In mid-May, 2013, a symposium on “Reading the Renaissance” was held at Indiana University in honor of Judith H. Anderson, who has taught there for thirty-nine years. Guest speakers were Andrew Escobedo, David Lee Miller, William Oram, and Anne Lake Prescott. Dozens of Anderson’s former and current graduate students also participated in the day-long event, returning to IU from Rhode Island, Seattle, Costa Rica, and other locations. Anderson has served on over eighty dissertation committees in several fields and periods, of which she has directed roughly half. She describes her retirement from the IU teaching faculty as a prolonged and active sabbatical with new and continuing projects, not to mention a number of dissertations still in progress. (Judith also notes that, on provocative principle, she is tempted to adopt the practice common among Classicists of using the form of the adjective emeritus/-a /-um that is not a grammatical error for the title “professor,” adding that she has not been a professoress these many decades. Discussion invited: custom, implications for gender, anachronism, sexism, the pleasures, frustrations, or futility of swimming upstream, and the like.)
Andrew Escobedo, Ohio University
Is a Personification an Example or a Sign?
Literary personifications behave as agents within narratives, but they also resemble allegorical signs. To what degree does their allegorical nature—if they are allegorical—promote or retard their function as agents? In other words, what is the relationship between a personification’s characterhood and its signhood?
Borrowing the terminology of the art philosopher Nelson Goodman, we can say that literary prosopopoeia involves a mixture of signification and exemplification. In some cases, personifications signify their concept by performing actions that share no characteristics with that concept. The character of Chastity (Pudicitia) in Prudentius’s Psychomachia, for instance, defeats her opponent Lust by thrusting a sword into the vice’s throat. She signifies chastity through actions that are not themselves literally chaste; her signifying function, as with many allegorical signs, has nothing to do with the nature of her character.
Yet contrast Chastity with Prudentius’s Patience: this personification endures the assaults of Wrath patiently, and throughout the encounter the poet describes her has calm, still, and waiting. The things that Patience does are literally patient, and so she exemplifies her concept in a way that Chastity does not. What Patience signifies depends on what she does and on what kind of character she is, because she exemplifies what she signifies.
The rubrics of sign and example allow us to specify the range of ways in which personifications act out their concepts as agents. As signs, personifications are partly free of the protocols of probability and causation that govern the literal fiction. As examples, they engage the literal fiction with their characters and signify their concept within that fiction. They have one foot in signhood and one foot in characterhood.
David Lee Miller, University of South Carolina
Allegory and Metacognition in the Legend of Temperance
This paper sets out to hone the edge of a critical commonplace, the notion that the allegory of The Faerie Queene teaches us how to read the poem. Beginning with the example of the Fradubio episode, in which the Redcrosse Knight fails to recognize his own experience in the story told by the enchanted tree, I suggest that the allegory demands more from a reader than “superior awareness” of the protagonist’s cognitive failure. It demands cognition (“Redcrosse is missing the point”) but also recognition (“I am like Redcrosse”) and, finally, what I propose to call metacognition: “The process of knowing in this text amounts to a sustained interplay in which I am called upon to witness failures of recognition, diagnose them, and rediscover my own implication in the scenes I am witnessing.” The paper goes on to illustrate the way that the invitation to metacognitive discovery is built into the allegory via close readings of the Mortdant and Amavia and Maleger episodes in Book II of the poem.
William Oram, Smith College
Glendower’s Truth: Shakespeare as Historian in 1 Henry IV
This paper considers the imagination, that essential, unreliable image-making faculty of the mind, as it shapes the conflict between Hotspur and Glendower in III.i of Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV. As a charismatic leader Glendower must capture the imaginations of his followers: his seemingly fanciful claim to magical power helps to establish his authority. Like Prince Hal, he manipulates this public imagination to assure his rule. By contrast, Hotspur, who sees himself as a common-sense skeptic, cannot see the actual world for his own fantastic vision of himself. Characteristically, he quarrels over a map of England (itself a mental construct) as he imagines an engineering project to shift the bed of the river Trent. This scene, absent from Holinshed and seemingly untethered from the rest of the play, epitomizes the tetralogy’s scrutiny of the imagination as it enables and limits political action.
Anne Lake Prescott, Professor Emerita, Barnard College
Nathan and the Problem with Parables
In “The Nathan Syndrome: Stories with a Moral Intention,”[1] Robert McAfee Brown claims that because “stories have power to transform” they “are inevitably moral vehicles.” Victims of “tyrants” can take heart from Nathan’s guts in rebuking David, through a fable, for stealing Uriah’s wife and arranging his murder. Yes, although Steven Batman noted in The New Arrival of the three Gracis (1580) how “discreetly” Nathan “intrappid” the king with “similitude,” and in 1614 Andrew Willet observed in his Harmonie upon the second booke of Samuel that Nathan’s used “covert speech” because rulers are “headstrong.” Most famously, Philip Sidney’s Defense argues that poesis is better than “wordish” philosophy or history’s depressing facts for moving us to virtue; he cites this same fable. Yet this fiction first moves David to condemn an imaginary perpetrator, and Nathan must play the exegete before the king weeps out Psalm 51: Sidney’s David takes fiction as history, then learns it’s poetry, and then composes verse that because prophetic is not the “right poetry” Sidney defends. It’s complicated.
Others advising power likewise remembered Nathan. Beware hypocrisy, Hugh Latimer tells Edward in 1550, because “There is nothynge pryvye or hydden that shall not be revealed”; witness David, who through “pollicy thought to have cloked the [Bathsheba] matter.” And years later, in 1631, a young Thomas Fuller, although not a prince’s adviser, versified “Davids heinous sinne. Heartie repentance. Heavie punishment”; here God sends “Plaine-dealing Nathan.” But is he “plaine-dealing”? He sneaks into plain-dealing through a “parable, his minde to maske, / … And Lapwing-like, round fluttering a while, / With a praeface and a witty wile, / He made the King himselfe for to beguile.” Fuller sees the tension between plainness and parable, for his David had relied on “false shewes” to “shade” his “secret sinnes” but was “couzned by one plaine Prophet” and “condemnèd by his own command.” Preachers should be “powerfull and plaine.” But would a “plaine” Nathan have trapped David?
Another complexity: how much may one versify or expand the history of David’s adultery as disguised by a fiction that disguises history before biblical narrative becomes secular literature? Or does God, like Sidney, enjoy tangles?
[1] Religion & Literature 16.1 (1984), 56.
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Comments
It is truly refreshing to see that the symposium was organized in honor of Judith H. Anderson, a remarkable professor who devoted nearly four decades to teaching at Indiana University. The gathering of guest speakers and former and current graduate students from various locations is a testament to the impact she has had on countless people in the field of Renaissance studies. Anderson's commitment to the academy is evident in her extensive involvement in dissertation committees and ongoing projects even after her retirement. Her willingness to challenge traditional conventions, as noted in her playful contemplation of adopting the emeritus form, sparks intriguing discussions of custom, gender implications, anachronism, and sexism. It highlights her intellectual curiosity and willingness to swim against the current. This celebration of Anderson's contributions reminds me of the famous <a href=https://graduateway.com/brindis-speech/>brindis speech of jose rizal</a>, a Filipino national hero. In his speech, Rizal stressed the importance of recognizing and honoring those who have dedicated themselves to the pursuit of knowledge and the betterment of society. Anderson's lifelong commitment and the symposium held in his honor embody the spirit of Rizal's call to appreciate the efforts of educators and their significant role in shaping minds and preserving our cultural heritage.
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