Carla Mazzio | University of California, Riverside (original) (raw)
Papers by Carla Mazzio
This essay argues that speech pathologies integral to articulations of love melancholy in early m... more This essay argues that speech pathologies integral to articulations of love melancholy in early modern England were largely a sign and a symptom of print. Linking the impaired speech of the melancholic lover with the proliferation of amatory discourses in the literary and educational texts of the late sixteenth-century, this essay argues that what is experienced by the melancholic as vocal self-alienation (and a painfully and visually mediated distance from the object of love) can and should be read in terms of a historical transition of technology and representation that entailed a heightened awareness not only of the alterity of voice, but of the ocular dimensions of both word and sound. Positing a direct relationship between theatrical performance and developing practices and technologies of literacy in the period, this essay argues that theater functioned as as a specific response to the imagined textualization of voice, identity, passion and affect in the literature and culture of early modern England. "The Melancholy of Print: Love's Labour's Lost," in Historicism, Psychoanalysis and early Modern Culture, Eds. Carla Mazzio and Douglas Trevor (New York: Routledge, 2000), 186- 227.
"The Invisible Element in Art: Dürer, Shakespeare, Donne," in Vision and its Instruments: Art, Sc... more "The Invisible Element in Art: Dürer, Shakespeare, Donne," in Vision and its Instruments: Art, Science, and Technology in Early Modern Europe, ed. Alina Payne (February, 2015), makes an argument for aesthetic innovation, self-reflection, and the production of affect at the limits of visual instrumentality. Here Mazzio connects Dürer's Melencolia I, Shakespeare's Hamlet, and Donne's Devotions-- as she identifies air, the invisible element in art, as a mise-en-abîme of sight itself.
Books by Carla Mazzio
What might it mean to use books rather than read them? This work examines the relationship bet... more What might it mean to use books rather than read them?
This work examines the relationship between book use and forms of thought and theory in the early modern period. Drawing on legal, medical, religious, scientific and literary texts, and on how-to books on topics ranging from cooking, praying, and memorizing to socializing, surveying, and traveling, Carla Mazzio and Bradin Cormack explore how early books defined the conditions of their own use and in so doing imagined the social and theoretical significance of that use.
The volume addresses the material dimensions of the book in terms of the knowledge systems that informed them, looking not only to printed features such as title pages, tables, indexes and illustrations but also to the marginalia and other marks of use that actual readers and users left in and on their books. The authors argue that when books reflect on the uses they anticipate or ask of their readers, they tend to theorize their own forms. Book Use, Book Theory offers a fascinating approach to the history of the book and the history of theory as it emerged from textual practice.
This book, based on a library exhibition at the University of Chicago, has been put online by the University of Chicago library and thus has no restrictions on use.
Examines how the body - its organs, limbs, viscera - was represented in the literature and cultur... more Examines how the body - its organs, limbs, viscera - was represented in the literature and culture of early modern Europe. How and why did 16th and 17th century medical, religious, and literary texts portray the body part by part, rather than as an entity? And what does this view of the human body tell us about society's view of part and whole, of individual and universal in the early modern period? As this volume demonstrates, the symbolics of body parts challenges our assumptions about "the body" as a fundamental Renaissance image of self, society, and nation. The book presents work by: Nancy Vickers on corporeal fragments; Peter Stallybrass on the foot; Marjorie Garber on joints; Stephen Greenblatt on bodily marking and mutilation; Gail Kern Paster on the nervous system; Michael Schoenfeldt on the belly; Jeffrey Masten on the anus; Katherine Park on the clitoris; Kathryn Schwartz on the breast; Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky on the eye; Katherine Rowe on the hands; Scott Stevens on the heart and brain; Carla Mazzio on the tongue; and David Hillman on the entrails.An examination of how the body--its organs, limbs, and viscera--were represented in the literature and culture of early modern Europe. This provocative volume demonstrates, the symbolism of body parts challenge our assumptions about "the body" as a fundamental Renaissance image of self, society, and nation. This book was awarded The English Association Beatrice White Book Prize in 1999.
The Inarticulate Renaissance explores the conceptual potential of the disabled utterance in the E... more The Inarticulate Renaissance explores the conceptual potential of the disabled utterance in the English literary Renaissance. What might it have meant, in the sixteenth-century "age of eloquence," to speak indistinctly; to mumble to oneself or to God; to speak unintelligibly to a lover, a teacher, a court of law; or to be utterly dumfounded in the face of new words, persons, situations, and things? This innovative book maps out a "Renaissance" otherwise eclipsed by cultural and literary-critical investments in a period defined by the impact of classical humanism, Reformation poetics, and the flourishing of vernacular languages and literatures. For Carla Mazzio, the specter of the inarticulate was part of a culture grappling with the often startlingly incoherent dimensions of language practices and ideologies in the humanities, religion, law, historiography, print, and vernacular speech. Through a historical analysis of forms of failed utterance, as they informed and were recast in sixteenth-century drama, her book foregrounds the inarticulate as a central subject of cultural history and dramatic innovation. Playwrights from Nicholas Udall to William Shakespeare, while exposing ideological fictions through which articulate and inarticulate became distinguished, also transformed apparent challenges to "articulate" communication into occasions for cultivating new forms of expression and audition. The Inarticulate Renaissance was awarded the Roland H. Bainton Book Prize for Literature in 2010.
Shakespeare & Science examines Shakespearean drama in light of early practices, theories, and con... more Shakespeare & Science examines Shakespearean drama in light of early practices, theories, and conceptual lexicons of anatomy, cartography, botany, physics, cosmology, meteorology, experimental science, and early variants of “life science.” In doing so, it aims, on the one hand, to expand our understanding of the relationships between art and science, nature and norms, and experience and experiment in the early modern period, and, on the other hand, to attend to the relative neglect of Shakespeare in recent scholarship on literature and science informed by new developments in the History of Science and Science Studies. Featuring new articles by Jean Feerick, Carla Mazzio, Kristen Poole, Elizabeth Spiller, Valerie Traub, Henry Turner, and William West, this Special Double Issue aims to move beyond earlier assessments of Shakespeare and particular sciences, and beyond the analysis of thematic traces of, or indeed reflections of, historical arenas of scientific practice, investigation and explication. It aims rather, to move toward a more nuanced understanding of forms of consilience and contestation between dramatic and scientific practices, epistemologies, mentalities, and assumptions integral to the making and unmaking of knowledge. While presenting a series of varied and innovative arguments on science, culture and Shakespearean drama, this volume is designed to pose as many questions as it provides answers, and in doing so to spur new research into Shakespeare and the manifold “sciences” that informed, and would be informed by, his works.
Mazzio’s introduction historicizes “science” c. 1600 and maps out earlier cultural and scholarly interests in “Shakespeare and science," including a still largely unexplored archive of nineteenth and early twentieth-century scientific practitioners (of chemistry, meteorology, entomology, ornithology, botany, medicine and mineralogy) who wrote books and articles on Shakespeare and their particular area of specialization. The Introduction also attends to treatments of Shakespeare and various sciences in the twentieth century in order to emphasize that, while the articles themselves offer new approaches and insights to Shakespearean drama and early modern culture, Shakespeare & Science emerges even as it departs from a long and variegated tradition of inquiry into Shakespearean drama and practices and forms of knowledge aligned with the sciences.
Carla Mazzio and Douglas Trevor have brought together an outstanding group of literary, cultural,... more Carla Mazzio and Douglas Trevor have brought together an outstanding group of literary, cultural, and history scholars to examine various aspects of early modern culture and subjectivity with a heightened attention to pressing questions of method. Through a synthesis of historicism and psychoanalytic criticism, the contributors explore the complicated, nuanced, and often surprising relationships between history and subjectivity in Europe centuries before psychoanalytic theory. Addressing such topics as "fetishes and Renaissances," "the cartographic unconscious," and "the topographic imaginary," these essays move beyond the strict boundaries of historicism and psychoanalysis to carve out new histories of interiority in early modern Europe. Contributors include Ann Rosalind Jones, Peter Stallybrass, James R. Siemon, John Guillory, Eric Wilson, Karen Newman, Tom Conley, Jeffrey Masten, Carla Mazzio, Katharine Eisaman Maus, Jonathan Goldberg, Douglas Trevor, Kathryn Schwarz, David Hillman and Marjorie Garber.
Exhibitions by Carla Mazzio
www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/webexhibits/bookusebooktheory/ What does it mean to use a book, rather ... more www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/webexhibits/bookusebooktheory/
What does it mean to use a book, rather than read it? How do books define the conditions of their own use, and in so doing imagine the social and theoretical significance of that use? This exhibition explores the inseparable relationship between technologies of book use and forms of thought and theory in the period between 1500 and 1700. Prioritizing the material and social phenomenon of book use, in contrast to the relatively abstracted notion of reading, foregrounds the place of practice in the history of the book. It thereby disrupts clear distinctions between author and reader, text and context, the book as knowledge and the book as material object. Understanding the early book as a practical tool makes it possible to see its many material forms (e.g., binding, typography, title page, margins, index, illustrations) in terms of the knowledge systems that both shaped and were shaped by them.
Drawing examples from professional texts in the disciplines of law and medicine, from literary, religious and educational texts, and from practical manuals on cooking, carving, measuring, memorizing, praying, surveying and traveling, the exhibit explores how early books invited a wide range of uses, asking readers to move within them in particular ways, to write in them, manipulate them, apply them in worlds beyond the book. Crucially, the show argues that where books reflected on such uses and on the textual practices that made them possible, they discovered (or invented) theory. A book with a substantial scholarly essay was published alongside the exhibition entitled Book Use, Book Theory: 1500-1700. www.amazon.com/Book-Use-Theory-1500-1700/dp/0943056349
Reviews by Carla Mazzio
Carla Mazzio, draft for the Journal of British Studies.
Drafts by Carla Mazzio
This essay argues that speech pathologies integral to articulations of love melancholy in early m... more This essay argues that speech pathologies integral to articulations of love melancholy in early modern England were largely a sign and a symptom of print. Linking the impaired speech of the melancholic lover with the proliferation of amatory discourses in the literary and educational texts of the late sixteenth-century, this essay argues that what is experienced by the melancholic as vocal self-alienation (and a painfully and visually mediated distance from the object of love) can and should be read in terms of a historical transition of technology and representation that entailed a heightened awareness not only of the alterity of voice, but of the ocular dimensions of both word and sound. Positing a direct relationship between theatrical performance and developing practices and technologies of literacy in the period, this essay argues that theater functioned as as a specific response to the imagined textualization of voice, identity, passion and affect in the literature and culture of early modern England. "The Melancholy of Print: Love's Labour's Lost," in Historicism, Psychoanalysis and early Modern Culture, Eds. Carla Mazzio and Douglas Trevor (New York: Routledge, 2000), 186- 227.
"The Invisible Element in Art: Dürer, Shakespeare, Donne," in Vision and its Instruments: Art, Sc... more "The Invisible Element in Art: Dürer, Shakespeare, Donne," in Vision and its Instruments: Art, Science, and Technology in Early Modern Europe, ed. Alina Payne (February, 2015), makes an argument for aesthetic innovation, self-reflection, and the production of affect at the limits of visual instrumentality. Here Mazzio connects Dürer's Melencolia I, Shakespeare's Hamlet, and Donne's Devotions-- as she identifies air, the invisible element in art, as a mise-en-abîme of sight itself.
What might it mean to use books rather than read them? This work examines the relationship bet... more What might it mean to use books rather than read them?
This work examines the relationship between book use and forms of thought and theory in the early modern period. Drawing on legal, medical, religious, scientific and literary texts, and on how-to books on topics ranging from cooking, praying, and memorizing to socializing, surveying, and traveling, Carla Mazzio and Bradin Cormack explore how early books defined the conditions of their own use and in so doing imagined the social and theoretical significance of that use.
The volume addresses the material dimensions of the book in terms of the knowledge systems that informed them, looking not only to printed features such as title pages, tables, indexes and illustrations but also to the marginalia and other marks of use that actual readers and users left in and on their books. The authors argue that when books reflect on the uses they anticipate or ask of their readers, they tend to theorize their own forms. Book Use, Book Theory offers a fascinating approach to the history of the book and the history of theory as it emerged from textual practice.
This book, based on a library exhibition at the University of Chicago, has been put online by the University of Chicago library and thus has no restrictions on use.
Examines how the body - its organs, limbs, viscera - was represented in the literature and cultur... more Examines how the body - its organs, limbs, viscera - was represented in the literature and culture of early modern Europe. How and why did 16th and 17th century medical, religious, and literary texts portray the body part by part, rather than as an entity? And what does this view of the human body tell us about society's view of part and whole, of individual and universal in the early modern period? As this volume demonstrates, the symbolics of body parts challenges our assumptions about "the body" as a fundamental Renaissance image of self, society, and nation. The book presents work by: Nancy Vickers on corporeal fragments; Peter Stallybrass on the foot; Marjorie Garber on joints; Stephen Greenblatt on bodily marking and mutilation; Gail Kern Paster on the nervous system; Michael Schoenfeldt on the belly; Jeffrey Masten on the anus; Katherine Park on the clitoris; Kathryn Schwartz on the breast; Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky on the eye; Katherine Rowe on the hands; Scott Stevens on the heart and brain; Carla Mazzio on the tongue; and David Hillman on the entrails.An examination of how the body--its organs, limbs, and viscera--were represented in the literature and culture of early modern Europe. This provocative volume demonstrates, the symbolism of body parts challenge our assumptions about "the body" as a fundamental Renaissance image of self, society, and nation. This book was awarded The English Association Beatrice White Book Prize in 1999.
The Inarticulate Renaissance explores the conceptual potential of the disabled utterance in the E... more The Inarticulate Renaissance explores the conceptual potential of the disabled utterance in the English literary Renaissance. What might it have meant, in the sixteenth-century "age of eloquence," to speak indistinctly; to mumble to oneself or to God; to speak unintelligibly to a lover, a teacher, a court of law; or to be utterly dumfounded in the face of new words, persons, situations, and things? This innovative book maps out a "Renaissance" otherwise eclipsed by cultural and literary-critical investments in a period defined by the impact of classical humanism, Reformation poetics, and the flourishing of vernacular languages and literatures. For Carla Mazzio, the specter of the inarticulate was part of a culture grappling with the often startlingly incoherent dimensions of language practices and ideologies in the humanities, religion, law, historiography, print, and vernacular speech. Through a historical analysis of forms of failed utterance, as they informed and were recast in sixteenth-century drama, her book foregrounds the inarticulate as a central subject of cultural history and dramatic innovation. Playwrights from Nicholas Udall to William Shakespeare, while exposing ideological fictions through which articulate and inarticulate became distinguished, also transformed apparent challenges to "articulate" communication into occasions for cultivating new forms of expression and audition. The Inarticulate Renaissance was awarded the Roland H. Bainton Book Prize for Literature in 2010.
Shakespeare & Science examines Shakespearean drama in light of early practices, theories, and con... more Shakespeare & Science examines Shakespearean drama in light of early practices, theories, and conceptual lexicons of anatomy, cartography, botany, physics, cosmology, meteorology, experimental science, and early variants of “life science.” In doing so, it aims, on the one hand, to expand our understanding of the relationships between art and science, nature and norms, and experience and experiment in the early modern period, and, on the other hand, to attend to the relative neglect of Shakespeare in recent scholarship on literature and science informed by new developments in the History of Science and Science Studies. Featuring new articles by Jean Feerick, Carla Mazzio, Kristen Poole, Elizabeth Spiller, Valerie Traub, Henry Turner, and William West, this Special Double Issue aims to move beyond earlier assessments of Shakespeare and particular sciences, and beyond the analysis of thematic traces of, or indeed reflections of, historical arenas of scientific practice, investigation and explication. It aims rather, to move toward a more nuanced understanding of forms of consilience and contestation between dramatic and scientific practices, epistemologies, mentalities, and assumptions integral to the making and unmaking of knowledge. While presenting a series of varied and innovative arguments on science, culture and Shakespearean drama, this volume is designed to pose as many questions as it provides answers, and in doing so to spur new research into Shakespeare and the manifold “sciences” that informed, and would be informed by, his works.
Mazzio’s introduction historicizes “science” c. 1600 and maps out earlier cultural and scholarly interests in “Shakespeare and science," including a still largely unexplored archive of nineteenth and early twentieth-century scientific practitioners (of chemistry, meteorology, entomology, ornithology, botany, medicine and mineralogy) who wrote books and articles on Shakespeare and their particular area of specialization. The Introduction also attends to treatments of Shakespeare and various sciences in the twentieth century in order to emphasize that, while the articles themselves offer new approaches and insights to Shakespearean drama and early modern culture, Shakespeare & Science emerges even as it departs from a long and variegated tradition of inquiry into Shakespearean drama and practices and forms of knowledge aligned with the sciences.
Carla Mazzio and Douglas Trevor have brought together an outstanding group of literary, cultural,... more Carla Mazzio and Douglas Trevor have brought together an outstanding group of literary, cultural, and history scholars to examine various aspects of early modern culture and subjectivity with a heightened attention to pressing questions of method. Through a synthesis of historicism and psychoanalytic criticism, the contributors explore the complicated, nuanced, and often surprising relationships between history and subjectivity in Europe centuries before psychoanalytic theory. Addressing such topics as "fetishes and Renaissances," "the cartographic unconscious," and "the topographic imaginary," these essays move beyond the strict boundaries of historicism and psychoanalysis to carve out new histories of interiority in early modern Europe. Contributors include Ann Rosalind Jones, Peter Stallybrass, James R. Siemon, John Guillory, Eric Wilson, Karen Newman, Tom Conley, Jeffrey Masten, Carla Mazzio, Katharine Eisaman Maus, Jonathan Goldberg, Douglas Trevor, Kathryn Schwarz, David Hillman and Marjorie Garber.
www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/webexhibits/bookusebooktheory/ What does it mean to use a book, rather ... more www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/webexhibits/bookusebooktheory/
What does it mean to use a book, rather than read it? How do books define the conditions of their own use, and in so doing imagine the social and theoretical significance of that use? This exhibition explores the inseparable relationship between technologies of book use and forms of thought and theory in the period between 1500 and 1700. Prioritizing the material and social phenomenon of book use, in contrast to the relatively abstracted notion of reading, foregrounds the place of practice in the history of the book. It thereby disrupts clear distinctions between author and reader, text and context, the book as knowledge and the book as material object. Understanding the early book as a practical tool makes it possible to see its many material forms (e.g., binding, typography, title page, margins, index, illustrations) in terms of the knowledge systems that both shaped and were shaped by them.
Drawing examples from professional texts in the disciplines of law and medicine, from literary, religious and educational texts, and from practical manuals on cooking, carving, measuring, memorizing, praying, surveying and traveling, the exhibit explores how early books invited a wide range of uses, asking readers to move within them in particular ways, to write in them, manipulate them, apply them in worlds beyond the book. Crucially, the show argues that where books reflected on such uses and on the textual practices that made them possible, they discovered (or invented) theory. A book with a substantial scholarly essay was published alongside the exhibition entitled Book Use, Book Theory: 1500-1700. www.amazon.com/Book-Use-Theory-1500-1700/dp/0943056349
Carla Mazzio, draft for the Journal of British Studies.