Aesthetics and Crisis: Essays on the Authority of Criticism in Early Modern Literary Studies

Abstract

There has recently been a wave of literary criticism interested in the application of aesthetic theory to early modern studies. Such interest has made significant headway in opening new possibilities for research that expand beyond the boundaries and limits of historical determinism, which has remained a dominate framework within the field for some time. Aesthetics re-envisions the text and the art object as a sensible form which becomes intelligible to criticism prior to the sociohistorical scene in which the text and art object were produced: this historicism, as I argue, only being reinjected back into the text and art object through a pre-critical gesture of metonymy. This reversal, placing the artwork before its historical production, provides a new opportunity to examine formal issues which continue to haunt the poetry of early modernism, which is where my project begins. However, while many recent critics have taken aesthetics as an alternative theory to supersede historicism, my own readings demonstrate how the formal traits of a text continue to decenter the stability which would ground aesthetics as an substitute methodology within literary studies. What each of my readings (made up of three major early modern poets—Sidney, Herbert, and Marvell—and corresponding to three formal figures respectively—mimesis, catachresis, and irony) sustain is a reconsideration not of a proper methodology with which to legitimize early modern criticism but of the impropriety of the very conditions of the production and reproduction of criticism itself. My project therefore works backwards, from each of my chapters to the preface, in an attempt to refuse the elision of the questions engendered by the self-authorization of criticism, such as the question of our own right to remain a legitimized authority before the text and the greater implications for our own role in the university. My project does not aim to solve what has otherwise been named the crisis of legitimation nor proffer a stable methodology but to accelerate a de-growth of criticism, which falls back on our own complicity within the university.