Description
- Abstract:
- This dissertation begins with the observation that, during the English Renaissance, matter was a multivalent term, which could refer to the phenomenal world as well as the materia of language. In order to address this duality, this dissertation couples the empiricism of Bruno Latour and Actor Network Theory with critical attention to the routines and practices generative of copia in Renaissance humanism. Following Latour, I treat things as “gatherings” of rhetorical, social, and physical practices. My central theoretical focus lies in accounting for humanist rhetorical practices within this network, specifically, asking how figures and tropes define the contours of actors and actants. My investment in the rhetorical highlights how the verbal productivity of copia, defined primarily in the work of Desiderius Erasmus, was set in relation to the phenomenal world. Using Latour’s model of “things” and Erasmus’s conception of copia as the theoretical framework, each chapter offers a case study for considering “things-as gatherings” within a distinct genre: tragedy, lyric, comedy, and allegory. In Chapter 1, I consider the woods of William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus as the silva rhetoricae of classical rhetoric, an absolute sovereign space, and the physical woodenness of the stage itself. In Chapter 2, I consider love tokens, like posy rings, in John Donne’s lyrics and elegies. Chapter 3 takes up “moveables” in the domestic interior in Ben Jonson’s Volpone, as they are enumerated in the performance of an inventory. Chapter 4 considers the trope of fire for erotic desire in Book III of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, exploring how it signals both human lust and an elemental, nonhuman otherness. Together, the chapters study how each genre offers different conditions of possibility—phenomenal, social, and rhetorical—for the “gathering” or “assembly” of participants that collectively make things. The selected texts collectively represent a condensed historical span, from 1580-1630, which articulates a relationship between the copia of sixteenth century humanism and the emerging category of the phenomenal in the seventeenth century, demonstrating the ways in which the rhetorical mobility of copia increasingly entered into relation with experience in the phenomenal world.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2015)
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Citation
Beaver, James C.,
"Material Encounters of the English Renaissance"
(2015).
English Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0154FFT
