Go Figure
Energies, Forms, and Institutions in the Early Modern World
Will be published approx. on 2. March 2011
Book
Hardback
228 pages
978-0-8232-3349-6 (ISBN)
Description
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-Francois 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.
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-Francois 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.
Reviews / Votes
"A superb contribution to Renaissance studies that respects the complexity of textual detail as well as social, cultural, and political history." -- -William J. Kennedy Cornell University "A significant contribution to recent New Formalist debates on the relation between aesthetics, historicism, and poststructuralist theory." -- -Melissa Sanchez University of Pennsylvania "An extraordinarily stimulating collection, on an important topic for multiple disciplines." -- -Patricia Parker Stanford UniversityMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Product notice
Cloth over boards
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 163 mm
Thickness: 23 mm
Weight
490 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8232-3349-6 (9780823233496)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Judith H. Anderson is Chancellor's Professor of English Emeritus at Indiana University. Her books include Words That Matter: Linguistic Perception in Renaissance English; Translating Investments: Metaphor and the Dynamic of Cultural Change in Tudor-Stuart England (Fordham); and Reading the Allegorical Intertext: Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton (Fordham).
Joan Pong Linton is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Asian American Program at Indiana University. In 1998, she published The Romance of the New World: Gender and the Literary Formations of English Colonialism.
Joan Pong Linton is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Asian American Program at Indiana University. In 1998, she published The Romance of the New World: Gender and the Literary Formations of English Colonialism.