General Ideas Flashcards
Gerard Genette
Paratext as a ‘threshold’ between work and world - opportunity to choose whether to read or retreat
Elizabeth Eisenstein
the standardization caused by the printing press in fact encouraged originality - by creating a norm or ‘Standard’ from which one could deviate
Michel Foucault
Identifies the Renaissance, especially due to print culture, as ‘the moment of industrialisation’ in which the author as a figure came into being
[importance ascribed to authorship in Renaissance]
Joseph Lowenstein
Textual corruption may be a result of the 1590s rise in printing of plays - a script would be printed when the play’s publicity on stage waned, but this encouraged piracy
eg actors may have published pirated editions from memory
Andrew Gurr
Details ‘the popularity of playgoing for the illiterate’
Michael Hattaway
Argues that actors [‘players’] were regarded as as chroniclers of the time, anatomizers of the age, fulfilling some of the functions of journalists or political commentators’ not just ‘entertainment’
What was the benefit of clergy?
If laymen could prove that they could read, they were exempted from death penalty for some crimes
demonstrating the value placed upon literacy- seen to be exclusive
What did Cicero say of the ‘complete orator’ in ancient Roman times?
the ‘complete orator’ holds up both personal and national ‘dignity’ and ‘safety’
Why did William Tyndale argue it was important for the bible to be printed?
So that lay people ‘might see the process, order, and meaning of the text’
Renaissance idea of individual and personal knoweldge through experienceimplicit
What is Nancy Selleck’s idea, in The Interpersonal Idiom?
that ‘identity starts with the other’ - the ‘interpersonal conception of selfhood’
How does John Martin understand the Renaissance self?
To be produced by ‘the enigmatic relation of the interior life to life in society’
What does Christopher TIllmouth
Passion as an ‘object of ethical anxiety’ - the interpersonal interactions are thus sites and causes of such anxiety
What does Bellanda Rathbone suggest is unique about the Renaissance?
their acute epochal self-consciousness - ‘their sense of astonishment at the miracle of cultural and intellectual “re-birth” going on around them’
What does Christopher Haigh warn?
It is important not to see the Reformation as a linear process - it must be ‘broken-up’ in order to be understood, as it was piecemeal change in itself
What does Patrick Collinson say post-Reformations thought of Catholicism?
“Pre-Reformation Catholicism was a religion of orality and visuality, polemically caricatured by Protestants as a contrivance to keep the people in a state of ignorance”
What does Janel Mueller say was the basis of the Reformation
‘scripturalism’ - going back to the basic text, but also expanding it eg through allegory
What does Steven Greenblatt argue about early modern theatre?
It is a ‘political mode’ - and early modern theatre was ‘itself a social event’
What does Leonard Tennenhouse explain?
the idea of the monarch’s two bodies - the body natural and the body mystical - as one and the same
this theory also connects the monarch with their ancestors
[but, problematised by usurpations]
What does Jonathon Hart say about histories in the early modern period?
‘histories are both stories and stories about the past. Historical drama is suggestive because of the way it calls attention to its fictional nature while also claiming the truth of history’’
How does Thomas Heywood, in An Apology for Actors (1612), justify the presentation of ‘foreign history’ in drama?
‘either the virtues of our countrymen are extolled, or their vices reproved…either animating men to noble attempts, or attacking the consciousnesses of the spectators’
How does Henry Peacham (1622) discuss exemplarity?
‘‘no subject affecteth us with more delight than history…to be made wise by their example’’
WHat does GK HUnter suggest about artificiality?
Because Elizabeth’s court was so artificial, artifice in drama is a serious attmept to ‘dispaly…the deepest values of the age’
What is Machiavelli (in The Prince, 1532)’s seminal influence?
The idea that virtues and vices are not natural, but feigned - it is possible to manipulate one’s own behaviour.
Counteracts the belief in physiognomy - lack of trust, as behaviour can be mediated and thus inner self is not necessarily expressed in the outer
also focus on the human world alone - no concern for afterlife or religion
