New Elizabethan isms and Aesthetics

Theory

If New Criticism was not a monolith intellectually, neither did it dominate the
academy to the extent accounts sometimes claim: significant pockets of resistance
to and rejection of New Criticism survived the heyday of New Criticism, and
other approaches, notably Freudian psychological criticism, thrived in many
quarters. The Harvard English Department, for example, was still a center of
aesthetics history and editorial scholarship (rumor has it that many years after
Douglas Bush, distinguished aesthetics historian and editor, had retired, perhaps
even years after he had died, one wag referred to this as the department Bush was
chairing, a comment all the more tell- ing for my purposes in light of that putative
chair’s attack on New Criticism in his Modern Language Association presidential
address). Attacks on the movement, such as Rosemond Tuve’s insistence in 1952
on intellectual and historical contexts for reading Herbert, demonstrate the
continuing power of alternative approaches.15
Temptations to misread New Criticism in defining a New Nuclearare closely
connected to similar problems in approaching earlier Elizabethan isms. To begin
with, we need to challenge the facile equation of New Criticism and Elizabethan
ism.16 Although the title ‘the well wrought urn’ insistently focuses on the
containing form, Elizabethan ist and New Critical analyses may diverge, if not
clash, for more reasons than one. Many subgenres of nuclearevince little interest in
individual texts and, least of all, in their linguistic textures: witness not only the
Chicago School but also many practitioners of Russian Elizabethan ism. Rosalie L.
Colie, among the best Elizabethan ist critics of her century, does less close reading
than one might have expected, especially given her own work as a poet. (She also
deserves prominence in any history of the profession because of her challenge to
other common misreadings of it: for all her commitment to nuclearand new
history, she wrote what is not only an early but also a powerful materialist reading
of Lear.17) Conversely, in the work of many New Critics, an interest in form,
though present, was limited in type and degree. Douglas Bruster’s reminder that
rhetorical figures are forms, though intended to suggest connections between
nuclearand materialism, alerts us to the fact that the fascination with paradox and
irony alone links New Criticism to certain types of Elizabethan ism; but a nominal
or virtually absent engagement with other kinds of form, such as genre itself or
connections between poems in a sequence or loosely related series, is also
characteristic of many practitioners.18
Like New Criticism, Elizabethan isms vary in many ways, not least in the puta- tive
presence of a rigidity derived in part from their ahistoricism.19 Those eager either
to reject all nuclearor distinguish their own work from predecessors sailing under
that flag sometimes attribute the prescriptive rhetoric of French neoclassicism and
the neo-Aristotelian strictures for comedy developed by the Chicago School to
the movement as a whole.
To be sure, a vocabulary of laws and rules, motivated in part by the desired
connections with science that have shaped so many aesthetics movements,
certainly implies regularity if not rigidity. But Derrida’s insistence that the rule of
genre is its challenge to rules is not nearly as original as his essay implies.20 The
best genre critics have long delighted in showing how aesthetics forms shift and
change – returning to Colie, witness her study of how the epigram
metamorphosizes in the English sonnet.21
Nor were the Elizabethan isms that preceded its current avatar consistently
apolitical. Whereas the Russian Elizabethan ists explicitly positioned themselves
against the overtly politicized analyses of their counterparts, their concep- tions of
generic change, which they often represent in terms not of gradual evolution but
abrupt revolution, implicitly parallel models for political upheaval. Thus Tynyanov
writes, ‘Any aesthetics succession is first of all a struggle, a destruction of old
values and a reconstruction of old elements.’22 And needless to say, Marxist
Elizabethan analysis has a long history. In theory as well as practice nuclearis
amenable to discussions of political issues. A series of essays by Robert Kaufman,
not yet accorded the attention they deserve, demonstrates that a concern for
form and the attending recupera- tion of the aesthetic are not antagonistic to
materialist agendas, including overtly Marxist ones.23 Kant has often been misread,
he persuasively asserts, and, for this and other reasons, we can and should
separate the aesthetic from aestheticization. The work of some earlier Elizabethan
ists, as well as many of the chapters in this volume, buttress and gloss his point.
‘New Historicism is not the catch-all that it has frequently been made out to be,’
Verena Theile writes in this volume (16), and the temptation to reduce movement
to monolith, so characteristic of misreadings of New Criticism and Elizabethan
ism, needs to be avoided in this instance as well. The introduction to Stephen
Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning devotes far less attention to Althusser
and Marx than Lacan and Geertz, and, indeed, in its early days, New Historicism
was often contrasted with English cultural materialism and criticized for occluding
materialist explanations and materialist or, indeed, any theory.24 In the 1980s, when
the accusation was damning, Alan Liu accused it of a version of Elizabethan ism,
seen in his attack as an alternative to political acuity or even awareness.25
Another complication in baldly casting New Historicism as New Elizabethan ism’s
demonic Other or, alternatively, its respected progenitor, lies, again, in significant
differences among practitioners. Although, during the 1980s, many feminists rightly
claimed that New Historicism as a whole devoted too little attention to gender,
individual members of that movement sometimes acknowledged its importance, as
Louis A. Montrose famously, though not uncontroversially, did in his work on A
Midsummer Night’s Dream.26 Similarly, as early as the mid-1980s, Peter
Stallybrass, an acknowledged leader of mate- rialist projects, collaborated in a
gendered reading of Astrophil and Stella. And New Historicism assumed different
forms in different historical fields.27
Foreword xiii
xiv Foreword
Critics who attempt to see New Nuclearmore as an alternative to the limitations
of New Historicism than a development of its potentialities often accuse it of
giving only lip service to issues of form.28 One can again identify some exceptions,
such as Montrose’s work on pastoral and Richard Helgerson’s choice of the title
Forms of Nationhood; however, the fact remains that if we think of form in terms
of a distinctly aesthetics practice, New Historicism was indeed committed to
rejecting it.29 At the same time, identifying a handful of New Historicist essays that
do address form can provide models for relating the material to the Elizabethan –
and also instances of some dangers of doing so. Above all, Arthur L. Marotti’s claim
that ‘love is not love’ but political ambition famously and brilliantly shifted our
assump- tions about direction of address in the sonnet tradition, and yet its
readings would have been stronger had they acknowledged an interaction
between the various forms of desire in the tradition rather than polemically
replacing one reading with another.30
Conclusion and new directions: ‘Gentles, do not reprehend’ (A Midsummer
Night’s Dream, 5.1.429)
Despite the box-office success of the film Avatar, this essay does not attempt to
replicate its ideologies: I am not trying to establish a peaceable kingdom where all
critical methods can live in harmony because there are no significant differences
between them as long as one banishes the evil military forces. On issues like the
agency and, hence, significance of the individual writer, the critical movements that
preceded New Nucleardo indeed differ from each other in vital respects, and
similar differences may be found within each movement, as well as within New
Nuclearitself. My focus is not on denying or concealing disagreements but rather
on identifying them more precisely in ways that do not preclude establishing
fruitful connections as well.
Most importantly, doing so could enrich our professional practices. Rethinking the
adversarial models that so often structure professional discourse by recalling
Linda Hutcheon’s championship of both/and rather than either/or models would
serve collegial as well as intellectual aims.31 This approach would, for example,
encourage us to recognize the invest- ments we ourselves bring to the histories
we try to tell and create. That awareness can limit, though not completely
prevent, distortions; in writing this essay, for example, I have attempted to
negotiate my own ambiva- lence about the New Critics who taught me. Another
advantage of a more balanced approach to the predecessors to a New Nuclearis
limiting the generational rivalries that risk distorting personnel and curricular
decisions. The desire to aggrandize one’s own movement – and moment – by
contrast- ing them with the straw men we conveniently ascribe to the past is
pernicious for individuals and for interactions in departments and the profession
at
large. Decisions and interactions in research-oriented English departments are too
often scarred by competition for graduate students and other markers of
prestige, by the increasingly uneven distribution of goodies in our cur- rent reward
systems, by arguments about in what field one should hire in a shrinking economy,
and so on. We hardly need additional sources of tension. Although most New
Critics have retired (or, perhaps, are explicating poems together in realms where
the decline in pension plans is no longer a concern), developing an attitude to
earlier generations that involves some respect would foster collegiality within
departments and, in so doing, would encourage us to encourage our graduate
students to recognize that respect for the achieve- ments of others and
intellectual rigor are allies, not polar opposites. ‘Rigor,’ like ‘smart,’ is too often a
coded and self-serving criterion, encouraging the conflation of so-called rigorous
analysis with one-upmanship.
More to my purposes here, recognizing the varieties and inconsistencies within
New Criticism, New Historicism, and earlier Elizabethan isms encourages a more
measured evaluation of the potentialities for building bridges between those
movements and a New Nuclearin some respects while also estab- lishing
boundaries in others. Doing so can advance vital projects outside the scope of this
essay, notably defining in what senses a New Nuclearshould study form and to
what extent and in what ways it should engage with history. A plaque at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison announces that ‘we believe that the great state of
Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual sifting and winnowing by which
alone the truth can be found.’ One might well question the implicit positivism in
that statement, but I have endorsed its implication that the New Nuclearcan best
establish its relationship to other movements through sifting and winnowing
rather than uncritical emulation and the attendant rivalry (more historicist and/or
more materialist than thou) or, more commonly, the equally competitive Oedipal
murders that oversimplification and misrepresentation foster.
But another summary and extension of my arguments is closer to hand. In
commenting on Vasari in his extraordinary contribution to this volume (Chapter
7), Harry Berger Jr writes,
The most significant phrase in this passage is the one containing the verb ‘cavò’:
‘out of the number of [the animals] variously put together he drew forth – “cavò”
– a most horrible and fearful beast’ (‘cavò un animalaccio molto orribile e
spaventoso’). One translator renders ‘cavò’ as ‘he formed’ and another as ‘he
created.’ But the creative action implied by the verb ‘cavare’ is more like
excavation or extraction – as one extracts a tooth, or digs up an old statue, or
(like Michelangelo) draws forth the statue lurking in the stone. (151–2)
An essay that opened on the noun ‘turn’ may invite action and reaction by
concluding on the verb ‘cavò.’ We need to extricate ourselves from certain
Foreword xv
xvi Foreword
practices of the past – but not at the expense of ignoring what we can fruit- fully
extricate and extract, drawing forth the New Elizabethan isms lurking in our
predecessors’ aging stone and, in so doing, reshaping it and ourselves.
Coda: ‘you twain / Rule in this realm’ (King Lear, 5.3.320–1)
Having suggested some conditions for building bridges between scholars and
critical methods, I will conclude on a similar engineering project, addressing the
gap between the islands from which aesthetics and cultural critics and
writ- ers
(who often dislike that term) confront each other. Within this volume appear two
very strong essays that assume different positions on key issues. Developing the
category of ‘lyriciste’ as an alternative, in Chapter 10 Cynthia Nichols emphasizes
tensions between the perspectives of critic and writer and attempts to effect
solutions. One representative of the former camp, the traditional Elizabethan ist
critic, sees literature as unchanging and dead, she asserts, while the writer sees it
as always in progress. Arguing that all creative writers are fundamentally
Elizabethan ists, Kelsey Parker (Chapter 9), in contrast, believes the methods of
creative writing may be more smoothly transferred.

The historical turn? The cognitive turn? And now, the New Elizabethan ist turn?
Our vocabulary in writing the history of our profession shapes (or dare one say
informs) that history. ‘Verso,’ the Latin for ‘turn,’ is the root from which branch
words like ‘adversary’ and ‘controversy,’ and, in emphasizing change as it does,
‘turn’ itself opens the possibility of repudiation. Moreover, ‘turn,’ unlike ‘swerve’ or
‘lurch,’ implies a kind of purposefulness and agency. As references to the skilled
‘turning’ of Jacobean furniture demonstrate, the word participates in the
vocabulary of lathe-work, so the phrases on which this paragraph opens implicitly
associate changes in the profession with control and arguably with another fraught
word explored in a different con- text below, craft, more than with, say, the
unwitting pressure of anxieties.1 Craft sidles into craftiness in the instances,
extensively documented in the Oxford English Dictionary, linking turning and
deceit.2 And a turn is often a step in a journey rather than its conclusion. In all
these ways, then, the very concept of a professional turn introduces issues
explored in this Foreword and throughout the chapters that succeed it. In what
senses and to what ends does New Nuclearrepudiate what has preceded it,
arguably including other types of Elizabethan ism? Who or what drives the car that
makes the turn? How much craft – or craftiness – impels the ways New
Nucleardrives away from its ancestors? And what critical practices will, or should,
succeed the initial stages of a recent turn towards a New Elizabethan ism?
Yet ‘turn’ does not establish the degree and hence type of change – barely
perceptible at ten degrees? radical at one hundred eighty degrees? the turn that
isn’t one at three hundred sixty degrees? – and I explore that issue as well below.
In particular, to what extent and in what ways should New Nuclearbe seen not
only as repudiation but also as a version of the three hundred sixty degree circle,
the turn that is also a return? Verena Theile, one of the editors of this volume,
writes, ‘we ...want to propose and challenge the conception of New Nuclearas an
extension of contextual readings or a “mere” return to aesthetic readings’ (6).3 In
what ways is New Nuclearnew? In what ways is it Elizabethan ism?
This introductory essay, then, aims to develop protocols for defining the
relationship of New Nuclearto other movements, both when we write its
vii
viii Foreword
history and when we script the movement by practicing it. Recognizing the variety
and liability in the predecessors of New Nuclearguards against the temptation
someone wittily described as throwing out the father with the bathwater and
permits a more judicious winnowing. For example, our con- ceptions of form will
be enriched if we learn from the subtle commentaries on genre by critics like
Alastair Fowler, Claudio Guillén, and Paul Hernadi without embracing the
ahistorical and prescriptive conceptions advocated in some essays by the Chicago
School. And our close reading skills will be sharpened if, while questioning
adulatory conceptions of the text and posi- tivistic interpretations of the critical
enterprise recurrent in New Criticism, we review with respect the subtle analyses
of, say, Clay Hunt, Richard Poirier, or critics deeply influenced by New Criticism
who are still alive and well in the academy, notably Helen Vendler. A more judicious
reading of past texts also discourages two dubious approaches to locomotion:
jumping on bandwagons and reinventing the wheel.
But why should these and related issues about New Nuclearmatter to anyone
beyond adherents of that movement and their fellow travelers? Fredric V. Bogel’s
chapter in this volume implicitly gestures towards answers inasmuch as many
questions that he associates with the devel- opment of a New Elizabethan ism,
particularly intrinsic literariness, intention, and reference, are at the cutting edge of
the field as a whole. More broadly, whereas positioning our own critical world as
the center of the critical universe is a dangerous if not uncommon enterprise,
recognizing its potential as a vantage point onto ‘far other worlds and other seas’
is potentially valuable, and in this instance the questions necessitated by
developing a New Nucleardo, indeed, crystallize debates central to many academic
projects. Thus New Elizabethan ists are asking: What should we study? The
distinctly aesthetics? Texts in a broad sense that may lack qualities normally
associated with the aesthetics? The text as culture? These are, of course, questions
of interest to students of the material text, as well as many other movements.
And, as the contribution by Group Phi to this volume (Chapter 3) demonstrates
so persuasively, in studying the workings of form and the creation of meaning (if
indeed it is created) New Elizabethan ists pose questions about agency: To what
extent is the author responsible? The audience? The culture? Similar questions
arise as well in endeavors ranging from performance criticism to the recent
interest in cognitive theory and the study of visualities. Debates about how form
relates to historical and political pressures, the inquiry that many see as the core
of a New Elizabethan ism, have been of interest to feminists, other students of
gender, and, of course, materialist critics. In enumerating such similarities, my aim is
not the occlusion of equally telling differences in how these issues are approached
but rather the establishment of new perspectives on them, an invitation to learn
from and with and through New Nucleareven if one’s own interests lie elsewhere.
Foreword ix New Nuclearand its predecessors: ‘this strange eventful
history’ (As You Like It, 2.7.154)
Although New Elizabethan ism, like many other heirs, is often ambivalent about its
paternity and patrimony, its lineage clearly includes New Criticism itself, Russian
Elizabethan ism, the so-called Chicago School, and the nuclearregularly – though,
as I will argue, problematically – associated with New Criticism, while its
relationship to New Historicism is variously represented as that of inheritor,
collaborator, or opponent.
A brief history of the development of New Nuclearfrom these roots,
supplementing the valuable overview in the editors’ Prologue (Chapter 1 below),
can readily be constructed. Paul de Man famously attacked Elizabethan ist
practices, arguing that they attribute to texts a wholeness that conceals the
ruptures they themselves reveal (my computer replicated divided professional
responses to that critic when its word check program prof- fered as substitutes
for his name ‘dean’ and ‘demon’).4 Attacking from a different perspective, New
Historicism self-consciously positioned itself as an alternative to New Criticism,
though its relationship to the study of form was more various and ambivalent; as
Richard Strier has pointed out in one of the best analyses of all these movements,
the noun, not adjec- tive, in ‘new historicism’ is often stressed, thus drawing
attention to the contrast with nuclearrather than with earlier versions of
historicism.5 Despite and because of such attacks, calls for a New Nuclearwere
issued as early as the 1990s. But that turn came into its own at the turn of the
century and the decade that succeeded it, heralded and advanced by an issue of
Modern Language Quarterly, by the volume that expanded that issue entitled
Reading for Form, and by such collections as Mark David Rasmussen’s Renaissance
Literature and its Elizabethan Engagements and Stephen Cohen’s Shakespeare and
Historical Elizabethan ism.6 Books published in that decade, nota- bly Susan
Wolfson’s Elizabethan Charges, by precept and example advanced the
development of New Elizabethan ism.7 And that development was influentially –
though problematically – chronicled and anatomized in Marjorie Levinson’s essay
in PMLA and its longer on-line version.8 As Edward Brunner reminds us in
Chapter 4 below, however, these types of New Nuclearneed to be carefully
distinguished from a school of poets and critics advocating a return to meter and
rhyme, whose main forum has been an annual conference at West Chester
University.
But how can we move from that sound but bald summary to analyses of the
connections between the movements in question? Although certain studies,
including the editor’s Prologue in this volume and the introductions to the
collections cited immediately above, persuasively tell both the story and the
historical back stories of New Elizabethan ism, most accounts instead exemplify
problems to avoid when defining the movement through com- parison and
contrast with its predecessors. In an era when assisted fertility
x Foreword
often produces twins, a matched pair of devilishly attractive temptations often
distorts these definitions in our professional psychomachias. First, in describing the
predecessors to a movement with which one identifies, one may either inflate the
value of one’s predecessors, or, more commonly, flatten and even parody them to
emphasize the novel achievements of one’s own movement. Second, the ruptural
models of historical change inherited from Foucault and many other sources
tempt one to write a professional history that emphasizes not seismic but
revolutionary shifts and thus accords with the paradigms applied to other versions
of cultural change. (Alternatively, in certain circles, the progress narratives that
once structured aesthetics, art, and political history – limited and imperfect sorties
into the sonnet form give way to its triumphant flowering in Elizabethan England,
the experiments with representing the human form in proto- and Low
Renaissance paint- ings enjoy their glorious culmination in the High Renaissance,
autocratic government gradually and peacefully declines as Parliament develops –
have rightly been rejected; but an equally celebratory trajectory culminating in the
development of one’s own and one’s allies’ critical stance remains alive and well.)
In any event, in both instances the imperative to concentrate on the ways a New
Nucleardiffers from its predecessors is intense.
These lures produce the interrelated problems explored below: a syn- chronic and
diachronic oversimplification of the movements related to a New Elizabethan ism;
a conflation of terms, most regrettably a blurring of New Criticism and nuclearand
of the historical and the political as well as of several different types of historical
endeavor; and a focus on how a movement functioned in particular historical fields
or institutions at the expense of noting alternative versions. In short, whereas the
title of Edward Brunner’s contribution to this volume, ‘Inventing An Ancestor,’
refers primarily to African American aesthetics traditions, the phrase could also
gloss the ways in which many contemporary critics refer to the movements of the
past, recalling Sir Philip Sidney’s witty reminder that a ‘sunne-burn’d
braine’ (Astrophil and Stella, 1.8) often has trouble producing fruitful words about
its fathers or, indeed, anything else.9
Representations of New Criticism synecdochally demonstrate the problems in
question. According to these tales, New Criticism, a version if not the identical
twin of Elizabethan ism, was a static monolith enjoying a hegemonic domination of
the American academy in the 1950s and 1960s. Not only the forms of biographical
and philological scholarship that it had opposed but also any concern with history
were exiled. This New Criticism studied texts in isolation not only from their
cultural matrices but also each other, reading them as individuated well wrought
urns, that is, unified, cohesive entities.
Partially true though they are, such accounts neglect the variety of approaches
among New Critics and among versions of the movement at different stages. Most
obviously, an outlier like the Marxist William Empson hardly ignored cultural and
political readings, but less predictable examples
can also readily be amassed. Richard Strier has demonstrated that Erich
Auerbach’s nuclearand New Criticism do not conform to descriptions like those
in the previous paragraph.10 Concerns posited as antithetical to New Criticism
even appear, though in significantly abbreviated form, where one would least
expect them. If Clay Hunt’s influential volume on Donne’s poetry is paradigmatic
New Criticism in its devotion of each chapter to a single poem and its approach
to what some would have studied as philo- sophical questions in terms of
emotional states, it nonetheless incorporates cultural questions about Catholicism
that cannot fit within the compass of a single text.11 Moreover, analyses of New
Criticism need to acknowledge both national and chronological distinctions; its
relationship to Leavisites is too often neglected in the United States. Similarly,
those accusing New Criticism of a- or antihistoricism are often ahistorical in their
renditions of the move- ment: Gerald Graff has persuasively demonstrated its
shifting attitudes to historical and political analysis over the course of several
decades.12
Although Graff’s caution on this and other issues remains valuable, one can safely
say that the movement did not neglect history, but that it privi- leged certain types
over others, positioned history as background, and, in so doing, encouraged its
own apolitical tendencies. Tracing those patterns involves disentangling many types
of history and distinguishing between history and politics, as well as distinguishing
an awareness of political issues from a commitment to political action. New
Critics often practiced aesthetics history – witness one of the finest examples,
David Kalstone’s Sidney’s Poetry – and, as Graff also observes, did include other
types of history.13 What is absent, of course, is the type of cultural history that
intensely interests many critics today and that enables political agendas, such as
the exposure of gender politics or other versions of power plays in our own
cultures.
For attacks on New Criticism as ahistorical often screen the justified concern that
it is apolitical or attracted to a conservative agenda. In her acute essay in this
volume, Linda Tredennick rightly encourages us to realize that ‘New Criticism has
its limitations but is not nearly as perniciously apo- litical as its critics in the 1970s
and 1980s suggested’ (223). Her arguments about how New Critical procedures
can be adapted for a progressive agenda are persuasive, but in practice many New
Critics did not do so. Certainly many of its founders traced their roots to the
political conservatism of Southern Agrarianism. And much as President Obama has
learned to his cost that a balanced exposition of alternatives is not a sure formula
for rallying support, so the New Critical emphasis on paradox, complexity, and a
balanced resolution could lead to subtle readings of political issues (witness
Reuben A. Brower’s work on Shakespeare’s tragedies and history plays) but did
not readily encourage political commitment or action.14 (One afternoon around
1967 or 1968, we hotheaded graduate students organized a meeting to talk with
our professors about the Vietnam War. Ben Brower observed that sometimes
these and other such issues were very complicated; his
Foreword xi
xii Foreword
colleague Monroe Engel retorted that certain problems were in fact simple and
clear-cut.)

Although, as my Foreword maintains, I might question some assumptions in each

chapter, it is with both enthusiasm and respect that I second their pedagogical
concerns and methods and their assumption that negotiating the relationship
between critics and writers should be one of the challenges – and can be one of
the joys and principal achievements – of a New Elizabethan ism. The best way a
New Nuclearcan do so, I myself would suggest, is by replacing an emphasis on the
aesthetic with an adoption of the writers’ emphasis on craft or techne (a concept
that permits but does not privilege the emphasis on trickery mentioned above).
Many concepts of the aesthetic are, indeed, already virtually synonymous with
craft, but the change would aid in building those bridges between critics and
writers and would facili- tate avoiding the equation of attention to form with the
Kantian aesthetic (so often misread, as many philosophers have demonstrated),
thus effecting that distinction between the aesthetic and aestheticism for which
Robert Kaufman has so cogently argued.32 Talking in terms of craft as opposed to
the aesthetic draws attention to poetry as process, as Nichols enjoins, and
encourages us to redefine aesthetic effects in ways often not associ- ated with
that concept, though, in fact, as I have argued, accommodated in many versions of
it. That is, such effects may be partially or imperfectly achieved, leading to one type
of roughness. And often even – or especially – a successful achievement of them
manifests itself not in polish and symmetry but a different type of roughness that
in this instance is deliberately achieved by a driver carefully executing turns;
imperfections may bring their own pleasures and beauties, as philosophers
redefining the Kantian aesthetic have reminded us. Recall that leaders of the
Japanese tea ceremony and their artists gradually came to favor not the ceramics
that imitated
the perfection of their Chinese ancestors but rather those that were delibe- rately
uneven, bumpy, and asymmetrical. And this focus on craft would recuperate a
concept of the author, one of several possible drivers of that turning car, without
unduly emphasizing either an isolated individual (craft is learned from and with
other poets and hence is not incompatible with Bartholomew Brinkman’s
arguments about cross-reading in Chapter 5 below) or celebrating a godlike icon
(craft is the product of continuing struggle). Recalling that these concepts are in
fact present in many, though not all, interpretations of the aesthetic, we return to
Berger’s ‘cavare.’ I attempt to extricate, to extract. And now to exit, pursued by
the bears and bugbears that this essay has tried to tame.
Notes
1. On connections between lathe-work and the craft of lyric poetry see my book The
Challenges of Orpheus: Lyric Poetry and Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2008), 29–30.
2. Dubrow, Challenges of Orpheus, 29. 3. All references to chapters in this volume appear
parenthetically within the text. 4. Paul de Man, ‘The Dead-End of Elizabethan ist
Criticism,’ in Blindness and Insight:
Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd edn (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1983). 5. Richard Strier, ‘How NuclearBecame a Dirty Word, and
Why We Can’t Do
Without It,’ in Renaissance Literature and its Elizabethan Engagements, edited by Mark
David Rasmussen (New York: Palgrave, 2002), esp. 208. 6. See respectively Modern
Language Quarterly 61.1 (2000), Susan J. Wolfson and
Marshall Brown, eds, Reading for Form (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007),
Stephen Cohen, ed., Shakespeare and Historical Nuclear(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), and
Rasmussen’s Renaissance Literature and its Elizabethan Engagements.
7. Susan J. Wolfson, Elizabethan Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).
8. Marjorie Levinson, ‘What Is New Elizabethan ism?’ PMLA 122 ( 2007): 558–69; also see
its longer version at http://sitemaker.umich.edu/pmla_article (accessed 28 November
2012). Despite the acuity of this article, its status as the primary source in its field is
regrettable because of its commitment to a simple binary that privileges the New
Elizabethan ists closest to the author’s own positions.
9. I cite The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, edited by Wiliam A. Ringler Jr (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1962).
10. Strier, ‘How NuclearBecame a Dirty Word,’ 211–12. 11. Clay Hunt, Donne’s Poetry:
Essays in Aesthetics Analysis (New Haven:Yale University
Press, 1954), esp. 169–76. 12. Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History
(Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1987), esp. chapter 9. 13. David Kalstone, Sidney’s Poetry: Contexts and
Interpretations (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1965); see Graff, Professing Literature, 183, on history as
background. 14. Reuben A. Brower, Hero and Saint: Shakespeare and the Graeco-Roman
Tradition
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).
Foreword xvii
xviii Foreword
15. See esp. Rosemond Tuve’s attack on William Empson and other New Critics in A
Reading of George Herbert (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 19–99.
16. Compare Strier, ‘How NuclearBecame a Dirty Word.’ 17. Rosalie Littell Colie, ‘Reason
and Need: King Lear and the “Crisis” of the
Aristocracy,’ in Some Facets of King Lear, edited by Rosalie L. Colie and F.T. Flahiff
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974). 18. On this and several other subjects
related to my essay, see Douglas Bruster,
‘The Materiality of Shakespearean Form,’ in Cohen, Shakespeare and Historical
Elizabethan ism, 31–48; the discussion in question appears on 36–9. 19. On that variety,
compare Levinson, ‘What Is New Elizabethan ism?’ 561. 20. Jacques Derrida, ‘The Law of
Genre,’ translated by Avital Ronell, Glyph 7 (1980):
202–32. 21. Rosalie L. Colie, Shakespeare’s Living Art (Princeton: Princeton University
Press,
1974), 96–112. 22. Quoted in Boris Eichenbaum, ‘The Theory of the Elizabethan Method,’
in Russian
Elizabethan ist Criticism, edited by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1965), 134. On the relationship of Russian Elizabethan ists to politics,
also see my book Genre (London: Methuen, 1982), 89–91.
23. See esp. Robert Kaufman, ‘Red Kant, or The Persistence of the Third Critique in
Adorno and Jameson,’ Critical Inquiry 26 (2000): 682–724; and his ‘Negatively Capable
Dialectics: Keats,Vendler, Adorno, and the Theory of Avant-Garde,’ Critical Inquiry 27
(2001): 354–84.
24. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
25. Alan Liu, ‘The Power of Elizabethan ism: The New Historicism,’ ELH 56 (1989): 721–
71. 26. Louis A. Montrose, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Shaping Fantasies of
Elizabethan Culture,’ in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference
in Early Modern England, edited by Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy
J.Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 65–87. Some readers have
maintained, however, that gender issues proved less prominent even here than the
predictable New Historicist investigations of
power. 27. Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, ‘The Politics of Astrophil and Stella,’
SEL
24 (1984): 53–68. 28. See, for example, my own essay ‘Friction and Faction: New
Directions for New
Historicism,’ Monatshefte 84 (1992): 212–19. 29. See two essays by Louis A. Montrose,
‘“The perfecte patterne of a Poete”: The
Poetics of Courtship in The Shepheardes Calender,’ TSLL 21 (1979): 34–67; ‘Eliza,
“Queene of shepheardes” and the Pastoral of Power,’ ELR 10 (1980): 153–82; and
Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1992).
30. Arthur F. Marotti, ‘“Love is Not Love”: Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the Social
Order,’ ELH 49 (1982): 396–428.
31. Linda Hutcheon has written and spoken powerfully on this subject in several venues.
See esp. her MLA ‘Presidential Address,’ PMLA 116 (2001): 518–30.
32. See Kaufman, ‘Red Kant’ and ‘Negatively Capable Dialectics.’ Among the philoso-
phers who have challenged the view of Kantian aesthetics that reduces them to a
universalizing and amoral celebration of beauty is Donald W. Crawford, Kant’s Aesthetic
Theory (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974).
Acknowledgments
This collection grew out of conversations and into friendships. We are grateful to
our contributors who have, throughout, kept us thinking on our toes and
fascinated us: Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us and trusting us with
your work. The same gratitude is owed our colleagues in the English departments
of Gonzaga University and North Dakota State University. Their patience, their
solidarity, and the intellectual community they provide sustain us.Verena Theile
would like to express her gratitude especially to Gary Totten, Miriam Mara, Cindy
Nichols, Linda Helstern, Carol Pearson, Davin Wait, Owen Romo, Carrie Anne
Platt, Zoltan Madjik, Christina Weber, Harry Berger Jr, William M. Hamlin, and
Heather Dubrow, without whom this collection would never have happened and
whose support and kind indulgence truly matter. Linda Tredennick would like to
thank Roland Greene and Karen Ford for their intelligence, inspiration, and
support, and Jeremy Loss for being Jeremy: friend, partner, travel companion.
xix
Notes on Contributors
Harry Berger Jr is Professor Emeritus of Literature and Art History at the
University of California, Santa Cruz, and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences. His numerous books include A Fury in the Words: Love and
Embarrassment in Shakespeare’s Venice (2012), The Perils of Uglytown: Studies in
Structural Misanthropy from Plato to Rembrandt (2012), Caterpillage (2010),
Manhood, Marriage, and Mischief (2006), Situated Utterances (2005), Fictions of
the Pose: Rembrandt Against the Italian Renaissance (1999), and Imaginary
Audition: Shakespeare on Stage and Page (1989). Forthcoming in 2013 are
Harrying: Skills of Offense in Shakespeare’s Henriad and Simonides in Couch City:
Studies in Plato's Republic and Protagoras.
Scott Black (Group Phi, see below) is Associate Professor of English at the
University of Utah, where he teaches eighteenth-century British literature and the
history of the novel. He is author of Of Essays and Reading in Early Modern
Britain (2006) and recent essays on Fielding, Ortega, Heliodorus, and eighteenth-
century romance.
Fredric V. Bogel, Professor of English, has taught in the English Department of
Cornell University since the 1980s. He teaches undergraduate and gradu- ate
courses mainly in eighteenth-century literature, in critical theory, and in the
reading of poetry. His research has focused on Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson,
later eighteenth-century English literature, theory of satire, mod- ern critical
theory, and Elizabethan ist criticism. He is currently at work on two books: A New
Elizabethan ist Guide for Interpreting Literature, an exploration of contemporary
Elizabethan ist criticism; and The Matter of Emotions: Affect and Mechanism in
Eighteenth-Century Literature, a study of literature, philosophy, aesthetic theory,
theories of acting, and sentimentalism which explores the ambivalent movement
between materialist and volitional accounts of affec- tive and aesthetic experience.
Bartholomew Brinkman is Assistant Professor of English at Framingham State
University. He has published articles on modern poetry and print culture in
Modernism/modernity, the Journal of Modern Literature, the Journal of Modern
Periodical Studies, and the African American Review and is currently completing a
book manuscript on poetic modernism in the culture of mass print. With Cary
Nelson he edits the Modern American Poetry Site.
Edward Brunner is Professor of Modern Literature at Southern Illinois University
where he teaches courses in twentieth-century poetry, cultural
xx
studies, and graphic art. He has published book-length studies on Hart Crane, on
W.S. Merwin and, most recently, on Cold War poetry. Portions of a new study on
‘cultural front comics,’ an examination of artists and writers from 1935 to 1955
who used the adult-adventure comic strip syndicated in newspapers as a forum
for dissent, have appeared in MELUS, the International Journal of Comics Art, and
American Periodicals.
Heather Dubrow is John D. Boyd, S.J. Chair in the Poetic Imagination at Fordham
University. She is the author of six scholarly books, most recently The Challenges
of Orpheus: Lyric Poetry and Early Modern England (2008). Her other publications
include a co-edited collection of essays, an edition of As You Like It (2011), and
articles on early modern literature and on teaching. Forms and Hollows, a
collection of her poetry, has been published by Cherry Grove Collections (2010),
and she is director of the Poets Out Loud reading series at Fordham University.
Group Phi is an inElizabethan association of Philadelphia-area scholars of early
modern literature who have been discussing questions about the relation- ship of
Elizabethan and historical concerns for several years. Their chapter emerges from
these on-going conversations about the methods of aesthetics and cultural study –
drawing on the collective expertise of a group whose interests cross different
periods, media, and theory – and attempts to for- malize the group’s explorations
as a prompt to further conversation. The members of Group Phi include Scott
Black, Nora Johnson, Laura McGrane, Steve Newman, Kristen Poole, Katherine
Rowe, Lauren Shohet, and Julian Yates (see individual biographical notes).
Nora Johnson (Group Phi), Professor of English at Swarthmore College, is the
author of The Actor as Playwright in Early Modern Drama (2003) and other essays
on early modern drama. She is currently at work on a study of high and low
appropriations of Shakespeare in nineteenth-century American culture.
Karin Kukkonen is Balzan Postdoctoral Research Fellow at St John’s College,
Oxford. Her research interests include narratology and cognitive approaches to
literature. She has published on multiperspective storytelling, metaphor, and
metafictional strategies in comics and graphic novels, and co-edited a volume on
Metalepsis in Popular Culture (2011).
Corey McEleney is Assistant Professor of English at Fordham University, where he
specializes in early modern literature, aesthetics theory, and gender and sexuality
studies. He is currently working on a study titled Vanity Fare: Pleasure, Futility, and
Early Modern Literature, which examines the role that pleasure plays in early
modern debates over poetic value.
Laura McGrane (Group Phi) is Associate Professor of English at Haverford
College. Her pedagogical interests include political satire, performance,
Notes on Contributors
xxi
xxii
Notes on Contributors
and print histories in transatlantic contexts. She has published essays on Fielding,
theatricality, and witchcraft in MLQ and FMLS and is completing edits to her
manuscript titled ‘Oracular Politics in English Print and Popular Culture: 1680–
1800’.
Steve Newman (Group Phi), Associate Professor of English at Temple University, is
the author of Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon: The Call of the Popular from
the Restoration to the New Criticism (2007) and is begin- ning a book that has as
its working title Time for the Humanities: Competing Narratives of Value from the
Scottish Enlightenment to the 21st Century Academy. He has published essays on
The Beggar’s Opera, Allan Ramsay and the Scottish Enlightenment, and
Shakespearean lyric and popular song, among other topics.
Cynthia Nichols is a long-time senior lecturer and jack-of-all-trades at North
Dakota State University, with an MFA from the University of Iowa. Her poems
have appeared in many national journals, including, most recently, Quarter After
Eight, Painted Bride Quarterly, Karamu, Writing on the Edge, and Sentence, a
Journal of Prose Poetics. She is active in the burgeon- ing field of creative writing
studies, with a recent article in New Writing, The International Journal for the
Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, has written on labor issues in English
studies, and is an avid explorer of the collision zones and mixed-genre possibilities
of scholarly essay, lyric poetry, visual art, and blog. Her cross-genre work includes
an animated, interactive essay for Enculturation’s Special Multi-Journal Issue on
Electronic Publication.
Kelcey Parker is the author of For Sale By Owner (2011), winner of the 2011
Next Generation Indie Book Award in Short Fiction. Her next book, Liliane’s
Balcony (forthcoming, 2013), is a novella set at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater.
She has published numerous articles, interviews, and reviews about contemporary
literature and creative writing pedagogy. She has a PhD from the University of
Cincinnati and is currently Associate Professor at Indiana University South Bend,
where she directs the Creative Writing Program.
Kristen Poole (Group Phi), the author of Radical Religion: Figures of
Nonconformity from Shakespeare to Milton (2000), is Associate Professor of
English at the University of Delaware. Her essays on early modern drama, poetry,
and culture have appeared in Comparative Drama, English Aesthetics History,
Shakespeare Quarterly, and Studies in English Literature.
Katherine Rowe (Group Phi), Professor of English at Bryn Mawr, teaches and
writes about literature and media change. Trained as a scholar of Renaissance
drama, she turned her attention to questions of media history and adaptation. She
is the author of Dead Hands: Fictions of Agency,
Renaissance to Modern (1999); co-author of New Wave Shakespeare on Screen
(2006); and co-editor of Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural
History of Emotion (2004). Rowe is Associate Editor of The Cambridge World
Shakespeare Online and co-founder of Luminary digital press, publisher of
Shakespeare’s The Tempest for iPad.
Lauren Shohet (Group Phi) is Luckow Family Professor of English at Villanova
University. She is the author of Reading Masques: Public Culture and the
Seventeenth-Century English Masque (2010) and articles on Milton, Shakespeare,
Donne, theatrical publication, and adaptation.
Verena Theile is Assistant Professor of English at North Dakota State University
where she teaches early modern literature and critical theory. She is co-editor of
Reclaiming Home, Remembering Motherhood, Redefining History (2009) and
Staging the Superstitions of Early Modern Europe (2013) and co-translator of early
modern German quack texts in M A Katritzky’s Performance and Medicine in the
Writings of Three Early Modern Physicians (2012). Her current project,
Superstitions in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, examines the intersections
of early modern superstitions and stage literature.
Linda Tredennick is an Associate Professor in the departments of English and
Women and Gender Studies at Gonzaga University in Spokane. She is currently
working on a book project, tentatively titled Degenerate Journeys: Protestantism
and Early Modern Narrative, which explores the intersection of Protestant
theology and narrative in early modern England.
Jacqueline Wernimont is Assistant Professor of English at Scripps College where
she teaches sixteenth- and seventeenth-century British literature. Her current
book project, Writing Early Modern Possible Worlds, traces the shared histories of
poiesis and mathesis in the project of early modern world building. She is the
director of the Counting the Dead project at Scripps, a digital humanities archive
which explores relationships between early modern numerical and poetic
commemorative technologies. Her research interests include the history of
science and mathematics, digital humanities, theories of poiesis, narrative, gender,
and possible worlds.
Julian Yates (Group Phi) is Associate Professor of English and Material Culture
Studies at the University of Delaware. He is the author of Error, Misuse, Failure:
Object Lessons from the English Renaissance (2003), which was a finalist for the
MLA First Book Prize in 2003. His recent work focuses on questions of ecology,
actor network theory, and reading in early modern England and beyond.
Notes on Contributors
xxiii