URLy Nouveau: A User’s Guide to Transfashioning the Early Modern

When we think about the early modern period (or pre-modern in some regions) we tend to attribute to it historical shifts, arcs, and narratives of development and influence within a particular span of history, such as, for scholars of English literary-cultural history, 1500–1640. But we typically do not see the period as having a speed, momentum, or intensity of its own, even as we identify the many ways and examples of how it anticipates and reflects modernity. Some of us, for instance, recognize in Hamlet proto-modernist reflexive-consciousness, in Iago a proto-modern performative individual, in Bartholomew Fair proto-meta-theatrics, in Tamburlaine a proto-post-dramatic style, in Rosalind and Moll Cutpurse proto-feminists, or in Robert Greene a proto-post-structuralist or modern celebrity author. Early modern studies, perhaps more than any other academic field focusing on a historical era, teems with claims for transformational phenomena of epic proportions: the antiquating of feudalism, the origin and rise of a nascent modern-heading mode of capitalism, the demise of absolutism, a democratic type of self-fashioning, colonialism, a resurgence of interest in the arts, new-world expansion, and so on. How, then, do we formulate toward an inclusive and expansive term to represent the multiplicity that is and continues to become the early modern?

The main critical enterprise for the past few decades, for scholars, it seems, has to do as much with discovering the new in the early modern period as clearly distinguishing an unequivocally new methodology as well as one that is best suited to its early modern subject matter. To give some prominent examples, which includes various overlapping and sub-setting, consider the succession from historicism to new historicism or other post-Marxisms, or cultural

“URLy Modern Conquests part 1” by Arturo Desimone

materialism to new historicism, or new historicism to materialist feminism, or the emergence of new materialism, then presentism (cultural materialism sans history), then mobility studies, then (new) new materialism (the different wave of new materialism in philosophy, performance studies, and communications, etc., that also comes back around to early modern studies), then to post-humanism, and, very recently, new idealism (and its battle with reductionist or eliminative materialism), or transversal poetics (that comingles and cross-pollinates with all the approaches mentioned). So what exactly is this drive for the “new” that characterizes the field of early modern studies, the period, and the corresponding methodologies? Why is it that scholars in the field have a compulsion for the new? Does this indicate some cultural anxiety among the early modern studies community over not being sufficiently original or fresh—of individual scholars inadvertently affirming their own lack in a long lineage of brilliance? Does this reveal a conspicuous absence within the field of a commitment to an accepted methodology or purpose, or rather the conspicuous presence of the field’s proven knowledge of appropriation or proper-naming? To move in a different direction, is it because the term early modern is itself inherently complicated, especially hermeneutically, by the fact that it is being applied to a moving target or targets; in other words, there is no static history to which it refers because history is mobile and mobilizing? If we compare the early modern period to the tortoise in Zeno’s paradox, then scholars are like Achilles, never catching up with their subject matter because they relate to it on their own terms. Perhaps it is some combination, the desire for the new on the one hand and the eclectic and processual nature of the subject matter on the other hand, that makes the super-sized field of early modern studies—yet not necessarily or even primarily the individual scholars operating within it—resonate with popular concepts of the postmodern, that is, its inconsistent, mutating, truth-changing, mystery-making, self-deconstructing, self-reconstructing, and generally positive ethos.

If, hypothetically, we conclude that the past few decades (of what?) are...