Disknowledge

Disknowledge PDF Author: Katherine Eggert
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812247515
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
Katherine Eggert explores the crumbling state of humanistic learning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the benefits of relying on alchemy despite its recognized flaws.

Disknowledge

Disknowledge PDF Author: Katherine Eggert
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812247515
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
Katherine Eggert explores the crumbling state of humanistic learning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the benefits of relying on alchemy despite its recognized flaws.

Disknowledge

Disknowledge PDF Author: Katherine Eggert
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812291883
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
"Disknowledge": knowing something isn't true, but believing it anyway. In Disknowledge: Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England, Katherine Eggert explores the crumbling state of learning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Even as the shortcomings of Renaissance humanism became plain to see, many intellectuals of the age had little choice but to treat their familiar knowledge systems as though they still held. Humanism thus came to share the status of alchemy: a way of thinking simultaneously productive and suspect, reasonable and wrongheaded. Eggert argues that English writers used alchemy to signal how to avoid or camouflage pressing but discomfiting topics in an age of rapid intellectual change. Disknowledge describes how John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, John Dee, Christopher Marlowe, William Harvey, Helkiah Crooke, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare used alchemical imagery, rhetoric, and habits of thought to shunt aside three difficult questions: how theories of matter shared their physics with Roman Catholic transubstantiation; how Christian Hermeticism depended on Jewish Kabbalah; and how new anatomical learning acknowledged women's role in human reproduction. Disknowledge further shows how Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Margaret Cavendish used the language of alchemy to castigate humanism for its blind spots and to invent a new, posthumanist mode of knowledge: writing fiction. Covering a wide range of authors and topics, Disknowledge is the first book to analyze how English Renaissance literature employed alchemy to probe the nature and limits of learning. The concept of disknowledge—willfully adhering to something we know is wrong—resonates across literary and cultural studies as an urgent issue of our own era.

Blotted Lines

Blotted Lines PDF Author: Adhaar Noor Desai
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501769863
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
Blotted Lines rebuffs centuries of mythologization about the creative process—the idea that William Shakespeare "never blotted out line"—to argue that by studying how early modern writers faced the challenges of writing poetry, instructors today can empower their students' approaches to critical writing. Adhaar Noor Desai offers deeply researched accounts of how poetic labor intersected with early modern rhetorical theory, material culture, and social networks. Tracing the productive struggles of such writers as George Gascoigne, Philip Sidney, John Davies of Hereford, Lady Anne Southwell, and Shakespeare across their manuscripts, Desai identifies in their work instances of discomposition: frustration, hesitation, self-doubt, and insecurity. Inspired to unmake their poems so that they might remake them, these poets welcomed discomposition because it catalyzed ongoing thinking and learning. Blotted Lines brings literary scholarship into conversation with modern composition studies, challenging early modern literary studies to treat writing as both noun and verb and foregrounding the ways poetry and criticism alike can model for students the cultivation of patience, collaboration, and risk in their writing.

Renaissance Papers 2021

Renaissance Papers 2021 PDF Author: Jim Pearce
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 164014143X
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 171

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Book Description
Essays on a wide range of topics including the role of early modern chess in upholding Aristotelian virtue; readings of Sidney, Wroth, Spenser, and Shakespeare; and several topics involving the New World.

Shakespeare Studies, volume 45

Shakespeare Studies, volume 45 PDF Author: James R. Siemon
Publisher: Associated University Presse
ISBN: 0838644864
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
Shakespeare Studies is an annual volume featuring the work of scholars, critics, and cultural historians from across the globe. This issue includes a Forum on the drama of the 1580s, from eleven contributors; a Next Gen Plenary, from four contributors, three articles, and reviews of sixteen books.

The Alchemist in Literature

The Alchemist in Literature PDF Author: Theodore Ziolkowski
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198746830
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
This study traces the figure of the alchemist in Western literature from its first appearance in Dante down to the present. From the beginning alchemy has had two aspects: exoteric or operative (the transmutation of baser metals into gold) and esoteric or speculative (the spiritual transformation of the alchemist himself). As scholarly interest in alchemy intensified, writers were attracted to the figure of the alchemist and his quest for power. The figure of the alchemist in literature provides a seismograph for major shifts in intellectual and cultural history.

Ovidian Transversions

Ovidian Transversions PDF Author: Valerie Traub
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781474448918
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
The only scholarly monograph to focus on Ovid's 'Iphis and Ianthe'.

Impossible Desire and the Limits of Knowledge in Renaissance Poetry

Impossible Desire and the Limits of Knowledge in Renaissance Poetry PDF Author: Wendy Beth Hyman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019257440X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Impossible Desire and the Limits of Knowledge in Renaissance Poetry examines the limits of embodiment, knowledge, and representation at a disregarded nexus: the erotic carpe diem poem in early modern England. These macabre seductions offer no compliments or promises, but instead focus on the lovers' anticipated decline, and—quite stunningly given the Reformation context—humanity's relegation not to a Christian afterlife but to a Marvellian 'desert of vast Eternity.' In this way, a poetic trope whose classical form was an expression of pragmatic Epicureanism became, during the religious upheaval of the Reformation, an unlikely but effective vehicle for articulating religious doubt. Its ambitions were thus largely philosophical, and came to incorporate investigations into the nature of matter, time, and poetic representation. Renaissance seduction poets invited their auditors to participate in a dangerous intellectual game, one whose primary interest was expanding the limits of knowledge. The book theorizes how Renaissance lyric's own fragile relationship to materiality and time, and its self-conscious relationship to making, positioned it to grapple with these 'impossible' metaphysical and representational problems. Although attentive to poetics, the book also challenges the commonplace view that the erotic invitation is exclusively a lyrical mode. Carpe diem's revival in post-Reformation Europe portends its radicalization, as debates between man and maid are dramatized in disputes between abstractions like chastity and material facts like death. Offered here is thus a theoretical reconsideration of the generic parameters and aspirations of the carpe diem trope, wherein questions about embodiment and knowledge are also investigations into the potentialities of literary form.

Forbidden Passages

Forbidden Passages PDF Author: Karoline P. Cook
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812248244
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Forbidden Passages is the first book to document and evaluate the impact of Moriscos—Christian converts from Islam—in the early modern Americas, and how their presence challenged notions of what it meant to be Spanish as the Atlantic empire expanded.

Catastrophizing

Catastrophizing PDF Author: Gerard Passannante
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022661235X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
When we catastrophize, we think the worst. We make too much of too little, or something of nothing. Yet what looks simply like a bad habit, Gerard Passannante argues, was also a spur to some of the daring conceptual innovations and feats of imagination that defined the intellectual and cultural history of the early modern period. Reaching back to the time between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, Passannante traces a history of catastrophizing through literary and philosophical encounters with materialism—the view that the world is composed of nothing but matter. As artists, poets, philosophers, and scholars pondered the physical causes and material stuff of the cosmos, they conjured up disasters out of thin air and responded as though to events that were befalling them. From Leonardo da Vinci’s imaginative experiments with nature’s destructive forces to the fevered fantasies of doomsday astrologers, from the self-fulfilling prophecies of Shakespeare’s tragic characters to the mental earthquakes that guided Kant toward his theory of the sublime, Passannante shows how and why the early moderns reached for disaster when they ventured beyond the limits of the sensible. He goes on to explore both the danger and the critical potential of thinking catastrophically in our own time.