Download Engleska književnost od renesanse do neoklasicizma Simon Ryle

Engleska književnost od renesanse do neoklasicizma
Simon Ryle
[email protected]
16th-17th century English literature
Between Protestant Reformation (Luther 95 theses,
1517; Henry VIII's divorce, 1533) and Restoration
(1660)
Renaissance: 13th - 15th century Florentine/ Italian
movement in art and science (rebirth of the
classical)
Revolution: 1640-1660
Renaissance / Early Modern?
Some causes (and effects):
Aesthetics
1504 Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa
1508-12 Michaelangelo, Sistine Chapel
1600 William Shakespeare, Hamlet
1604-5 William Shakespeare, King Lear
Social / Religious organization
1517 Martin Luther Wittenberg Theses
1525 William Tyndale translated New Testament (destroyed)
1527 Henry seeks divorce—to marry Anne Bolyne
1533 Breach with Rome
1536-9 Dissolution of the monasteries
Monarchs
1509-47 Henry 8th
1553-58 Bloody Mary—Protestants burned
1558-1603 Elizabeth 1st
1. Social / economic organization of the State:
The end of feudalism
J. M. W. Turner, The Chancel and Crossing of Tintern Abbey (1794)
Medieval feudal strip plots marked into the landscape
They [the oxen and sheep] consume, destroy, and devour whole fields,
houses, and cities. For look in what parts of the realm doth grow the
finest and therefore the dearest wool. There noblemen and gentlemen, yea,
and certain abbots, holy men no doubt, not contenting themselves with
the yearly revenues and profits that were wont to grow to their forefathers
and predecessors of their lands, nor being content that they live in rest and
pleasure nothing profiting, yea, much annoying, the public weal, leave no
land for tillage they enclose all into pasture, they throw down houses, they
pluck down towns and leave nothing standing, but only the church to be
made a sheep house; and, as though you lost no small quantity of ground
by forests, chases, lands, and parks, those good holy men turn dwellingplaces and all glebe land into wilderness and desolation… For one
shepherd or herdsman is enough to eat up that ground with cattle, to the
occupying whereof about husbandry many hands would be requisite.
Sir Thomas More, Utopia
Base / Superstructure
“The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill,
society with the industrial capitalist.” (Karl Marx, The Poverty of
Philosophy, 1847)
2. The flourishing of the vernacular
1516 Sir Thomas More, Utopia
2b. Gutenberg galaxy
– Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg
Develop in 1450-60s the process of moveable type
used in printing press
3. Globalizations: the growing global power of England
Colonization
1577-80 Drake’s circumnavigation of globe in The Golden Hind
1587 Drake raids Cadiz
1588 English beat Spanish Armada
The Golden Hind:
circumnavigated the globe 1577-80
Sir Francis Drake, 1540-96
3b. Globalization, schism and knowledge
Renaissance scepticism – how do we know what we know?
Michel de Montaigne, “On Cannibals” 1580
I find that there is nothing barbarous and savage in this nation, by
anything that I can gather, excepting, that every one gives the title
of barbarism to everything that is not in use in his own country.
As, indeed, we have no other level of truth and reason, than the
example and idea of the opinions and customs of the place
wherein we live: there is always the perfect religion, there the
perfect government, there the most exact and accomplished usage
of all things. They are savages at the same rate that we say fruit are
wild, which nature produces of herself and by her own ordinary
progress; whereas in truth, we ought rather to call those wild,
whose natures we have changed by our artifice, and diverted from
the common order.
4. Humanism and a new aesthetics
A new phase in the attempt to represent:
a.) realistic subjectivity, and
b.) realistic space
Giotto, Scenes from the Life of Christ: Lamentation, The Mourning of Christ
(between 1304-06)
The Annunciation, Church of St. Climent in Ohrid, Macedonia (first quarter of the 14th century)
In the middle ages... man was conscious of himself only
as a member of a race, people, party, family, or
corporation – only through some general category. In
Italy this veil first melted into air; an objective treatment of
the state sand all things of this world became possible.
The subjective side at the same time asserted itself with
corresponding emphasis; man became a spiritual
individual, and recognized himself as such.
Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy,
1867
What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in
faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action
how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of
the world, the paragon of animals—and yet, to me, what is this
quintessence of dust?
Hamlet (2.2.303-7)
Michaelangelo, The Creation of Adam, Sistine Chapel, Vatican, 1508-12
Raphael, The Marriage of the Virgin (1504)
Deiric Bouts, The Last Supper, St. Peter's Church, Leuven, 1464-1467
5. Science, knowledge and humanism
Leon Battista Alberti
Della Pittura (On Painting), 1435
“I will take first from the mathematicians those things with which
my subject is concerned.”
Ambivalence of Renaissance knowledge (human power/
decentralization):
1543: Copernicus Revolution of the Spheres
Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), Galileo Galilei (1564–1642).
Hans Holbein the Younger, The Ambassadors (1530)
Anamorphosis and momento mori
What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in
faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action
how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the
world, the paragon of animals—and yet, to me, what is this
quintessence of dust?
Hamlet (2.2.303-7)
Class methodology / learning aims:
Close reading
What is close reading?
Active (not passive) knowledge:
a.) Literature is concentrated meaning.
b.) Literature involves a relation of content (the presentation
of characters and places, literary motifs, etc.), and form/ style
c.) Coherent, organized expression of one's findings
I am at the barber’s, and copy of
Paris-Match is offered to me. On
the cover, a young Negro in a
French uniform is saluting, with his
eyes uplifted, probably fixed on a
fold of the tricolour. All this is the
meaning of the picture. But whether
naively or not, I see very well what it
signifies to me : that France is a
great Empire, that all her sons,
without any colour discrimination,
faithfully serve under the flag, and
that there is no better answer to the
detractors of an alleged colonialism
than the zeal shown by this Negro
in serving his so-called oppressors.
(Roland Barthes, Mythologies, 1957).
The sleeping and the dead
Are as but pictures; ‘tis the eye of childhood
That fears a painted devil. If he do bleed,
I'll gild the faces of the grooms withal,
For it must seem their guilt. (Macbeth 2.2.54-59)
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 8th Edition (Vol 1). Eds.
M.H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt. New York: Routledge, 2001.