Abstract
The idea of a return of theory might give readers pause. When, if at all, did use and development of theory in early modern English literary-cultural studies decline? With the exception of new materialist, post humanist, and some performance-oriented work, as well as the combined social theory, performance aesthetics, and critical methodology of transversal poetics, the field has suffered a waning interest in theoretically driven approaches that began during the mid-1990s. The radical drop in positions advertised in the MLA Job List for which an emphasis in theory was a primary criterion, the emergence of a large community of scholars whose focus was the history of the book, editing, or philology, and the widespread popularity of Harold Bloom’s liberal-humanist account of Shakespeare’s genius all exemplified this lag.1
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Notes
William Flesch, Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and other Biological Components of Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
Denis Dutton, The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008)
Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009)
Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (New York: Harper, 2008).
Jean Howard and Marion F. O’Connor, Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology (London: Methuen, 1987).
Cited in Bradd Shore, Culture in Mind: Cognition, Culture, and the Problem of Meaning (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 32.
Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Penguin Books, 2002), 60.
Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson, The Origin and Evolution of Cultures (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 104.
Michael Tomasello, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 10.
For an example of work along these lines, see Andrew Newberg, Why God Won’t Go Away (New York: Random House, 2002).
Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 89.
Cited in Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 236.
See Andrew Newberg, Principles of Neurotheology (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010).
Ken Jackson and Arthur Marotti, ‘The Turn to Religion in Early Modern Studies’, Criticism 46: 1 (2004), 167–190.
Graham Hammill and Julia Lupton, ‘Sovereign, Citizens, and Saints: Political Theology and Renaissance Literature’, Religion and Literature 38: 3 (2006), 1–11.
Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 220.
See Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters in the Concept of Sovereignty, ed. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
See Giorgio Agamben, States of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
For a transversalist perspective on this notion of bare life, see Anna Kłosowska and Bryan Reynolds, ‘Civilizing Subjects, or Not: Montaigne’s Guide to Modernity, Agamben’s Exception, and Human Rights after Derrida’, in Bryan Reynolds, Transversal Subjects: From Montaigne to Deleuze after Derrida (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 203–61.
Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 7–11.
Douglas Bruster, Shakespeare and the Question of Culture: Early Modern Literature and the Cultural Turn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
Jonathan Gil Harris, Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).
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© 2011 Paul Cefalu & Bryan Reynolds
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Cefalu, P., Reynolds, B. (2011). Tarrying with the Subjunctive, an Introduction. In: Cefalu, P., Reynolds, B. (eds) The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230299986_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230299986_1
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