonson, Jane Anger and others became sites for articulating anxious emotions-including fears about the stability of England after the death of Queen Elizabeth and the increasing factional splits between Protestant groups. But, given that railings about religious and political matters often led to censorship or even death, most railing writers chose to circumvent such possible repercussions by railing against unconventional gender identity, perverse sexual proclivities, and controversial aesthetics. In the process, Prendergast argues, railers shaped an anti-aesthetics that was itself dependent on the very expressions of perverse gender and sexuality that they discursively condemned, an aesthetics that created a conceptual third space in which bitter enemies-male or female, conformist or nonconformist-could bond by engaging in collaborative experiments with dialogical invective. By considering a literary mode of articulation that vehemently counters dominant literary discourse, this book changes the way that we look at late Elizabethan and early Jacobean literature, as it associates works that have been studied in isolation from each other with a larger, coherent literary movement.

On the Nature of Marx's Things
On the Nature of Marx's Things

Author: Jacques Lezra

Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

Published: 2018-03-27

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 0823279448

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

On the Nature of Marx’s Things is a major rethinking of the Marxian tradition, one based not on fixed things but on the inextricable interrelation between the material world and our language for it. Lezra traces to Marx’s earliest writings a subterranean, Lucretian practice that he calls necrophilological translation that continues to haunt Marx’s inheritors. This Lucretian strain, requiring that we think materiality in non-self-evident ways, as dynamic, aleatory, and always marked by its relation to language, raises central questions about ontology, political economy, and reading. “Lezra,” writes Vittorio Morfino in his preface, “transfers all of the power of the Althusserian encounter into his conception of translation.” Lezra’s expansive understanding of translation covers practices that put different natural and national languages into relation, often across periods, but also practices or mechanisms internal to each language. Obscured by later critical attention to the contradictory lexicons—of fetishism and of chrematistics—that Capital uses to describe how value accrues to commodities, and by the dialectical approach that’s framed Marx’s work since Engels sought to marry it to the natural philosophy of his time, necrophilological translation has a troubling, definitive influence in Marx’s thought and in his wake. It entails a radical revision of what counts as translation, and wholly new ways of imagining what an object is, of what counts as matter, value, sovereignty, mediation, and even number. In On the Nature of Marx’s Things a materialism “of the encounter,” as recent criticism in the vein of the late Althusser calls it, encounters Marxological value-form theory, post-Schmittian divisible sovereignty, object-oriented-ontologies and the critique of correlationism, and philosophies of translation and untranslatability in debt to Quine, Cassin, and Derrida. The inheritors of the problems with which Marx grapples range from Spinoza’s marranismo, through Melville’s Bartleby, through the development of a previously unexplored Freudian political theology shaped by the revolutionary traditions of Schiller and Verdi, through Adorno’s exilic antihumanism against Said’s cosmopolitan humanism, through today’s new materialisms. Ultimately, necrophilology draws the story of capital’s capture of difference away from the story of capital’s production of subjectivity. It affords concepts and procedures for dismantling the system of objects on which neoliberal capitalism stands: concrete, this-wordly things like commodities, but also such “objects” as debt traps, austerity programs, the marketization of risk; ideologies; the pedagogical, professional, legal, even familial institutions that produce and reproduce inequities today.

For All Waters
For All Waters

Author: Lowell Duckert

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2017-03-31

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 1452953732

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Recent years have witnessed a surge in early modern ecostudies, many devoted to Shakespearean drama. Yet in this burgeoning discipline, travel writing appears moored in historicization, inorganic subjects are far less prevalent than organic ones, and freshwater sites are hardly visited. For All Waters explores these uncharted wetscapes. Lowell Duckert shows that when playwrights and travel writers such as Sir Walter Raleigh physically interacted with rivers, glaciers, monsoons, and swamps, they composed “hydrographies,” or bodily and textual assemblages of human and nonhuman things that dissolved notions of human autonomy and its singular narrativity. With a playful, punning touch woven deftly into its theoretical rigor, For All Waters disputes fantasies of ecological solitude that would keep our selves high and dry and that would try to sustain a political ecology excluding water and the poor. The lives of both humans and waterscapes can be improved simultaneously through direct engagement with wetness. For All Waters concludes by investigating waterscapes in peril today—West Virginia’s chemical rivers and Iceland’s vanishing glaciers—and outlining what we can learn from early moderns’ eco-ontological lessons. By taking their soggy and storied matters to heart, and arriving at a greater realization of our shared wetness, we can conceive new directions to take within the hydropolitical crises afflicting us today.

The Face of Mammon
The Face of Mammon

Author: David Landreth

Publisher: OUP USA

Published: 2012-04-19

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 0199773297

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Money talked in sixteenth-century England, as money still does today. But what the sixteenth century's gold and silver had to say for itself is strikingly different from the modern discourse of money. As David Landreth demonstrates in The Face of Mammon, the material and historical differences between the coins of the English Renaissance and today's paper and electronic money propel a distinctive and complex assessment of the relation between material substance and human value.Although the sixteenth century was marked by the traumatic emergence of conditions that would prove to be characteristic of the modern economy, the discipline of economics had not been invented to assess those conditions. The Face of Mammon considers how literary texts investigated these unexplained material transformations through attention to the materiality of gold and silver money. In new readings of Spenser's Faerie Queene, Marlowe's Jew of Malta, three plays by Shakespeare-King John, The Merchant of Venice, and Measure for Measure-the poetry of John Donne, and the prose of Thomas Nashe, Landreth argues that these texts situate the act of exchange at the center of a system of "common wealth" that sought to integrate political, ethical, and religious values with material ones, and probe the ways in which market value corrodes that system even as it depends upon it.Joining the methods of material-culture studies to those of economic criticism, The Face of Mammon offers a new account of the historical transformations of the concept of value to scholars of early modern literature, culture, and art, as well as to those interested in economic history.

A Handbook of English Renaissance Literary Studies
A Handbook of English Renaissance Literary Studies

Author: John Lee

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2017-08-14

Total Pages: 543

ISBN-13: 111845877X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Provides a detailed map of contemporary critical theory in Renaissance and Early Modern English literary studies beyond Shakespeare A Handbook of English Renaissance Literary Studies is a groundbreaking guide to the contemporary engagement with critical theory within the larger disciplinary area of Renaissance and Early Modern studies. Comprising commissioned contributions from leading international scholars, it provides an overview of literary theory, beyond Shakespeare, focusing on most major figures, as well as some lesser-known writers of the period. This book represents an important first step in bridging the divide between the abundance of titles which explore applications of theory in Shakespeare studies, and the relative lack of such texts concerning English Literary Renaissance studies as a whole, which includes major figures such as Marlowe, Jonson, Donne, and Milton. The tripartite structure offers a map of the critical landscape so that students can appreciate the breadth of the work being done, along with an exploration of the ways in which the treatments of or approaches to key issues have changed over time. Handbook of English Renaissance Literary Studies is must-reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students of early modern and Renaissance English literature, as well as their instructors and advisors. Divided into three main sections, “Conditions of Subjectivity,” “Spaces, Places, and Forms,” and “Practices and Theories,” A Handbook of English Renaissance Literary Studies: Provides an overview of theoretical work and the theoretical-informed competencies which are central to the teaching of English Renaissance literary studies beyond Shakespeare Provides a map of the critical landscape of the field to provide students with an opportunity to appreciate the breadth of the work done Features newly-commissioned essays in representative subject areas to offer a clear picture of the contemporary theoretically-engaged work in the field Explores the ways in which the treatments of or approaches to key issues have changed over time Offers examples of the ways in which the practice of a theoretically-engaged criticism may enrich the personal and professional lives of critics, and the culture in which such critical practice takes place

Being and Having in Shakespeare
Being and Having in Shakespeare

Author: Katharine Eisaman Maus

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2013-02-14

Total Pages: 150

ISBN-13: 0199698007

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Being and Having in Shakespeare is a revised and expanded version of the 2010 Oxford Wells Shakespeare Lectures exploring the politics of authority and ownership in Shakespeare's plays.

The Ephemeral History of Perfume
The Ephemeral History of Perfume

Author: Holly Dugan

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2011-09-14

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 1421402343

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In contrast to the other senses, smell has long been thought of as too elusive, too fleeting for traditional historical study. Holly Dugan disagrees, arguing that there are rich accounts documenting how men and women produced, consumed, and represented perfumes and their ephemeral effects. She delves deeply into the cultural archive of olfaction to explore what a sense of smell reveals about everyday life in early modern England. In this book, Dugan focuses on six important scents -- incense, rose, sassafras, rosemary, ambergris, and jasmine. She links these smells to the unique spaces they inhabited -- churches, courts, contact zones, plague-ridden households, luxury markets, and pleasure gardens -- and the objects used to dispense them. This original approach provides a rare opportunity to study how early modern men and women negotiated the environment in their everyday lives and the importance of smell to their daily actions. Dugan defines perfume broadly to include spices, flowers, herbs, animal parts, trees, resins, and other ingredients used to produce artificial scents, smokes, fumes, airs, balms, powders, and liquids. In researching these Renaissance aromas, Dugan uncovers the extraordinary ways, now largely lost, that people at the time spoke and wrote about smell: objects "ambered, civited, expired, fetored, halited, resented, and smeeked" or were described as "breathful, embathed, endulced, gracious, halited, incensial, odorant, pulvil, redolent, and suffite." A unique contribution to early modern studies, The Ephemeral History of Perfume is an unparalleled study of olfaction in the Renaissance, a period in which new scents and important cultural theories about smell were developed. Dugan's inspired analysis of a wide range of underexplored sources makes available to scholars a remarkable wealth of information on the topic.