The rhetoric of the body from Ovid to Shakespeare (original) (raw)

Lynn Enterline's book appears at a time when the scholarship on Renaissance Ovid is burgeoning, affecting the ways we think about imitation, constructions of subjectivity, and ideas and fantasies about the body and sexuality in early modern literature. Her lucid book combines historical, psychoanalytic (it is informed by Freud, Lacan, and Kristeva), and feminist approaches to the body with rhetorical, semiotic, and post-structuralist analyses of language (occasionally drawing on Barthes and Derrida, among others). Enterline provides critical, theoretical, and cultural readings of the ways the language of literature shapes different, often clashing, bodies in poetry and drama. The methodological and theoretical parameters of Enterline's approach continue to expand the study of rhetoric, corporeality, Ovidianism, and psychoanalysis, a field that, in a way, Enterline herself has shaped through her previous psychoanalytically informed work on Renaissance Ovidianism, language, and subjectivity. The present book extends further this rich field of critical inquiry and demonstrates, yet again, that perhaps the closest early equivalents to modern ideas of the subconscious and its psychoanalytic interpretations are found in the Renaissance reworkings of the conflicting and turbulent meshing of corporeality and interiority in Ovid's works. Enterline's examination of early texts ranks among the most theoretically sophisticated that apply psychoanalytic theory to early modern literature. The book's contention, Enterline states at the outset, is "that the violated and fractured body is the place where, for Ovid, aesthetics and violence converge, where the usually separated realms of the rhetorical and the sexual most insistently meet" (p. 1). Thus her study of the complex intertwining of the poetic and the erotic primarily focuses on the close analysis of tropes and forms of corporeal violence and dismemberment, as well as their effects on desire, femininity, and masculinity in Italian and English Renaissance literature. In her demonstration of the very productive and systematic use of post-structuralist theories of writing, language, and desire in the analysis of early modern texts, Enterline never subsumes texts into theory. Rather, she grounds her theory in the text and then, through close analyses, unpacks what she does. Enterline's selection of texts ranges from Ovid's Metamorphoses, to Petrarch's Rime Sparse, to John Marston's Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image, to Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece and The Winter's Tale. The book has six chapters, each devoted either to Ovidian figures (for example, Daphne and Medusa) and the problems they embody in literature, or to a literary text and a topic or figures central to that text's preoccupation with the body. The introductory chapter, "Pursuing Daphne," which focuses on violence and agency in the myths of Daphne and Medusa, and explores forms of verbal fetishism and its Renaissance uses with particular attention to Petrarch's Rime Sparse, foregrounds much of the book's argument, especially as developed in the next chapter, "Medusa's mouth: body and voice in the Metamorphoses." Here, in a feminist critique of Metamorphoses,