(back
to EMF Tables of Contents)
EMF 3 is the second of
two numbers proposing new ideas about the nature of the early
modern?not as the derivative of a preconception, but as a set
of turning points in the history of specific artistic and intellectual
disciplines.
Catharine Randall bridges the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries in her analysis of self-perceived "otherness"
in the work of three poets: Du Bellay, who lamented the bankruptcy
of humanism; the Huguenot Agrippa d'Aubigné, writing as
a theological exclus; and François de Malherbe, an isolated
formalist paradoxically seeking to free his voice by maximizing
artistic constraints.
Lorraine Daston sheds light on
factuality in science from 1600 to 1750 by exploring the idea
of luminescence. Her comparative study of Robert Boyle and Charles
Dufay?both Cartesian, yet adepts of experimentalism?illustrates
the arduous passage of fact form wonder to regularity.
Hassan Melehy addresses the procedures
Descartes followed to establish a thinking philosophical subject,
independent of language and the deceptions of literature. Deeply
indebted to Montaigne as well as pervaded by metaphors of architecture
and travel, however, the realm represented by the cogito could
only have been produced by literary means.
Jean-Philippe Beaulieu and Hannah
Fournier's study of Mme de Gournay's Advis discloses the tense
coexistence of two views of society: one, immutable and hierarchized,
is based on the masculine tradition, the other, adjusted to the
claims of particular social groups and the individual, reflects
feminine experience.
Bashir El-Beshti argues that while
Orientalist texts were often written or read as displaced critiques
of European culture, most political and historical treatises written
about Turks during the early-modern period constructed "Turkishness"
as a denial of the principles that legitimated western monarchies.
This negative view, he argues, came to be deeply embedded in European
political philosophy as a whole.
Jane Ogden Newman's study of Daniel
Caspar Lohenstein's Cleopatra explores the phenotypic and political
racializing of characters through literary and intertextual devices
from whose meanings and suggestions arise a non-demonizing semiotics
of color.
Scott Bryson appears twice in this
number. In addition to writing EMF's first article-length
review (a genre which, with EMF 4, will replace long
notices), he shows in his essay, "Rules and Transgression,"
how the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns redefined as transgressive
the concept of imitatio naturae, the relationship between nature
and fiction. This he traces from writings of the seventeenth-century
antagonists to the work of Diderot.
Finally, Joan DeJean uses the history
of the book to rewrite the history of the Quarrel of the Ancients
and Moderns. She argues that literary works and a new way of reading
them played a key role in the radical shift in mentalité
that Paul Hazard termed "la crise de la conscience européenne."
Focusing particularly on Le Mercure galant and the publicity campaign
concerning La Princesse de Cléves carried out on its pages,
the article shows how a unprecedented type of non-professional
critic was created trough the institution of "literary news."
Justified and significant as these
essays are, let there be no illusion. The task of empirical analysis
is incomplete and the time for even a provisional synthesis of
findings far off. Every reader will identify neglected areas as
well as unanswered questions and untried modes of inquiry. I hope,
therefore, that the discussion initiated here will continue for
some time to come on the pages of this and other periodicals.
Meanwhile, the next volume of EMF,
edited in consultation with Alice Stroup, will examine forgotten
utopias from the vantage point of historiography, political theory,
philosophy, art history, and, of course, literary criticism. (DLR)
P.S. Readers of EMF 2
("Signs of the Early Modern"1) will find a revised version
of Timothy J. Reiss's essay, "Meaning in Sixteenth-Century
Grammar and Rhetoric: Fabri, Tory, Palsgrave" (129-69) in
the author's Knowledge, Discovery, and Imagination in Early-Modern
Europe: The Rise of Aesthetic Rationalism (Cambridge UP,
1997).
[top]
