Word And Self Estranged In English Texts, 15501660
by Philippa Kelly /
2010 / English / PDF
19.2 MB Download
The essays in "Word and Self Estranged in English Texts,
1550-1660", consider diverse historical contexts for writing about
'strangeness'. They draw on current practices of reading to present
contrasts and analogies within and between various social
understandings. In so doing they reveal an interplay of thematic
and stylistic modes that tells us a great deal about how, and why,
certain aspects of life and thinking were 'estranged' in sixteenth
and seventeenth century thinking. The collection's unique strength
is that it makes specific bridges between contemporary perspectives
and early modern connotations of strangeness and inhibition. The
subjects of these essays are 'strange' to our ways of thinking
because of their obvious distance from us in time and culture. And
yet, curiously, far from being entirely alien to these texts, some
of the most modern thinking-about paradigms, texts,
concepts-connects with the early modern in unexpected ways. Milton
meets the contemporary 'competent reader', Wittgenstein meets
Robert Cawdrey, Shakespeare embraces the teenager, and Marvell
matches wits with French mathematician Rene Thom. Additionally, the
early modern texts posit their own 'others', or sites of
estrangement-Moorishness, Persian art, even the human body-with
which they perform their own astonishing maneuvers of estrangement
and alignment. In reading Renaissance works from our own time and
inviting them to reflect upon our own time, "Word and Self
Estranged in English Texts, 1550-1660" offers a vital
reinterpretation of early modern texts.
The essays in "Word and Self Estranged in English Texts,
1550-1660", consider diverse historical contexts for writing about
'strangeness'. They draw on current practices of reading to present
contrasts and analogies within and between various social
understandings. In so doing they reveal an interplay of thematic
and stylistic modes that tells us a great deal about how, and why,
certain aspects of life and thinking were 'estranged' in sixteenth
and seventeenth century thinking. The collection's unique strength
is that it makes specific bridges between contemporary perspectives
and early modern connotations of strangeness and inhibition. The
subjects of these essays are 'strange' to our ways of thinking
because of their obvious distance from us in time and culture. And
yet, curiously, far from being entirely alien to these texts, some
of the most modern thinking-about paradigms, texts,
concepts-connects with the early modern in unexpected ways. Milton
meets the contemporary 'competent reader', Wittgenstein meets
Robert Cawdrey, Shakespeare embraces the teenager, and Marvell
matches wits with French mathematician Rene Thom. Additionally, the
early modern texts posit their own 'others', or sites of
estrangement-Moorishness, Persian art, even the human body-with
which they perform their own astonishing maneuvers of estrangement
and alignment. In reading Renaissance works from our own time and
inviting them to reflect upon our own time, "Word and Self
Estranged in English Texts, 1550-1660" offers a vital
reinterpretation of early modern texts.