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| The literature of the English Renaissance, especially in the predominant mode of pastoral, manifests a preoccupation with the category of origin, in its interrelation with issues of seduction, desire, sexualities, loss, and melancholy. The thinking of rhetoric, another predominant strain in early modern letters, is also informed by an engagement with the category of origin.
The late sixteenth century in England witnessed an unusual proliferation of texts that, after the fashion of Longos’s Daphnis and Chloe , the Idylls of Theocritus, Virgil’s Eclogues, recounted the lives and loves of shepheards. In addition to well-known texts such as Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia , Edmund Spenser’s The Shepheard’s Calendar and Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Renaissance pastorals included Shakespeare’s fascinating and neglected poem, “A Lover’s Complaint,” John Dickenson’s Arisbas: Euphues Among his Slumbers or Cupid’s Journey to Hell and The Shepheard’s Complaint, Robert Greene’s The Reports of the Shepheards and Menaphon: Camilla’s Alarum to Slumbering Euphues in his Melancholie Cell, Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynd: Euphues’s Golden Legacy , Michael Drayton’s The Shepheard’s Garland, William Smith’s Chloris: The Complaint of the Passionate Despis’d Shepheard and Richard Barnfield’s The Affectionate Shepheard. Beginning with the most archaic of pastorals, the biblical Song of Songs and the founding texts of the genre by Longos, Theocritus and Virgil but focussing on the intriguing pastoral tradition of late sixteenth-century England, we shall try to unfold these pycho-rhetorical, psycho-erotic structures of those texts. What is the conceptual relation of pastoral to the two components of its name – the (archaic) past and the oral? What is the conceptual relation of these two components to one another? Why indeed is the genre so preoccupied with the acoustic and the oral/aural not only in its name but also in its foregrounding of euphony and acoustic pleasure? What is the relation of this insistence on euphony and the name “Euphues” that appears in the title of several of these pastorals (which is the name not only of a prototypical humanist portrayed in John Lyly’s influential Euphues but also of a particular rhetoric promulgated by Lyly that privileges the beauty of harmony and sound)? How are the euphonic and Euphuistic related to the issues of sleep and dream that some of these pastorals name in their very titles? How are they related to the realm of Cupid or Eros, of desire, that the title of one of Dickenson’s pastorals names? What is it that makes pastoral the ideal linguistic vehicle for the exploration of polymorphic sexualities, from heterosexuality and androgyny through perversion to homoeroticism and incest? Why is it that pastoral consistently chooses rhetorical forms such as aposiopesis, anapodoton, apostrophe and in particular simile, that bracket the ontological? These are some of the questions we will keep in mind as we read Renaissance pastoral texts through an art of primitive listening based in affect and the unconscious, the only aurality which, Michele Montrelay says, can lead us back to our origins. The course will explore the early modern thinking of origin in Renaissance literature and rhetorical theory. In particular, we will address the questions of the possibility of writing origin, of forms of signification which can perform the archaic modes of being Renaissance fictionalizations of origin represents, aesthetic forms which can carry the archaic yet continue to function in an economy of loss. Throughout, we shall keep our findings from the the primitive listening to Renaissance texts in dynamic interaction with psychoanalytical engagements with the category of the archaic, especially those of Michele Montrelay, Denis Vasse, and Francois Baudry. Texts: the above Requirements: oral presentation of seminar project, outline and draft to be submitted in the course of the semester, seminar paper. | |
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| îåòã à' ùì ñîñèø á' éú÷ééí áéåí çñø áùòä 9:00 | |
| îåòã á' ùì ñîñèø á' éú÷ééí áéåí çñø áùòä 9:00 | |