Martin Elsky - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Martin Elsky
Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies, Mar 1, 2019
Rosemond Tuve's Chapel Talks reveal that her demonstration of the connection between Herbert's im... more Rosemond Tuve's Chapel Talks reveal that her demonstration of the connection between Herbert's imagery and biblical typology is related to events of the Second World War. Her argument for Herbert's use of typology is widely regarded as a reaction to William Empson's ahistorical New Critical reading of Herbert. Her Chapel Talks indicate that her interest in typological imagery predated her dispute with Empson and are connected to her experience with mostly Jewish refugees at Black Mountain College in Asheville, NC. These talks illustrate the moral commitment behind her groundbreaking historical research and its relationship to theological movements leading to the Second Vatican Council and to a changed relationship between Christians and Jews following the war. As Tuve's typological criticism was widely regarded as an influential vehicle for larger arguments for the value of historicism, her Chapel Talks suggest a connection of historical criticism to world historical events.
中山人文學報, Jul 1, 2012
Referring back to Coleridge's notion of ”the willing suspension of disbelief,” this paper exp... more Referring back to Coleridge's notion of ”the willing suspension of disbelief,” this paper explores the transition that occurs when ludic identification with a religious text becomes real identification. This transformation was particularly poignant in the reception of an especially strong religious poet, Dante, by an extremely influential critic, T. S. Eliot, at a major historical moment, the period of and after the sexcentenary of Dante's death in 1921. The sexcentenary took place in the immediate aftermath of the First World War when various European intellectuals on both sides of the war turned to Dante for spiritual, intellectual, and political sustenance to heal the trauma of the war. Eliot's short, widely read monograph on Dante, published during a continuing dialogue with I. A. Richards on religion and literature, reveals his difficulty with the concept of the willing suspension of disbelief. Eliot raises and then rejects the possibility that a twentieth-century reader could cross confessional lines and truly enter Dante's world through the suspension of disbelief and the imaginative assumption of belief in Dante's theology; actual identification with Dante's faith is ultimately necessary, Eliot concludes. The fraught political dimension of the willing suspension of disbelief during this tumultuous time is apparent in the monograph's now suppressed dedication to Charles Maurras. Eliot's was developing his thinking about belief and non-belief in relation to politics, society and literature during his friendship with this self-described reactionary, monarchist, anti-democratic figure.
Studies in Philology, 2020
Chapel Talks, delivered to an audience of students at Connecticut College for Women between 1944 ... more Chapel Talks, delivered to an audience of students at Connecticut College for Women between 1944 and 1956, provide insight into the larger motivation behind mid-century historical criticism emerging from the Second World War. These talks, a selection of which is introduced and transcribed here, show the link between Tuve's literary thinking and her moral commitments while she was articulating her widely influential arguments about typological criticism and historical criticism more generally. The introduction to her Chapel Talks traces the context of historicism in the turbulence of the war, as in the connection between her groundbreaking analysis of typology in George Herbert's "The Sacrifice" and her experience with Jewish refugees at Black Mountain College. Further, it shows the connection between her critical response to American habits that emerged after victory in the war and questions of medieval and Renaissance periodization posed by Ernst Curtius's European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. The introduction argues that Tuve's historical criticism is the second wave to Edwin Greenlaw's first wave, articulated in the wake of the First World War, and is linked to emerging European democratic movements supported by the wartime "Anglo-Saxon," or Anglo-American, alliance, in which the United States would play the leading role in politics and literary criticism.
The commemorations in Germany for the sexcentenary of Dante’s death in 1921 can be understood thr... more The commemorations in Germany for the sexcentenary of Dante’s death in 1921 can be understood through Jan Assmann’s classic explanation of how institutions construct collective memory as a “contemporized past” for present purposes. Assmann’s view of collective memory can be further extended to explore how rival institutions work to construct competing memories, or how an institution attempts to wrest memory from another institution. Dante was taken off the Index of Prohibited Books only in the late nineteenth century and was fully promoted as an exemplary Catholic poet only in 1921 in Benedict XV’s encyclical. German Catholic writers used the sexcentenary as an occasion to “remember” Dante as a Catholic writer and thinker in opposition to those who more traditionally commemorated Dante because of his anti-papal attitudes, as a proto-Protestant precursor of Luther. This rival confessional memorial reconstruction of Dante by competing institutions was eschewed by professional, academic scholars in university departments of Romance Philology, and was instead carried out in the popular press by writers, intellectuals, and politicians in newspapers and periodicals with broad audiences. Making no claim for original research, articles in these outlets typically assert partisan positions by providing rival pedigrees that link Dante either to a German anti-papal legacy or to a German Catholic legacy. For example, Dante commemoration in newspaper articles by the poet and Reichstag secretary Hans Benzmann exemplifies the anti-Catholic view of Dante, while the commemorative newspaper article by the Catholic publicist, member of the Catholic Centre Party, public health reformer, and professor in an agricultural university Martin Fassbender exemplifies the Catholic community’s attempt to bring Dante into its fold. Moreover, because memory of Dante was being offered to the German nation as a spiritual and political model for recovery from the catastrophe of the First World War, a Catholic Dante implied a Catholic role in post-war German renewal after years of Catholic repression. Catholic institutional memory of Dante during the sexcentenary thus not only sought to reclaim its cultural patrimony from another community that it thought had misappropriated it, but it also functioned as a proxy for memory of the war.
Cambridge University Press eBooks, Nov 25, 1999
Criticism-a Quarterly for Literature and The Arts, 2001
Criticism-a Quarterly for Literature and The Arts, 2001
The subject of Erich Auerbach's hitherto untranslated "Passio as Passion" con cerns... more The subject of Erich Auerbach's hitherto untranslated "Passio as Passion" con cerns a theme that is never associated with him, the history of emotions. For the English-speaking world, Mimesis has been read back into "Figura" (1939)1 and Dante, Poet of the Secular World (1929)2 as a critical history that led to the development of Auerbach's powerful analysis of literary realism. His interest in the history of emotions has largely gone unnoticed. We might see a different critical trajectory in Auerbach's work if instead our starting point were an essay like "Passio as Passion." Here Auerbach provides a non-Freudian, pre structuralist philological explanation of, put simply, the ability to express strong emotions, specifically erotic passion. This classic philological essay is more wide ranging than the better known "Figura," but it applies the same method: it examines how a culture reveals the values it holds dear by the way it fills the words available to it with meaning; it proposes that the history of the changing contents of a word is the history of the changing values of a culture. In this case, Auerbach asks how the contemporary French word passion and German Leidenschajt acquired the meaning they bear for us today. Auerbach starts genetically from the Greek word (3'yPx, and moves in stages to its Stoic rendition as passio, to its early Christian and medieval transformation, which laid the groundwork for its modern meaning as first established by Racine. The essay is of interest to us today for two reasons: first, for what it contri butes to current interest in the history of emotions, and second, for what it reveals about the practice of criticism at a time of extremes. That the emotions have a history implies that subjects are historically con tingent and open to the possibility that they are hence culturally determined. In their excellent overview of the issues at stake in the argument for the social construction of the emotions, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank pro vide a reference point for approximating where Auerbach stands in the devel opment of this issue.3 For example, among the tenets that Auerbach does not
Renaissance Quarterly, 2005
female saints. She also discusses the male response to the Virgin Mary as well. Peters discusses ... more female saints. She also discusses the male response to the Virgin Mary as well. Peters discusses the integration of the cults of Mary and of Christ into the concern for the salvation of the soul. One fifteenth-century sermon described Mary’s power as not only stronger than any other saint but rivaling that even of Christ. This Mary was not only Queen of Heaven and Lady of the World, but was also the Empress of Hell, who could even command the obedience of demons. The powerful Mary during the Reformation becomes reframed as a representative grieving Christian, with Christ as the emblematized suffering reformer. Neither the Virgin Mary nor Mary Magdalene is lost to Protestantism. Peters demonstrates how Christocentric piety developed throughout the Reformation period. Peters suggests that as a result women did not experience the Reformation as an alien male environment, but rather as one where women could feel comfortable and at home with the representative frail Christian, a woman devoted to Christ. What caused women to limit in their involvement in congregations was not, Peters carefully demonstrates, the break of the Reformation, but rather the tendencies within an increasingly dominant Calvinistic strain of Protestantism. Peters used churchwarden accounts extensively for her research. She also examined wills of both men and women and many printed sermons and other theological works of the period. This book is beautifully produced with many illustrations and a full bibliography as well as notes. It deserves to be widely read. CAROLE LEVIN University of Nebraska
English Literary Renaissance, Sep 1, 2001
... 18. Gheeraerts' engravings appear in Edeweard de Dene, De Warachtige Fabulen der Dieren ... more ... 18. Gheeraerts' engravings appear in Edeweard de Dene, De Warachtige Fabulen der Dieren (Bruges, 1567). ... See, eg, Simon de Passe's portrait of Princess Anne (dated 1616) (identified in the engraving as “Great EMPRESSE of the North”); she is placed on a promontory ...
Renaissance Quarterly, 2000
The consolidation of England into a monarchical commonwealth in the sixteenth and seventeenth cen... more The consolidation of England into a monarchical commonwealth in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries created the possibility of polyvalent geographic identity. Ben Jonsons country house poem, “To Sir Robert Wroth, “ was written from the vantage point of a shift in the politico-geographical borders that made local communities in the shires part of a centralizing monarchical commonwealth. Microhistorical examination of the Wroths and their village in the period preceding the composition of the poem reveals their insistent local identity and resistance to the monarchical commonwealth ruled from London. The immediate context of their resistance to the center was a Privy Council project to make the River Lea navigable in order to bringdown the price of grain in London. Economically threatened, the Wroths orchestrated sabotage against the project, but eventually acquiesced to the Privy Council and re-entered the centrally administered commonwealth fold. Jonsons poem is a testimony to this reaffiliation, a celebration of the Wroths as exemplars of commonwealth identity within local region. Only when they distanced themselves from local identity did the Wroths become suitable for Jonson as a poetic model of the country ideal. In Jonsons hands, the country house poem becomes the vehicle of multivalent identification with place.
Renaissance Quarterly, 1980
Renaissance Quarterly, 1988
Modern language studies, 1983
... It is also worth noting, as Luciano Berti explains, that the portrait of St. ... He beckons t... more ... It is also worth noting, as Luciano Berti explains, that the portrait of St. ... He beckons them to "Joy at the uprising of this Sunne, and Sonne" (7, 2); he commands them to "Behold the Highest, parting hence away" (7, 5). The meditator has changed position from a spectator to an ...
ELH, 1983
... Easter Wings" too plays on the hieroglyphic representation of typological time in sa... more ... Easter Wings" too plays on the hieroglyphic representation of typological time in sacred history, but unlike "The Altar," which is a hiero-glyph of a ... The central image of the poem is man's falling and rising in the historical scheme of re-demption, an image which the poet connects ...
Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies, Mar 1, 2019
Rosemond Tuve's Chapel Talks reveal that her demonstration of the connection between Herbert's im... more Rosemond Tuve's Chapel Talks reveal that her demonstration of the connection between Herbert's imagery and biblical typology is related to events of the Second World War. Her argument for Herbert's use of typology is widely regarded as a reaction to William Empson's ahistorical New Critical reading of Herbert. Her Chapel Talks indicate that her interest in typological imagery predated her dispute with Empson and are connected to her experience with mostly Jewish refugees at Black Mountain College in Asheville, NC. These talks illustrate the moral commitment behind her groundbreaking historical research and its relationship to theological movements leading to the Second Vatican Council and to a changed relationship between Christians and Jews following the war. As Tuve's typological criticism was widely regarded as an influential vehicle for larger arguments for the value of historicism, her Chapel Talks suggest a connection of historical criticism to world historical events.
中山人文學報, Jul 1, 2012
Referring back to Coleridge's notion of ”the willing suspension of disbelief,” this paper exp... more Referring back to Coleridge's notion of ”the willing suspension of disbelief,” this paper explores the transition that occurs when ludic identification with a religious text becomes real identification. This transformation was particularly poignant in the reception of an especially strong religious poet, Dante, by an extremely influential critic, T. S. Eliot, at a major historical moment, the period of and after the sexcentenary of Dante's death in 1921. The sexcentenary took place in the immediate aftermath of the First World War when various European intellectuals on both sides of the war turned to Dante for spiritual, intellectual, and political sustenance to heal the trauma of the war. Eliot's short, widely read monograph on Dante, published during a continuing dialogue with I. A. Richards on religion and literature, reveals his difficulty with the concept of the willing suspension of disbelief. Eliot raises and then rejects the possibility that a twentieth-century reader could cross confessional lines and truly enter Dante's world through the suspension of disbelief and the imaginative assumption of belief in Dante's theology; actual identification with Dante's faith is ultimately necessary, Eliot concludes. The fraught political dimension of the willing suspension of disbelief during this tumultuous time is apparent in the monograph's now suppressed dedication to Charles Maurras. Eliot's was developing his thinking about belief and non-belief in relation to politics, society and literature during his friendship with this self-described reactionary, monarchist, anti-democratic figure.
Studies in Philology, 2020
Chapel Talks, delivered to an audience of students at Connecticut College for Women between 1944 ... more Chapel Talks, delivered to an audience of students at Connecticut College for Women between 1944 and 1956, provide insight into the larger motivation behind mid-century historical criticism emerging from the Second World War. These talks, a selection of which is introduced and transcribed here, show the link between Tuve's literary thinking and her moral commitments while she was articulating her widely influential arguments about typological criticism and historical criticism more generally. The introduction to her Chapel Talks traces the context of historicism in the turbulence of the war, as in the connection between her groundbreaking analysis of typology in George Herbert's "The Sacrifice" and her experience with Jewish refugees at Black Mountain College. Further, it shows the connection between her critical response to American habits that emerged after victory in the war and questions of medieval and Renaissance periodization posed by Ernst Curtius's European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. The introduction argues that Tuve's historical criticism is the second wave to Edwin Greenlaw's first wave, articulated in the wake of the First World War, and is linked to emerging European democratic movements supported by the wartime "Anglo-Saxon," or Anglo-American, alliance, in which the United States would play the leading role in politics and literary criticism.
The commemorations in Germany for the sexcentenary of Dante’s death in 1921 can be understood thr... more The commemorations in Germany for the sexcentenary of Dante’s death in 1921 can be understood through Jan Assmann’s classic explanation of how institutions construct collective memory as a “contemporized past” for present purposes. Assmann’s view of collective memory can be further extended to explore how rival institutions work to construct competing memories, or how an institution attempts to wrest memory from another institution. Dante was taken off the Index of Prohibited Books only in the late nineteenth century and was fully promoted as an exemplary Catholic poet only in 1921 in Benedict XV’s encyclical. German Catholic writers used the sexcentenary as an occasion to “remember” Dante as a Catholic writer and thinker in opposition to those who more traditionally commemorated Dante because of his anti-papal attitudes, as a proto-Protestant precursor of Luther. This rival confessional memorial reconstruction of Dante by competing institutions was eschewed by professional, academic scholars in university departments of Romance Philology, and was instead carried out in the popular press by writers, intellectuals, and politicians in newspapers and periodicals with broad audiences. Making no claim for original research, articles in these outlets typically assert partisan positions by providing rival pedigrees that link Dante either to a German anti-papal legacy or to a German Catholic legacy. For example, Dante commemoration in newspaper articles by the poet and Reichstag secretary Hans Benzmann exemplifies the anti-Catholic view of Dante, while the commemorative newspaper article by the Catholic publicist, member of the Catholic Centre Party, public health reformer, and professor in an agricultural university Martin Fassbender exemplifies the Catholic community’s attempt to bring Dante into its fold. Moreover, because memory of Dante was being offered to the German nation as a spiritual and political model for recovery from the catastrophe of the First World War, a Catholic Dante implied a Catholic role in post-war German renewal after years of Catholic repression. Catholic institutional memory of Dante during the sexcentenary thus not only sought to reclaim its cultural patrimony from another community that it thought had misappropriated it, but it also functioned as a proxy for memory of the war.
Cambridge University Press eBooks, Nov 25, 1999
Criticism-a Quarterly for Literature and The Arts, 2001
Criticism-a Quarterly for Literature and The Arts, 2001
The subject of Erich Auerbach's hitherto untranslated "Passio as Passion" con cerns... more The subject of Erich Auerbach's hitherto untranslated "Passio as Passion" con cerns a theme that is never associated with him, the history of emotions. For the English-speaking world, Mimesis has been read back into "Figura" (1939)1 and Dante, Poet of the Secular World (1929)2 as a critical history that led to the development of Auerbach's powerful analysis of literary realism. His interest in the history of emotions has largely gone unnoticed. We might see a different critical trajectory in Auerbach's work if instead our starting point were an essay like "Passio as Passion." Here Auerbach provides a non-Freudian, pre structuralist philological explanation of, put simply, the ability to express strong emotions, specifically erotic passion. This classic philological essay is more wide ranging than the better known "Figura," but it applies the same method: it examines how a culture reveals the values it holds dear by the way it fills the words available to it with meaning; it proposes that the history of the changing contents of a word is the history of the changing values of a culture. In this case, Auerbach asks how the contemporary French word passion and German Leidenschajt acquired the meaning they bear for us today. Auerbach starts genetically from the Greek word (3'yPx, and moves in stages to its Stoic rendition as passio, to its early Christian and medieval transformation, which laid the groundwork for its modern meaning as first established by Racine. The essay is of interest to us today for two reasons: first, for what it contri butes to current interest in the history of emotions, and second, for what it reveals about the practice of criticism at a time of extremes. That the emotions have a history implies that subjects are historically con tingent and open to the possibility that they are hence culturally determined. In their excellent overview of the issues at stake in the argument for the social construction of the emotions, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank pro vide a reference point for approximating where Auerbach stands in the devel opment of this issue.3 For example, among the tenets that Auerbach does not
Renaissance Quarterly, 2005
female saints. She also discusses the male response to the Virgin Mary as well. Peters discusses ... more female saints. She also discusses the male response to the Virgin Mary as well. Peters discusses the integration of the cults of Mary and of Christ into the concern for the salvation of the soul. One fifteenth-century sermon described Mary’s power as not only stronger than any other saint but rivaling that even of Christ. This Mary was not only Queen of Heaven and Lady of the World, but was also the Empress of Hell, who could even command the obedience of demons. The powerful Mary during the Reformation becomes reframed as a representative grieving Christian, with Christ as the emblematized suffering reformer. Neither the Virgin Mary nor Mary Magdalene is lost to Protestantism. Peters demonstrates how Christocentric piety developed throughout the Reformation period. Peters suggests that as a result women did not experience the Reformation as an alien male environment, but rather as one where women could feel comfortable and at home with the representative frail Christian, a woman devoted to Christ. What caused women to limit in their involvement in congregations was not, Peters carefully demonstrates, the break of the Reformation, but rather the tendencies within an increasingly dominant Calvinistic strain of Protestantism. Peters used churchwarden accounts extensively for her research. She also examined wills of both men and women and many printed sermons and other theological works of the period. This book is beautifully produced with many illustrations and a full bibliography as well as notes. It deserves to be widely read. CAROLE LEVIN University of Nebraska
English Literary Renaissance, Sep 1, 2001
... 18. Gheeraerts' engravings appear in Edeweard de Dene, De Warachtige Fabulen der Dieren ... more ... 18. Gheeraerts' engravings appear in Edeweard de Dene, De Warachtige Fabulen der Dieren (Bruges, 1567). ... See, eg, Simon de Passe's portrait of Princess Anne (dated 1616) (identified in the engraving as “Great EMPRESSE of the North”); she is placed on a promontory ...
Renaissance Quarterly, 2000
The consolidation of England into a monarchical commonwealth in the sixteenth and seventeenth cen... more The consolidation of England into a monarchical commonwealth in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries created the possibility of polyvalent geographic identity. Ben Jonsons country house poem, “To Sir Robert Wroth, “ was written from the vantage point of a shift in the politico-geographical borders that made local communities in the shires part of a centralizing monarchical commonwealth. Microhistorical examination of the Wroths and their village in the period preceding the composition of the poem reveals their insistent local identity and resistance to the monarchical commonwealth ruled from London. The immediate context of their resistance to the center was a Privy Council project to make the River Lea navigable in order to bringdown the price of grain in London. Economically threatened, the Wroths orchestrated sabotage against the project, but eventually acquiesced to the Privy Council and re-entered the centrally administered commonwealth fold. Jonsons poem is a testimony to this reaffiliation, a celebration of the Wroths as exemplars of commonwealth identity within local region. Only when they distanced themselves from local identity did the Wroths become suitable for Jonson as a poetic model of the country ideal. In Jonsons hands, the country house poem becomes the vehicle of multivalent identification with place.
Renaissance Quarterly, 1980
Renaissance Quarterly, 1988
Modern language studies, 1983
... It is also worth noting, as Luciano Berti explains, that the portrait of St. ... He beckons t... more ... It is also worth noting, as Luciano Berti explains, that the portrait of St. ... He beckons them to "Joy at the uprising of this Sunne, and Sonne" (7, 2); he commands them to "Behold the Highest, parting hence away" (7, 5). The meditator has changed position from a spectator to an ...
ELH, 1983
... Easter Wings" too plays on the hieroglyphic representation of typological time in sa... more ... Easter Wings" too plays on the hieroglyphic representation of typological time in sacred history, but unlike "The Altar," which is a hiero-glyph of a ... The central image of the poem is man's falling and rising in the historical scheme of re-demption, an image which the poet connects ...