Abstract
In recent years, early modernists across a spectrum of fields have been picking up on the intellectual trends in a variety of other disciplines in their quest for a descriptive vocabulary for the patterns we find in early modern cultures. The objects we are trying to describe — material histories crossing a range of phenomena and levels of analysis — defy description by more traditional and received vocabularies, including the progeny of the various poststructuralisms: deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and Althusserian and Foucauldian materialisms.1 The behaviors of these systems, involving trade and economics, exploration and map-making, social and political formations and change, production and cultivation of the arts, and the spread of literate culture throughout Europe, to name only some, invite critics and historians to experiment with the vocabulary of ‘complex’ systems that has been more readily associated with the social sciences and — undergirding them — the physical sciences.
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Notes
See F. Elizabeth Hart, ‘Matter, System, and Early Modern Studies: Outlines for a Materialist Linguistics’, Configurations 6 (1998), 311–343, for notes pertaining to the relationship between varieties of Marxism and neo-Marxist–particularly Foucauldian–materialist historical methodologies.
See especially Mary Thomas Crane, Shakespeare’s Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001)
Ellen Spolsky, Satisfying Skepticism: Embodied Knowledge in the Early Modern World (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate Publishing, 2001); ‘Darwin and Derrida: Cognitive Literary Theory as a Species of Post-Structuralism’, Poetics Today 23:1 (2002), 43–62; Word vs. Image: Cognitive Hunger in Shakespeare’s England (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)
Bruce McConachie, Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
See Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), which also helpfully summarizes the history of cognitive science in its development toward an embrace of dynamic systems theory: ‘Three major approaches to the study of the mind can be distinguished within cognitive science–cognitivism, connectionism, and embodied dynamicism. Each approach has its preferred theoretical metaphor for understanding the mind. For cognitivism, the metaphor is the mind as a digital computer; for connectionism, it is the mind as neural network; for embodied dynamicism, it is the mind as an embodied dynamic system. Cognitivism dominated the field from the 1950s to the 1970s. In the 1980s, connectionism began to challenge the cognitivist orthodoxy, followed in the 1990s by embodied dynamicism. In contemporary research, all three approaches coexist, both separately and in various hybrid forms’ (4).
See F. Elizabeth Hart, ‘The Epistemology of Cognitive Literary Studies’, Philosophy and Literature 25 (2001), 314–334.
See George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
Ivo Kamps, ‘Materialist Shakespeare: An Introduction’, in Kamps, ed., Materialist Shakespeare: A History (New York: Verso, 1995), 4.
See Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, and George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999).
See Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities (New York: Basic Books, 2002).
Louis Montrose, ‘Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture’, in H. Aram Veeser, ed., The New Historicism (New York and London: Routledge, 1989), 15–36 (21, emphasis in original).
Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004)
Robert N. Watson, Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006)
Bruce R. Smith, The Key of Green: Passion and Perception in Renaissance Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
See Henry S. Turner, Shakespeare’s Double Helix (London and New York: Continuum, 2007), and Alison Games, The Web of Empire. Notice the ‘web’ of Games’ title and her repetition throughout of terms like ‘emergence’ and ‘circulation’ as critical tropes to account for shifts emanating from smaller-scale human interactions toward larger-scale but retentively patterned cultural phenomena. For example, Games writes: ‘The repeated migration of the people at the heart of English expansion reveals the webs of connection that first linked England to a wider world and then, through multiple voyages, tightened the web, and embedded England in a world of uncertain and tantalizing opportunity’ (15, emphasis added).
Valerie Traub, ‘Mapping the Global Body’, in Peter Erickson and Clark Hulse, eds, Early Modern Visual Culture: Representation, Race, and Empire in Renaissance England (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 44–97.
See Linda Woodbridge, ‘Payback Time: On the Economic Rhetoric of Revenge in The Merchant of Venice’, in Paul Yachnin and Patricia Badir, eds, Shakespeare and the Cultures of Performance (Burlington/Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2008), 29–44
Natasha Korda, ‘Dame Usury: Gender, Credit, and (Ac)counting in the Sonnets and The Merchant of Venice’, Shakespeare Quarterly 60:3 (2009), 129–153; Amanda Bailey, Of Bondage: Debt and Dramatic Economies in Early Modern England (in progress).
See Ralph Berry, Shakespeare’s Comedies: Explorations in Form (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972).
Citations to the play are from David Bevington’s The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 6th edition (Harlow: Longman, 2009).
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© 2011 F. Elizabeth Hart
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Elizabeth Hart, F. (2011). A Paltry ‘Hoop of Gold’: Semantics and Systematicity in Early Modern Studies. In: Cefalu, P., Reynolds, B. (eds) The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230299986_2
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