Five Words

Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes

Roland Greene

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780226000770
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

Blood. Invention. Language. Resistance. World. Five ordinary words that do a great deal of conceptual work in everyday life and literature. In this original experiment in critical semantics, Roland Greene considers how these words changed over the course of the sixteenth century and what their changes indicate about broader forces in science, politics, and other disciplines.Rather than analyzing works, careers, or histories, Greene discusses a broad swath of Renaissance and transatlantic literature—including Shakespeare, Cervantes, Camões, and Milton—in terms of the development of these five words. Aiming to shift the conversation around Renaissance literature from current approaches to riskier enterprises, Greene also proposes new methods that take advantage of digital resources like full-text databases, but still depend on the interpreter to fashion ideas out of ordinary language. Five Words is an innovative and accessible book that points the field of literary studies in an exciting new direction.

NOTES

Introduction

1. Leo Spitzer, Essays in Historical Semantics (New York: Russell and Russell, 1948), was perhaps the first modern exponent of a semantic history apart from what he calls “idea-histories” or the study of corresponding words (e.g., Renaissance, romanticism, civilization). William Empson, The Structure of Complex Words (London: Chatto and Windus, 1951), came to words as combinations of emotions, senses, implications, and moods out of his earlier work on ambiguity. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), more or less invented the approach to the past through a cluster of terms; a related approach is found in Martin Jay, Cultural Semantics: Keywords of Our Time (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998). Reinhart Koselleck’s influential work on conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte) is available in English in The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. Todd Samuel Presner et al. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), and Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). Theodor Adorno’s classic essay “Words from Abroad” is translated in Notes to Literature, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 1:185–99. Perhaps the least systematic of the major approaches to semantic history is C. S. Lewis, Studies in Words, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967). At a further remove, and less relevant to my project, are the influential studies of concepts, metaphors, and images by Giorgio Agamben, Walter Benjamin, Hans Blumenberg, Carl Schmitt, and others.

2. There are any number of relevant accounts, but one that resonates with my approach is J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), 2–6.

3. Juan de Castellanos, Elegías de varones ilustres de Indias, ed. Gerardo Rivas Moreno (Bogotá: Gerardo Rivas Moreno, 1997), 9–10.

4. Edmundo O’Gorman, The Invention of America: An Inquiry into the Historical Nature of the New World and the Meaning of Its History (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1961).

5. I have been influenced by Stanley Cavell’s conviction that “we learn language and learn the world together, that they become elaborated and distorted together, and in the same places.” Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 19.

6. For example, Lynn Hunt, “The Rhetoric of Revolution,” in Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 19–51; Donald R. Kelley, “‘Second Nature’: The Idea of Custom in European Law, Society, and Culture,” in The Transmission of Culture in Early Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Grafton and Ann Blair (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 131–72; Jens Bartelson, A Genealogy of Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); John Martin, “Inventing Sincerity, Refashioning Prudence: The Discovery of the Individual in Renaissance Europe,” American Historical Review 102 (1997): 1304–42; Peter Harrison, “Curiosity, Forbidden Knowledge, and the Reformation of Natural Philosophy in Early Modern England,” Isis 92 (2001): 265–90; and Anne Ferry, “Anonymous: The Literary History of a Word,” New Literary History 3 (2002): 193–214.

7. I borrow the term “equipment for living” from Kenneth Burke, “Literature as Equipment for Living,” in The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 293–304, without sharing his idea of a sociological criticism.

8. Edward Phillips, The New World of English Words (London, 1658), Kk3i^v, L1^r, Nn3i^v.

9. On history as a semantic engine, see Anthony Grafton, What Was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

10. Thus Sigmund Freud in “A Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad,’” trans. James Strachey, in Complete Psychological Works, ed. James Strachey et al., 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1956–74), 19:227–32, treats means of writing as representations of the structure of the psyche, a possibility developed further by Jacques Derrida in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 196–231.

11. For instance, see the human geographer Clarence K. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967); the historicist John Danby, Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature: A Study of King Lear (London: Faber and Faber, 1961); the new historicist Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988)—and many more studies like these. Danby considers nature and its meanings “the moving parts of Shakespeare’s world” but does not reflect on or develop the conceit.

12. To cite only a few representative examples: for conquest, Inga Clendinnen, “‘Fierce and Unnatural Cruelty’: Cortés and the Conquest of Mexico,” Representations 33 (1991): 65–100; for matter, Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991); for imagination, Murray W. Bundy, “‘Invention’ and ‘Imagination’ in the Renaissance,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 29 (1930): 535–45; for rebellion, Andrew Hadfield, “Treason and Rebellion,” in A Concise Companion to English Renaissance Literature, ed. Donna B. Hamilton (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), and Rebecca Lemon, Treason by Words: Literature, Law, and Rebellion in Shakespeare’s England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006); and for experience, Charles B. Schmitt, “Experience and Experiment: A Comparison of Zabarella’s View with Galileo’s in De motu,” Studies in the Renaissance 16 (1969): 80–138, repr. in his Studies in Renaissance Philosophy and Science (London: Variorum, 1981), unpaginated; and Jay, Cultural Semantics, 62–78.

13. Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America (London: Virago Press, 1988), 157.

Invention

1. François Rabelais, Le Tiers Livre, ed. M. A. Screech (Geneva: Droz, 1964), 327.

2. François Rigolot, “Rabelais’s Laurel for Glory: A Further Study of the ‘Pantagruelion,’” Renaissance Quarterly 42 (1989): 60–77.

3. Rabelais, Le Tiers Livre, 342–44.

4. François Rabelais, The Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. J. M. Cohen (London: Penguin Books, 1955), 427–28.

5. Charles Trinkaus, The Scope of Renaissance Humanism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983), 364–85, addresses the backgrounds of this tradition.

6. Rabelais, Le Tiers Livre, 338.

7. François Rabelais, OEuvres complètes, ed. Guy Demerson, rev. ed. (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1995), 51.

8. These two factors are often called by the terms res and verba, or “thing” and “word,” but I prefer to draw the contrast more broadly. See Brian Vickers, “‘Words and Things’—or ‘Words, Concepts, and Things’? Rhetorical and Linguistic Categories in the Renaissance,” in Res and Verba in der Renaissance, ed. Eckhard Kessler and Ian Maclean (Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz, 2002), 287–336.

9. Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 15...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction, An Experiment in Early Modern Critical Semantics
• Invention
• Language
• Resistance
• Blood
• World
• Afterword
• Notes
• Index