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In the seventeenth century the ancient hope for the physical
resurrection of the body and its flesh began an unexpected second
life as critical theory, challenging the notion of an autonomous
self and driving early modern avant-garde poetry. As an emerging
empirical scientific world view and a rising Cartesian dualist
ontology transformed the ancient hope for the resurrection of the
flesh into the fantasy of a soul or mind living on separately from
any body, literature complicated the terms of the debate. Such
poets as Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, and Jonson picked up the
discarded idea of the resurrection of the flesh and bent it from an
apocalyptic future into the here and now to imagine the self
already infused with the strange, vibrant materiality of the
resurrection body. Fate of the Flesh explores what happens when
seventeenth-century poets posit a resurrection body within the
historical person. These poets see the resurrection body as the
precondition for the social person's identities and forms of agency
and yet as deeply other to all such identities and agencies, an
alien within the self that both enables and undercuts life as a
social person. This perspective leads seventeenth-century poets to
a compelling awareness of the unsettling materiality within the
heart of the self and allows them to re-imagine agency, selfhood,
and the natural world in its light. By developing a poetics that
seeks a deranging materiality within the self, these poets
anticipate twentieth-century "avant-garde" poetics. They frame
their poems neither as simple representation nor as beautiful
objects but as a form of social praxis that creates new communities
of readers and writers assembled around a new experience of
self-as-body mediated by poetry.
In the seventeenth century the ancient hope for the physical
resurrection of the body and its flesh began an unexpected second
life as critical theory, challenging the notion of an autonomous
self and driving early modern avant-garde poetry. As an emerging
empirical scientific world view and a rising Cartesian dualist
ontology transformed the ancient hope for the resurrection of the
flesh into the fantasy of a soul or mind living on separately from
any body, literature complicated the terms of the debate. Such
poets as Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, and Jonson picked up the
discarded idea of the resurrection of the flesh and bent it from an
apocalyptic future into the here and now to imagine the self
already infused with the strange, vibrant materiality of the
resurrection body. Fate of the Flesh explores what happens when
seventeenth-century poets posit a resurrection body within the
historical person. These poets see the resurrection body as the
precondition for the social person’s identities and forms of
agency and yet as deeply other to all such identities and agencies,
an alien within the self that both enables and undercuts life as a
social person. This perspective leads seventeenth-century poets to
a compelling awareness of the unsettling materiality within the
heart of the self and allows them to re-imagine agency, selfhood,
and the natural world in its light. By developing a poetics that
seeks a deranging materiality within the self, these poets
anticipate twentieth-century “avant-garde” poetics. They frame
their poems neither as simple representation nor as beautiful
objects but as a form of social praxis that creates new communities
of readers and writers assembled around a new experience of
self-as-body mediated by poetry.
Before the eighteenth-century rise of the ideology of intimacy,
sexuality was defined not by social affiliations but by bodies. In
"Before Intimacy," Daniel Juan Gil examines sixteenth-century
English literary concepts of sexuality that frame erotic ties as
neither bound by social customs nor transgressive of them, but
rather as "loopholes" in people's experiences and associations.
Engaging the poems of Wyatt, Sidney's "Astrophil and Stella,"
Spenser's "Amoretti" and "The Faerie Queene," and Shakespeare's
"Troilus and Cressida" and the "Sonnets," Gil demonstrates how
sexuality was conceived as a relationship system inhabited by men
and women interchangeably--set apart from the "norm" and not
institutionalized in a private or domestic realm. Going beyond the
sodomy-as-transgression analytic, he asserts the existence of
socially inconsequential sexual bonds while recognizing the
pleasurable effects of violating the supposed traditional modes of
bonding and ideals of universal humanity and social hierarchy.
Celebrating the ability of corporeal emotions to interpret
connections between people who share nothing in terms of societal
structure, "Before Intimacy" shows how these works of early modern
literature provide a discourse of sexuality that strives to
understand status differences in erotic contexts and thereby
question key assumptions of modernity.
Daniel Juan Gil is assistant professor of English at TCU.
Before the eighteenth-century rise of the ideology of intimacy,
sexuality was defined not by social affiliations but by bodies. In
"Before Intimacy," Daniel Juan Gil examines sixteenth-century
English literary concepts of sexuality that frame erotic ties as
neither bound by social customs nor transgressive of them, but
rather as "loopholes" in people's experiences and associations.
Engaging the poems of Wyatt, Sidney's "Astrophil and Stella,"
Spenser's "Amoretti" and "The Faerie Queene," and Shakespeare's
"Troilus and Cressida" and the "Sonnets," Gil demonstrates how
sexuality was conceived as a relationship system inhabited by men
and women interchangeably--set apart from the "norm" and not
institutionalized in a private or domestic realm. Going beyond the
sodomy-as-transgression analytic, he asserts the existence of
socially inconsequential sexual bonds while recognizing the
pleasurable effects of violating the supposed traditional modes of
bonding and ideals of universal humanity and social hierarchy.
Celebrating the ability of corporeal emotions to interpret
connections between people who share nothing in terms of societal
structure, "Before Intimacy" shows how these works of early modern
literature provide a discourse of sexuality that strives to
understand status differences in erotic contexts and thereby
question key assumptions of modernity.
Daniel Juan Gil is assistant professor of English at TCU.
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