Poetry in a World of Things - Aesthetics and Empiricism in Renaissance Ekphrasis

We have become used to looking at art from a stance of detachment. In order to be objective, we create a "mental space" between ourselves and the objects of our investigation, separating internal and external worlds. This detachment dates back to the early modern period, when researchers in a wide variety of fields tried to describe material objects as "things in themselves"--things, that is, without the admixture of imagination. Generations of scholars have heralded this shift as the Renaissance "discovery" of the observable world.

In Poetry in a World of Things, Rachel Eisendrath explores how poetry responded to this new detachment by becoming a repository for a more complex experience of the world. The book focuses on ekphrasis, the elaborate literary description of a thing, as a mode of resistance to this new empirical objectivity. Poets like Petrarch, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare crafted highly artful descriptions that recovered the threatened subjective experience of the material world. In so doing, these poets reflected on the emergence of objectivity itself as a process that was often darker and more painful than otherwise acknowledged. This highly original book reclaims subjectivity as a decidedly poetic and human way of experiencing the material world and, at the same time, makes a case for understanding art objects as fundamentally unlike any other kind of objects.

About the author

Rachel Eisendrath is assistant professor of English and chair of Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University.

Product details

• Authors: Rachel Eisendrath
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 30.04.2018
• EAN: 9780226516615
• ISBN: 978-0-226-51661-5
• No. of pages: 208
• Subjects: Guides > Self-help, everyday life > Family; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; Europe, European History, LITERARY CRITICISM / European / General, LITERARY CRITICISM / Renaissance, ART / European, History of Art, Literature: history & criticism, Literary studies: general, Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700, Renaissance art, Renaissance style, Literature: history and criticism, European history: Renaissance, HISTORY / Europe / Renaissance, Literary studies: c 1400 to c 1600, ART / History / European / Renaissance