Hodes, Nathaniel (Author)
Brandeis University
Flesch, William
Flesch, William
Whittington, Leah
Targoff, Ramie
Whittington, Leah
Publication date: 2014
Language: English
Edition Details: Advisor: Targoff, Ramie; Committee Members: Flesch, William, Whittington, Leah.
Physical Details: 201 pp.
The newfound social mobility of late-16th-century England allowed writers to critique authoritarian power structures and advocate Protestant reforms through allegorical fiction. Surprisingly, where many of these works touch on national and theological matters, the characters' discourse becomes conspicuously logical, adopting an unnaturally objective tone full of formal syllogisms. Authors craft such moments in reaction to the growing popularity of Ramism (initiated by French educator Pierre de la Ramée), which promoted syllogistic reason as the basis of all understanding. Ramus broke Aristotelian convention by fusing the certitude of abstract, scientific demonstration with the probable judgments of humanism concerning the active, moral life. Protestants especially embraced logic to facilitate the Reformation doctrine of sola scriptura : that every biblical text has only one literal meaning discovered through inferential argument. Laboring to dramatize their characters' claims to conviction, however, Milton and other poets reflect a broader Renaissance worry that reason is corrupt, and so logic is hopelessly worldly and timebound. Chapter 1 focuses on Abraham Fraunce's conversion of Edmund Spenser's Shepheardes Calender to a straightforward argument, which undermines Spenser's literary intention to consolidate a national identity through numerous conflicting allegories concerning the proper role of church and government. Subsequent chapters examine poetic revolts against logic's mandate of a precise way of reasoning and arguing. Chapter 2 examines how Shakespeare's Richard III uses Ramist method, especially in his implausible seduction of Anne, to circumvent the divine right of kingship by convincing others of his supposedly hidden inner virtue. Chapter 3 concentrates on the sinner of John Donne's Holy Sonnets, who grapples with anxiety about his salvation via logic. Donne's sermons reveal that logic cannot redirect errant desires but rather leads us to replace reason with a faith instilled by the Holy Spirit--a process that the Holy Sonnets enact. By the late 17th century, Ramism had developed into a science of ethical praxis aimed at calculating the highest moral ends. Chapter 4 examines how, in response, John Milton represents Satan and Eve in Paradise Lost seduced by the seeming certainties of syllogistic. Convincing themselves that falling is their only option, they negate their own freedom.
...MoreDescription Cited in Dissertation Abstracts International-A 76/02(E), Aug 2015. Proquest Document ID: 1616758673.
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