This Distracted Globe

Jonathan Goldberg, Karen Newman

Description

Worldmaking takes many forms in early modern literature and thus challenges any single interpretive approach. The essays in this collection investigate the material stuff of the world in Spenser, Cary, and Marlowe; the sociable bonds of authorship, sexuality, and sovereignty in Shakespeare and others; and the universal status of spirit, gender, and empire in the worlds of Vaughan, Donne, and the dastan (tale) of Chouboli, a Rajasthani princess. Together, these essays make the case that to address what it takes to make a world in the early modern period requires the kinds of thinking exemplified by theory.

Informations

• Publié par: Fordham University Press
• Date de parution: 01 avril 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780823270316
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

T h i s D i s t r a c t e d G l o b e

This Distracted Globe Worldmaking in Early Modern Literature

Marcie Frank, Jonathan Goldberg, and Karen Newman Editors

f o r d h a m u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s New York 2016

Copyright © 2016 Fordham University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Frank, Marcie, editor. Goldberg, Jonathan, editor. Newman, Karen, 1949– editor. Title: This distracted globe : worldmaking in early modern literature / edited by Marcie Frank, Jonathan Goldberg, Karen Newman. Description: New York : Fordham University Press, 2016. Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers:lccn2015036362 isbn9780823270286 (hardback) isbn9780823270293 (paper) Subjects:lcsh: English literature—Early modern, 1500 –1700 —History and criticism. Material culture in literature. Literature and society—England—History—16th century. Literature and society—England—History—17th century. BISAC: LITERARY CRITICISM / Renaissance. Classification:lcc pr428.m38 d57 2016 ddc820.9/003—dc23lcrecord available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015036362

Printed in the United States of America 18 17 16 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

Preface

c o n t e n t s

Introduction: World Enough and Time jonathan goldberg (with karen newman and marcie frank)

Part I.materiality 1. Worldly Muck: Translating Matter in Book 2 ofThe Faerie Queene brent dawson 2. ExtremCeary david glimp 3.MarloweF’osotstools aaron kunin

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Part II.sociality “Who Is Speaking Here?”: Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Modern Authorship, and the Contemporary University robert matz Hamletand the Truth about Friendship james kuzner “Racked . . . to the Uttermost”: The Verges of Love and Subjecthood inThe Merchant of Venice lara bovilsky Cities of the Stranger meredith evans

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Part III.universality What It Feels Like to Be a Body: Humoralism, Cognitivism, and the Sociological Horizon of Early Modern Religion daniel juan gil Woman as World: The Female Microcosm / Macrocosm in Shakespeare and Donne lynn maxwell The Nether Lands of Chouboli’sDastan madhavi menon

Acknowledgments List of Contributors Index

Contents

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231 233 237

p r e f a c e

The essays in this volume were prompted by “Writing Sex and Other Mat- ters with Jonathan Goldberg,” a conference held at Brown University on September 21–22, 2012. Papers presented at the conference lie behind about half of the essays found in the pages that follow. These essays, we found, spoke to essays offered subsequently by other contributors, often in surprising, unplanned ways, across markedly different scholarly styles. This confluence furthered the prospect of a collection, of which this book is the result. The various contributions take up questions of materiality — of bodies, of writing — that project and encompass the multiple worlds we inhabit and from which we imagine our world differently, a distracted re- lationality, to recall Hamlet’s phrase about the globe that has come to title this collection of essays. Hamlet’s “globe” is a figure for the world, for his head, and for the stage on which he performs and speaks the words provided for him in a script he is at that moment claiming to attempt to remember and inscribe within. These concerns about multiple materiali- ties reflect an abiding interest for Goldberg as a literary theorist and prime mover of queer theory, but it is especially gratifying that a conference in his honor helped to produce scholarship with a freestanding life of its own, for dynamic generativity is at the heart of his scholarly and pedagogical ethos. In their different ways, these essays reflect the worldmaking power of Renaissance literature. As the entry in the recentDictionary of Untrans- latablesreminds us,worldis not a term with singular meaning. It includes cosmological, ontological, theological, chronological, sociological, an- 1 thropological, and existential senses. As Roland Greene observes in the “World” section of his recentFive Words, an exploration of five generative concepts in early modernity, the questions that move throughworldin the period were provoked by the scientific and philosophic theories of mul- tiple worlds as well as by colonialist ventures into the so-called New World that threw the relations between subject formation and worldmaking into question. “World” is about relations between the whole and the partial, the

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singular and the multiple, the corporeal and the abstract, the natural and the constructed, the human and the divine, the subjective and the corpo- rate, questions central for early modernity. These are not questions simply 2 confined to the wordworldalthough that word is not sounded in every. So, essay in this collection (the introduction addresses a Spenserian etymology forworld), the questions raised in these essays resonate with the multiple meanings ofworld. Ranging across the canonical writers of the period, the essays collected here treat the world as cosmos, globe, earth, universe, so- cial sphere, and mundanity in order to explore these meanings. Although most of the essays focus on early modern English literature, these forays into worldmaking extend beyond the boundaries of a single literary tradi- tion. This is most palpably evident in the wide range of theoretical con- cerns engaged in the volume, as well as in their rich contextualization that ranges from Pauline doctrines to the throne of Saint Peter, from classical sources to the creation of Urdu. Reflecting on the range of meanings ofworld, the essays are grouped into three categories: Materiality, Sociality, and Universality — rubrics meant to suggest some of the ways essays on disparate authors, genres, and topics, and displaying differences in methodology and outlook, nonethe- less speak to one another as well as to concerns that may engage readers with interests in these topics more broadly. The first group —with essays by Brent Dawson on Edmund Spenser, David Glimp on Elizabeth Cary, and Aaron Kunin on Christopher Marlowe — explores the stuff of which the world is made and the objects it fails to contain. The second group — featuring Robert Matz on Shakespeare’s sonnets, James Kuzner on friend- ship inHamlet, Lara Bovilsky on the extremity of male-male relations in The Merchant of Venice, and Meredith Evans on pirates and global relations of belonging — deals with the social relations the world enables or disables. The third group —with essays by Daniel Juan Gil on religious bodies in Henry Vaughan, Lynn Maxwell on microcosm /macrocosm tropes in John Donne and Shakespeare, and Madhavi Menon on Chouboli’sDastan— con- templates the applicability of the norms of one world to another, whether that transfer happens between this world and the hereafter, within the gen- dered spheres of male and female, or in relations between the “fi rst” and “third” worlds. Equally invested in exposing the worldmaking and world- destroying energies of the texts they analyze, these essays’ shared interest in the instability of their texts’ worlds means that they also overlap across the rubrics in which we have grouped them. The introduction to the vol- ume offers further discussion ofworldandworldmakingby way of rumina- tions on the multiple ways these essays speak to one another; it also offers

Preface

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a theoretical framework for reflecting on worldmaking in early modern literature through readings of Spenser as well as Sir Thomas Browne, John Milton, and Andrew Marvell (the last three not addressed at length else- where in this collection). It ends by considering how this volume furthers the work of queering the Renaissance.

notes  1. Barbara Cassin, ed.,Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, trans. Steven Rendall, Christian Hubert, Jeffrey Mehlman, Natha- nael Stein, and Michael Syrotinski; trans. ed. Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 1265. Originally published asVocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des in- traduisibles(Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 2004). An entry for “Welt” can be found on 1217–34 and an entry on “planetary” on 1223. R2.olaGnrdeene,Five Words(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 143–72.