Frame, Glass, Verse

Rayna Kalas

Description

In a book that draws attention to some of our most familiar and unquestioned habits of thought-from "framing" to "perspective" to "reflection"-Rayna Kalas suggests that metaphors of the poetic imagination were once distinctly material and technical in character. Kalas explores the visual culture of the English Renaissance by way of the poetic image, showing that English writers avoided charges of idolatry and fancy through conceits that were visual, but not pictorial. Frames, mirrors, and windows have been pervasive and enduring metaphors for texts from classical antiquity to modernity; as a result, those metaphors seem universally to emphasize the mimetic function of language, dividing reality from the text that represents it. This book dissociates those metaphors from their earlier and later formulations in order to demonstrate that figurative language was material in translating signs and images out of a sacred and iconic context and into an aesthetic and representational one. Reading specific poetic images-in works by Spenser, Shakespeare, Gascoigne, Bacon, and Nashe-together with material innovations in frames and glass, Kalas reveals both the immanence and the agency of figurative language in the early modern period.Frame, Glass, Verse shows, finally, how this earlier understanding of poetic language has been obscured by a modern idea of framing that has structured our apprehension of works of art, concepts, and even historical periods. Kalas presents archival research in the history of frames, mirrors, windows, lenses, and reliquaries that will be of interest to art historians, cultural theorists, historians of science, and literary critics alike. Throughout Frame, Glass, Verse, she challenges readers to rethink the relationship of poetry to technology.

Sujets

• Reino Unido
• History of art
• United Kingdom
• History of science
• Great Britain
• Royaume-Uni

Informations

• Publié par: Cornell University Press
• Date de parution: 15 décembre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781501727320
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 14 Mo

Extrait

frame, glass, verse

Frame, Glass, Verse

The Technology of Poetic Invention

in the English Renaissance

Rayna Kalas

Cornell University Press Ithaca & London

This book has been published with the aid of a grant from the Hull Memorial Publication Fund of Cornell University.

Copyright ©2007by Cornell University

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House,512East State Street, Ithaca, New York14850. Visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu.

First published2007by Cornell University Press First paperback printing2018

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data Kalas, Rayna,1968–  Frame, glass, verse : technology of poetic invention in the English Renaissance / Rayna Kalas.  p. cm.  Includes bibliographical references and index.  ISBN9780801445415(cloth : alk. paper)  ISBN9781501730887(pbk. : alk. paper) 1. English poetry—Early modern,1500–1700—History and criticism. 2and criticism.. Framestories—History 3. Poetics—History— 16th century.4. Mirrors in literature.5. Invention (Rhetoric). 6I. Title.. Renaissance—England.  PR535.F7K352007 821'.309—dc22

For Barbara Jean Nelson, who taught me to see through things and to see them

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Contents

Preface ix Acknowledgments xvii Introduction: The Renaissance and Its Period Frames 1 The Frame before the Work of Art 22 The Craft of Poesy and the Framing of Verse 54 The Tempered Frame 82 Poetic Offices and the Conceit of the Mirror 106 Poesy, Progress, and the Perspective Glass 133 “Shakes-speare’s Sonnets” and the Properties of Glass 166 Coda: The Material Sign and the Transparency of Language Notes 207 Index 239

199

Preface

Traditional thinking, and the common-sense habits it left behind after fading out philosophically, demand a frame of reference in which all things have their place. Not too much importance is attached to the intelligibility of the frame—it may even be laid down in dogmatic axioms—if only each reflec- tion can be localized, and if unframed thoughts are kept out. But a cognition that is to bear fruit will throw itself to the objectsà fond perdu. The vertigo this causes is anindex veri; the shock of inconclusiveness, the negative as which it cannot help appearing in the frame-covered, never-changing realm, is true for untruth only.

—Theodor W. Adorno,Negative Dialectics

This book is interested in poetry’s ability to make visible things that might otherwise remain unseen: such things as time, systems of social rank, the phys- ical properties of matter, the processes of the imagination. Some of these things are unseen because intangible. Others are solid material things, things that are a part of everyday reality, but are overlooked precisely because they are familiar, inherent, or routinized. Poetic language brings things to light: it makes the opaque transparent, to use a contemporary idiom. This book is in- terested inhowfigurative language achieves such disclosure. I cannot say, strictly speaking, that this is my interest, because such disclosures belong to the history of poetics. In the case of Renaissance poetry, the interest in how po- etry reveals things gets expressed in figures of framing and images of glass. Framing and glass reveal a crucial aspect of Renaissance poetic imagery: its character as a material practice and a technical craft.

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