Sublimating the Singularity of an Author(ity): Textual Publics, Textual Agency, and a Case Study of “Eikon Basilike” (1649-1660) (original) (raw)
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A Mirror of Men: Sovereignty, Performance, and Textuality in Tudor England, 1501-1559
2009
Sixteenth-century England witnessed both unprecedented generic experimentation in the recording of spectacle and a shift in strategies of sovereign representation and subject formation: it is the central objective of this dissertation to argue for the reciprocal implication of these two phenomena. Henry VII, Henry VIII, and Elizabeth I used performance to legitimate their authority. Aristocratic and civic identities, in turn, were modelled on sovereign identity, which was disseminated through narratives in civic entries, tournaments, public progresses, and courtly pageantry. This dissertation investigates the relationship between ritualized social dramas (a marriage, birth, and coronation) and the mechanisms behind the recording and dissemination of these performances in courtly and civic texts in England from 1501 to 1559. Focussing on The Receyt of the Ladie Kateryne (London 1501), The Great Tournament Roll of Westminster (Westminster 1511), and The Quenes Maiesties Passage (London 1559), this project attempts to understand the role performance texts played in developing conceptions of social identity. Specifically, this dissertation seeks to demonstrate that a number of new hybrid genres emerged in Tudor England to record ritualized social dramas. I argue that each of the texts under scrutiny stands out as a unique record of performance as their authors use unprecedented narrative strategies to invest their accounts with "liveness," situating the reader as a "spectator" of the sovereign within a performative context. An important objective of these hybrid genres was to control the audience/reader's response to the symbology of performance. Each monarch attempted to influence social and political identities through courtly performance; however, the challenges of governing differed among reigns. While Henry VII struggled against charges of illegitimacy, Henry VIII had to consolidate the loyalties of his nobles, and Elizabeth I came to the throne iii amidst religious turmoil and anxieties about female rule. Strategies for the performance and recording of sovereign authority shifted, therefore, to account for the changes in England's political structure. By examining how performance is textualized in these new genres, I attempt to expose the tensions animating the relationships among the monarch, his/her nobility, and the civic authorities. vi
Poetry and the politics of memory during the English Restoration, 1660-1685
Social scientists and historians have undertaken many studies in order to understand the experience and memory of violence in early modern and modern history, as memories of violent pasts were often altered and redirected, or strategically ignored by a state’s new regime. A majority of the studies regarding this phenomenon laid their focus on the period after 1800, as they combined memory politics with the rise of nationalism. Yet nationalism is not integral to memory politics as representation and memory politics were of great importance in early modern times. A government or monarch could evoke memory in the form of images, rituals and words, to communicate a desired image to the general public. This thesis examines the politics of memory during the English Restoration. During this time, the Licensing Act prevented people from legally publishing nonconformist opinions. As poetry often employs metaphorical and symbolical devices, poets might have been allowed to express and publish their (nonconformist) opinion more freely as censors could miss the subjacent meaning of the poem. One might, therefore, expect poetry to give a better representation of the ideological divisions within the English society.
2011
Shakespeare's dialogue tweaks the familiar correspondence in the early modern period between body and book. Viola introduces Orsino as a-hybridization between the human organism and technology‖ (Marcus 23), a clever but already entirely familiar image, and one that derives from-two core metaphors: the book of nature and the body as a network which replicates the order of the world beyond it‖ (Rhodes 187). Nature is a book, the human body a microcosm of created Nature, thus body, book and world correspond.-[P]eople in early print culture often thought of themselves … as writing, or as half-human, half-book,‖ says Leah Marcus (23). 1 Neil Rhodes agrees, and points to John Donne as a particularly avid user of book metaphors to show how the relationship between self and world-is textually mediated‖ (192): all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another. (Meditation XVII 445) 10 The phrase-rhetoric of assertion‖ I take from Gary Olson's-Toward a Post-Process Composition: Abandoning the Rhetoric of Assertion.‖ In composition studies, Olson says,-[t]he technology of assertion seems ubiquitous,‖ and-despite our attempts to introduce alternative genres, to help students become more dialogic and less monologic, more sophistic and less Aristotelian, more exploratory and less argumentative, more personal and less academic, the Western, rationalist tradition of assertion and support is so entrenched in our epistemology and ways of understanding what ‗good' writing and ‗thinking' are that this tradition, along with its concomitant assumptions, defies even our most concerted efforts to subvert it‖ (235). 11 The phrase rhetoric of struggle I derive from Diane Davis' Breaking Up [at] Totality: a Rhetoric of Laughter. Davis agrees with Olson that-[w]riting gets codified, disciplined, domesticated in the typical composition course; indeed, writing is often sacrificed in the name of 'composition,' in the name of this ‗discipline's' service-oriented and pre-established requirements‖ (6). In opposition to-a style of writing that is allowed (or, really, required) to efface what it exscribes‖ (13-14), Davis proposes a nondisciplinary rhetoric that creates-pattern[s] of connection based on coordination rather than subordination‖ (108).
The Art of Oblivion: Politics of Remembering and Forgetting in Restoration England
In recent years, the concept of ‘cultural’ or ‘collective memory’ (M. Halbwachs) has developed into a productive interdisciplinary tool for unlocking connections between history and media, including literary texts. In this lecture, it is going to be applied to literary texts surrounding the restoration of the English monarchy in 1660. How did literary texts react to this political and cultural shift that was widely represented as an act of memory and forgetting? What communicative strategies did they use in order to act upon their contemporary readership? In a cultural climate characterized by a heightened awareness of the normative and formative functions of collective memory, how did literary texts refer to, practice or reflect acts of recall and oblivion? Concentrating on John Dryden’s poem Astraea Redux and on John Milton’s epic Paradise Lost, I am going to examine the interplay between officially sanctioned ‘fictions of state’ (H. Love) and dissenting literary-political counter-fictions. I shall demonstrate that Paradise Lost is not only a text of puritan dissent but also, like other texts from this period, an example of literary countermemory (a concept that can be defined as the systematic exploitation of an enemy’s most trusted sources against their grain). Astraea Redux and Paradise Lost can be read as competing acts of cultural memory and countermemory in the Restoration period: foundational, supportive and legitimizing on the one hand, counter-presential, critical and delegitimizing on the other. Their rivalry is the more fascinating because they make use of virtually the same materials to construct and deliver their arguments: Virgilian epic and Biblical narrative, the major sources of early modern literary culture. Guided by a conceptual interest in the historical functions of literary communication, a comparative reading of these two texts offers itself as a case study of early modern memorial cultures, and as a paradigmatic example for the ways in which historical events, cultural processes and literary productions interact, re-frame and reconfigure one another.
Reverberations of The Prince: from ‘heroic fury’ to ‘living philology’
Thesis Eleven, 2018
This article explores the ways in which Gramsci's engagement with Machiavelli and The Prince in particular result in three significant developments in the Prison Notebooks. First, I analyze how the 'heroic fury' of Gramsci's lifelong interest in Machiavelli's thought develops, during the composition of his carceral writings, into a novel approach to the reading of The Prince, giving rise to the famous notion of the 'modern Prince'. Second, I argue that the modern Prince should not be regarded merely as a distinctive (individual or collective) figure, but rather, should be understood as a dramatic development that unfolds throughout 'the discourse itself' of the Prison Notebooks, particularly in the crucial phase of reorganisation in the 'special notebooks' composed from 1932 onwards. Third and finally, I suggest that the combination of the two preceding themes is decisive for understanding the modern Prince as a distinctive form of political organization. Rather than equated with a generic conception of the '(communist) political party', this notion was developed as a part of Gramsci's larger argument regarding the necessity for anti-Fascist political forces in Italy in the early 1930s to grow into an antagonistic collective body guided by principles of 'living philology'.
(Re)defining gender in Early Modern English drama, 2020
In this paper I shall explore the reasons that led Margaret Cavendish — a self-confident and determined noble woman— to use her emotions as strategies of power that shaped language in her plays, while experiencing totally contradictory emotions and describing herself as bashful and melancholic in her autobiographic work A True Relation of my Birth, Breeding, and Life. Four of her dramatic works are going to be the main corpus for this study because they offer the most revealing of her attitudes toward marriage and her desire for fame: But my approach to emotions will be more in line with Stephen Ahern’s aforementioned questions to account for affect, than with Wilcox’s perspective on emotions. To start with, the heroine of the tale of a marriage of near equals entitled Bell in Campo (1662) shows the necessary agency to rescue her husband at the head of an army of women, thus going beyond the limits of representation, removed from the conventions of affect expected from her role as a wife (Ahern 2019). Secondly, The Bridals (1662) satirizes marriage by offering two encountered reactions to the wedding night, two different affective investments on the part of the writer that would certainly provoke different reactions in readers. Finally, Loves Adventures (1662) introduces a woman who has to pass as a man in order to succeed in war and diplomacy, whereas The Convent of Pleasure (1668) suggests the possibility of having a separatist community of women and hints at lesbian sexuality — two plays that show different identities, affective assemblages (fake- queer — provoked by crossdressing— and lesbian) that take place in spaces such as a battlefield and a convent, both opened by heightened emotions.
Making History: The Rhetorical and Historical Occasion of Elizabeth Tudor's Coronation Entry
Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 2001
The problem of historiography is, above all else, a problem of the relationship between events and texts. 1 The notion of the factuality of history is predicated on the erasure of this relationship, or on the simplification of the multiple valences of events to their representation in accounts and their traces in various forms of records. However, events themselves differ for different viewers and participants, to such an extent that there can be no privileged viewpoint except one artificially produced through textual representation. Events deemed worthy of recording are defined not only by the incidents they comprise, but also by the kind of rhetorical occasion they present-and the rhetorical occasion includes not only the event but also the writer, the writer's purpose and intentions, and the writer's audience. 2 The audience for a text, while not as diverse as the audience for an event (in that a text's audience tends to be limited to the literate), cannot be simplified into a group to whom the writer makes specific, identifiable appeals. Audiences are shaped by texts, but their experiences, positioning, and interpretive practices also shape texts in ways that writers cannot anticipate and control, as events themselves are divergently shaped by their audiences. This essay investigates the interactions of these processes. This multilevel diversity of interpretive response renders accounts of historical events useful not only for what they reveal about a specific event, but for what they reveal about, and how they interact with, the complex social context of the production and reception of such an event. The relationship between events and texts can usefully be examined as a rhetorical structure, not simply in terms of the rhetorical forms of texts and events, but in terms of the entire rhetorical occasion. Such an "occasion" includes the interests of individuals within social groups, and of specific groups with relation to the larger sociopolitical scene, as that scene was conceived and, to
Ruin, Memory, and the Social Body in Augustan Literature
1998
This dissertation explores the ground ot: and practices of self-reflexivity behind, the often polemical contemporary debates that surround research practices and methodology in humanities and social sciences historiography. I focus on the unexamined reciprocity between conceptions ofhistory and the linguistic and imagistic practices of remembering that affect and produce historiography in the eighteenth century: despite the identity of their epistemological foundation, in the long eighteenth century, ''history'' and "memory" begin to function as diverging truth-claims. By the end ofthe seventeenth century, John Locke's well-known articulation of tabula rasa-itself a divergence from the remarkably stable medieval and renaissance conceptions of memory as "storehouse" and tabula rasa-signals an epistemological shift in forms of objectivity and, consequently, the subject's experiences ofherlhis interiority. I analyse aspects ofthe effects ofthis emerging epistemology on eighteenth century thinkers' reconstructions ofthe "social body." Across a number ofauthors' works and forms ofrepresentation-William Congreve's drama, Mary Wollstonecraft's political argumentation, picturesque theory and representation ofnature, Locke, Hume, and Joseph Priestly's philosophical debates, and William Blak¢ and Laurence Sterne's literary works-I attempt to trace significant shifts in the relation of, 'memory" and ''history.'' Throughout the chapters I focus on the relation oflinguistic strategies of representation to shifts in various kinds of social and personal formations: from gender roles and political or cultural forms, to interpretations ofcausality, agency, and avenues for social change.
Reading Minds – Wolf Hall's Revision of the Poetics of Subjectivity
This chapter will account as precisely as possible for the extraordinary appeal of the first novel in Mantel's Tudor trilogy, Wolf Hall, arguing that this results, at least in part, from its complicated narrative perspective. It examines the way tense, deixis, and focalization work, to discern how form translates into function, or how the poetics of representation inform its meanings. The novel's narrative perspective maintains a strict intra-and homodiegetic focalization, so that everything is seen through Cromwell's eyes; Cromwell's perception therefore guarantees textual coherence and defines the vision of the world represented, since it sets the limits of what is possible within this world. Wolf Hall thus employs history as this character's individual perception, creating for the reader an illusion of empathic proximity to the focalizer. However, while this strict focalization resembles interior monologue, Mantel's use of the third person 'he' is ...