Go Figure

Energies, Forms, and Institutions in the Early Modern World

Judith H. Anderson

Publication Year: 2011

Go Figure addresses theories of the figure and practices of figuration ranging from classical rhetoric and biblical exegesis to semiotics, psychoanalysis, and socio-politics. Situating theory in history, the essays in this volume focus on verbal and visual texts from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, and they explore science, sacramental poetics, romance and lyric narrative, and the natural world in still lifes, prayer, parasites, and politics. They engage the work of poets, painters, storytellers, and playwrights. While the theories that inform them are many and various, they share a point of reference in the work of Jean-Franois Lyotard, who theorizes the co-presence in language of the figure and discourse: Lyotard's figure relates to discourse as image emerges in description, as sense accompanies signification, and as energies shape texts from within. The original essays invited for the volume show how figural energies and forms inhabit both texts and the practices that produce them-how figures are fundamentally in play in the making of subjects, societies, traditions, and institutions.

Published by: Fordham University Press

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Title Page, Copyright Page

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pp. v-

Introduction

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pp. 1-18

In Go Figure, our focus on figuration joins a semiotic emphasis to a sociopolitical one and seeks to achieve, if only cumulatively, a kind of wholeness. Our collection is at once formal and historical, semiotic and cultural, aesthetic and...

Spenser’s Giant and the New Science

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pp. 19-37

Artegall’s debate with the egalitarian Giant in Book V of Spenser’s Faerie Queene has long been recognized by readers as raising, more explicitly than elsewhere in the poem, issues about language and representation that are fundamental...

The Sacramental Neuter and the Missing Body in Robert Southwell’s Poetics

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pp. 38-57

Mindful of the hazard of abusive simplification, this essay ventures an excavation of the recalcitrant terrain opened up by Maurice Blanchot’s 1963 essay on the ‘‘thought of the neuter’’ from which the epigraph to this essay is taken...

Reconfiguring Figuring: John Donne as Narrative Poet

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pp. 58-72

An essay on narrativity invites assays at narrative; an article on form invites the dovetailing of memoir with more traditional scholarly prose. Some years ago a distinguished colleague kindly agreed to read two chapters of the book I was...

The Narrative Turn against Metaphor: Metonymy, Identification, and Roger Boyle’s Parthenissa

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pp. 73-90

Roger Boyle’s Parthenissa, published serially throughout the 1650s, is one of a group of mid seventeenth-century British prose romances that share a penchant for political allegory. In keeping with generic predecessors such as Philip...

Caterpillage: Death and Truthiness in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Still Life Painting

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pp. 91-111

Ever since its emergence at the turn of the seventeenth century, the aesthetic body of Dutch still life painting has been hamstrung by iconography. Viewed through the magnific lens of Britannica Online, iconography is ‘‘the science of identification....

Figuring Belief: George Herbert’s Devotional Creatures

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pp. 112-131

In the early modern English devotional lexicon, the creature signified the vast array of beings and things created by God. ‘‘Meditation on the creature,’’ a form of contemplative practice developed within medieval theology, encouraged the devout...

Entertaining Friends: Falstaff ’s Parasitology

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pp. 132-148

Shakespeare’s frequent friendship pairings can congeal for us in a single figure in the imagination, one that is dyadic rather than binary. I refer particularly to those pairs in an ‘‘entertainer/entertained’’ relation, of the sort familiar...

Skin Merchants: Jack Cade’s Futures and the Figural Politics of Henry VI, Part II

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pp. 149-169

In Act IV, scene ii of Henry VI, Part II (1590/91), Dick the Butcher speaks the line that will be remembered: ‘‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers’’ (IV.ii.71).¹ Rebel leader Jack Cade agrees, ‘‘Nay, that I mean to do,’’ but pauses...

E-ISBN-13: 9780823248841
Print-ISBN-13: 9780823233496
Print-ISBN-10: 0823233499

Page Count: 240
Publication Year: 2011