Poetry, Signs, and MagicPoetry, Signs, and Magic brings together in a single volume fourteen new and previously published essays by the eminent Renaissance scholar and literary critic Thomas M. Greene. This collection looks back toward two earlier volumes by Greene, his first essay collection The Vulnerable Text: Essays on Renaissance Literature, and Poesie et Magie, whose theme is here explored again at greater length and depth, from linguistic and literary critical perspectives. Greene argues that certain poetic gestures draw their peculiar strengths by serving as vestiges of poetry's ancestral acts - magic, prayer, and invocation. Poetry, in other words, feigns an earlier power, but in this diminishment there occurs a verbal subtlety, and figural poignancy, commonly associated with art's aesthetic pleasures. Greene employs his well-known skills as a close reader to texts by a range of writers including a variety of contemporary theorists. in diverse contexts the distinction between disjunctive and conjunctive linguistics, dual theories of sound and meaning of crucial importance to Plato and Aristotle, to Catholic and Protestant debates on the sacraments, to the more recent skeptical methodologies of Derrida and de Man. Thomas M. Greene was a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Yale University. |
Contents
Foreword | 9 |
Introduction | 17 |
Rabelais and the Language of Malediction | 62 |
Copyright | |
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Aeneid Antony Antony and Cleopatra Antony's appears Balet Comique ballet Ballet des Polonais Beaujoyeulx becomes body called century ceremonial choreographic circle Cleopatra closure Coleridge Comus conjunctive context correspondence Cratylus culture dancers death disjunctive divine Dorat's dramatic Edited Elegy Essays evokes Ficino geranos gesture heaven human hymn imitate intuition invocation John Donne Jonson kind labyrinth labyrinth dances language lines linguistic linked magic masque Masque of Beauty maze meaning ment metaphor nature Orphic Paris passage perceived performance play Plutarch poem poet poetic poetry present projective quoted Rabelais reader recursus reference Renaissance rhetoric Richard Richard II ritual Ronsard Samuel Taylor Coleridge scene seems semiotic Shakespeare signified song sonnet Sonnet 16 soul sound speaker speech spirit suggests symbol textual theory Theseus thing thou tion trans translation Troia trope turn uncanny University Press verbal vols Wallace Stevens word writes York