{"title":"Knights-Destinerrant: Spenser with Jacques Derrida","authors":"Eric Langley, Luke Prendergast","doi":"10.1086/723162","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/723162","url":null,"abstract":"This coauthored article approaches Spenser’s The Faerie Queene via Derrida’s The Post Card. Derrida’s text, in which he sends out increasingly errant and ill-directed calls, signals, and communications with the frustrated expectation of response, provides an apposite framework by which to address the digressive and wandering narrative strategies of Spenser’s comparably “destinerrant,” aspirational yet abjectly apostrophizing text.","PeriodicalId":39606,"journal":{"name":"Spenser Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75968170","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Planes, Plateaus, and The Faerie Queene: Spenser with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari","authors":"Yulia Ryzhik","doi":"10.1086/722429","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/722429","url":null,"abstract":"What might Spenser’s allegory be capable of if it were described as a rhizome rather than a tree? Taking its cue from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, this essay attempts a “rhizomatic” reading of The Faerie Queene. At first, the two works appear incompatible: binary, hierarchical signification, which is paramount to Spenser’s allegory and constitutes its vertical dimension, is anathema to Deleuze and Guattari’s leveling methodology. Yet in its horizontal dimension, its narrative, The Faerie Queene—not unlike A Thousand Plateaus—has a rhizomatic structure, which provokes a hermeneutic response and creates a network of connections between distant nodes. This essay reads the Cave of Mammon as a Spenserian “plateau,” or “hyper-allegorical space,” in which the planes of signification multiply, converge, and become flexible and interpermeable. Paradoxically, when the rhizome overtakes allegory, it becomes no less restrictive than the system it challenges, but Spenser also offers a glimpse of a possible escape from the allegorical machine.","PeriodicalId":39606,"journal":{"name":"Spenser Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76739848","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“But wisht, that with that shepheard he mote dwelling share”: Spenser with Jacques Rancière","authors":"Owen Kane","doi":"10.1086/722431","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/722431","url":null,"abstract":"Drawing on The Faerie Queene and Aisthesis, this essay brings Spenser and Rancière together to demonstrate a scenographic style they share. The scenographic style starts with an idea and interweaves that idea with the interpretive network that gives it meaning. Both writers engage concepts at work in ways that cannot be appreciated in advance of the context they appear in. Writing in this descriptive style requires attending to dispositions—how things are arranged in relation to other things. Despite their differences on how to best imagine such dispositions, each author overwhelms and refigures any available criteria for forming normative critical judgments by positioning together objects that typically don’t belong alongside each other. I propose Rancière’s word “reverie” for moments in Spenser’s poetry where the plot relaxes in favor of a daydream-like entertaining of new dispositional arrangements. The unlikely alliance of these two authors is itself a scene of missed understanding (“la mésentente”) opening up new forms of belonging.","PeriodicalId":39606,"journal":{"name":"Spenser Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77893335","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Spenserian Matchmaking: A Response to “Affective Companions”","authors":"Drew Daniel","doi":"10.1086/723528","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/723528","url":null,"abstract":"Affect” names the relational mode of living systems. Changes in the variable intensity of affect register the impact of events on those systems, and the resulting presentation and expression of those affects adjust and alter the surrounding world, in ways large and small. From the swoons and shocks of violent encounter within The Faerie Queene to the scenarios of seduction and complaint within the shorter poetry, Edmund Spenser is a preeminent poet of affective companionship. Spenser’s prismatic representations of affect range across a spectrum from hyperaestheticized idealizations of companionate bliss to gently comedic depictions of friendship and chivalrous service to darkly paranoid fantasies of betrayal and deception. Spenser’s very preeminence risks making him look singular, sui generis. How open to companionship with other intellectual interlocutors is he? The four essays that I have been asked to respond to here offer rich examples of the promise and the pitfalls of thinking affective companionship through the critical production of new relationships between Spenser and four generative companions: we are asked to reread Spenser “with”GillesDeleuze, Val Plumwood, SianneNgai, and Jean-LucMarion. It is a Lacanian truism that every two-term relationship in fact implies a third Other, triangulating the pairing from without. That is the case here, as these pairings have been brought about through the intercession of four scholarly matchmakers, each working to align their chosen pair at their most promising points of potential adhesion, hoping things will spark or stick or at","PeriodicalId":39606,"journal":{"name":"Spenser Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80331863","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“To knit the knot that euer shall remaine”: Spenser with Jean-Luc Marion","authors":"Joseph D. Parry","doi":"10.1086/722426","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/722426","url":null,"abstract":"The Amoretti is Spenser’s phenomenology of marriage, that is, an attempt to think marriage in general and in the particularity of his own concrete experience of pursuing a second marriage with Elizabeth Boyle. Jean-Luc Marion’s examination of the “erotic phenomenon” can help us see the paradoxes and the high stakes, personal and philosophical, that Spenser’s courtship inevitably confronts: that marriage always already constitutes an oath of eternal fidelity made, however, against the horizon of its own dissolution at death. Spenser knows this problem well, having experienced the death of his first wife. His elaborately stylized performance not only draws attention to the way that Platonic Christian conceptualizations of eros elide these paradoxes but also allows him to play with the terms and conventions that have haunted so many of his predecessor love poets, especially Petrarch. In so doing, the poet sets committed erotic love in the Amoretti within a kind of Christian existentialist understanding of being—a conception that renders the sacred and, indeed, the grace of God as phenomena within mortal embodied experience.","PeriodicalId":39606,"journal":{"name":"Spenser Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81968533","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“What art thou man, (if man at all thou art)”: Spenser with Sylvia Wynter","authors":"Kat Addis","doi":"10.1086/722424","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/722424","url":null,"abstract":"This essay reaches toward thinking Spenser with Sylvia Wynter in two stages. In the first stage, I read Spenser’s use of the terms “inhumanitie” and “humanity” in The Faerie Queene in relation to Briana, Crudor, and the “salvage man.” Spenser’s use of these terms, I suggest, enacts and illustrates Wynter’s theory of the overrepresentation of Man as the human. In the second stage, thinking alongside Wynter’s emancipatory thrust toward, in David Scott’s terms, the “re-enchantment of humanism,” I reconsider what it might mean to be deposited on the edges of the poem’s allegorical scheme. If figures like the “bear-baby” and Gryll can be thought of as human but not on Man’s terms, they not only reveal the limits of Man’s imaginary but also demand an alternative poetry of the human.","PeriodicalId":39606,"journal":{"name":"Spenser Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78788457","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"In the Person of the Author: A Response to “Imagined Companions”","authors":"Leah Whittington","doi":"10.1086/723530","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/723530","url":null,"abstract":"During the years in which I spent most summers in Rome, the little blue backpack I used to tote my stuff around the city almost always contained, regardless of what I was up to that day, a copy of Georgina Masson’s Companion Guide to Rome. The Companion Guides, as the series description on the inside flap of my 1965 edition explained, were designed “to provide a Companion, in the person of the author.” Georgina (we were naturally on a first-name basis) took this job very seriously. Far be it from her to merely recite the names and dates of consuls or lecture me on the vicissitudes of the medieval papacy. As a fellow traveler on the great Roman adventure through life, art, and time, she made it her business to be exquisitely companionable. She was solicitous about my well-being, taking pains to ensure that I wore comfortable shoes (“preferably with a thick soft sole”), didn’t expose myself too long to the sun (“in the middle of the day the Forum is stifling”), and kept up my spirits in the face of common local disasters such as closures, construction, strikes, and vespas (“do not be surprised if plans fail to work out as expected”). She understood that a little cheerleading was sometimes necessary to achieve a desired end. If the 122 steps up to S. Maria Aracoeli required more courage than I could muster on a hot afternoon, she suggested climbing to Piazza Campidoglio via the gently ascending cordonata, which had the added benefit of having been designed by Michelangelo.","PeriodicalId":39606,"journal":{"name":"Spenser Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73724556","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Like to Amoret”: Spenser with Julia Kristeva","authors":"Emily Sarah Barth","doi":"10.1086/723159","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/723159","url":null,"abstract":"In placing Spenser and Kristeva in companionship with one another, this article proposes to demonstrate a shared understanding of subjectivity in their work. The development of the subject through Spenserian exemplarity works quite similarly to the way that Kristeva describes momentary assertions of identity producing subjectivity through unstable mimetic representation. Spenser instructs us to read the sprawling stories and revisions of Florimell, Britomart, and perhaps especially Amoret as though what has been done to one has been done to the others, producing a situation in which these characters might be read productively through the lens of Kristeva’s semiotic: “heterogeneous to meaning but always in sight of it.” In particular, approaching Amoret with Kristeva’s theory in hand reveals a figure positioned to suggest another way of proceeding onward through the complex social world of the text.","PeriodicalId":39606,"journal":{"name":"Spenser Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87636257","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Response to “Companionable Bodies”","authors":"M. Schoenfeldt","doi":"10.1086/723527","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/723527","url":null,"abstract":"I t is certainly difficult to read Spenser without a companion. The labyrinthine narrative and multidimensional allegory seem to demand the presence of an accomplice who can help one navigate the glorious distractions the text engenders. And it can’t be just any companion; it must be the right kind of companion, one who can help distinguish true from false, distraction from destination. Perhaps this is why Spenser so frequently bestows a sidekick on the figures representing his virtues; like us, the virtues need someone to help them traverse the treacherous and volatile landscape Spenser brilliantly re-creates. My own first companion in reading Spenser exerted a powerful influence on the way I have gone on to read him and helped inspire my abiding appreciation for the strange and wonderful poetic textures of The Faerie Queene. I did not read the poem until graduate school, I am embarrassed to say, although I am not sure that my undergraduate self would have been able to appreciate fully the remarkable effects of Spenser’s verse. As a graduate student at Berkeley, I signed up for a class with Stephen Booth, the famously close reader of Shakespeare ’s sonnets, because I really wanted to take a course with him. It was incidental that this course happened to be onThe Faerie Queene; I took the class for the professor, not for the subject. I finished the semester an abiding admirer of both. While the class was supposedly devoted to reading","PeriodicalId":39606,"journal":{"name":"Spenser Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76101127","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}