Please consider registering as a member of the International Spenser Society, the professional organization that supports The Spenser Review. There is no charge for membership; your contact information will be kept strictly confidential and will be used only to conduct the business of the ISS—chiefly to notify members when a new issue of SpR has been posted.

Open Worlds? Spenser’s Ecological Game Play
by Julian Yates

Open Worlds? Spensers Ecological Game Play

Julian Yates

jyates@udel.edu

 

Towards the end of the ominously numbered session #666, ‘Spenser, Ecology and the Dream of a Legible Environment’, at the 2020 Modern Language Association meeting in Seattle, Washington, presider Steve Mentz pondered something like the following: ‘As we have seen today, there is something about Spenser that encourages ecological thinking’. Certainly, the panel merited some such positive pronouncement, especially given how engaging all the papers had been: Joe Campana’s ‘Should (Bleeding) Trees Have Standing’; Brent Dawson’s ‘Spenser’s Storms and the Ends of Time’; Dyani Johns Taff’s ‘Male Wombs, Ravenous Oceans and Racialised Environments in The Faerie Queene’; Alexander Lowe McAdams, ‘Spenser’s Ecology of Temperance’; Will Rhodes’s ‘Reading the Colonised Environment: Irish Ecology and Allegorical Landscapes’; and Tiffany Jo Werth’s trippy ‘Life after Earth: Eschatology and Ecocriticism via Redcrosse Knight’s Vision’.[i] Since the conference, I have carried Steve’s comment in the back of my mind in the form of a question: what is it about Spenser’s works—and did he really mean really the Faerie Queene?—that lends itself to ecological thinking, that is, to a way of modelling the complicated phenomena we call life without reduction or at least sensitive to the ways in which it is reduced?[ii] My immediate response, which occurred to me with the kind of automaticity we metaphorise as arising from the gut, took the form of a feeling, a reaction, even a symptom: there is something about the structure of the diegetic worlds Spenser creates that makes them hospitable to ecologically minded thinking. This, I think, is the force of the phrase ‘the dream of a legible environment’ in the panel’s title. In what senses does the Faerie Queene render the codes or processes that make the world readable?[iii]

Following the panel, one of the editors of this issue of the Spenser Review approached me to ask if I might be interested in reporting on what they described as recent ‘intersections in Spenser studies with ecocriticism, the more-than-human, and ecologies’. Full of thoughts generated by panel #666, I wrote this short essay to explore what it might be about the world of the Faerie Queene that proves hospitable to ecological thinking. Along the way I redact some of the most recent essays and book chapters I have found most helpful to my thinking as I have tried to transform my quasi-automatic reaction into something like a response. It has not been possible, obviously, to do proper justice to the wealth of work out there – especially so given that the intersection between Spenser studies and ecocriticism is a burgeoning field of inquiry. My choices are entirely idiosyncratic.[iv] 

 

Game Play

Now, while a devoted and longtime reader of Spenser and Spenserian criticism, I am, myself, only a holiday or recreational Spenserian. My orientation to the field of Spenser studies remains that of the hobbyist or casual gamer. Spenser has always been something to play with; an invitation to play, even to waste a little time. This orientation to ‘play’ as time wasting is important, for my ‘hypothesis’ runs something like this: Spenser’s fictions are constructed as an absorbing or immersive game space. This game space does not amount to what certain video game designers would call an ‘open world’, a virtual landscape unfettered by overly linear sequencing or locked doors to ensure that the story unfold in a particular order; a world that allows and so encourages a player to explore. Or, if Spenser’s game-space does accord with open world architectures it is because, like them, it remains governed by certain rules that cannot be broken. It is, after all, subject to the time-bound linearity of the word. As philosopher and video game scholar Ian Bogost sums them up in a tweet drenched in irony: ‘An open-world video game is one in which anything you think of doing you can’t actually do’.[v] Such worlds are constructed so as to appear open: they are constructed so as to persuade you to the position that you could do anything you like and, by granting you that appearance of choice, they invite you to spend most of your time playing by their rules, even as, on occasion, you might choose to spend a day wandering off or around. This opening-closing or winking possibility of open world architecture speaks, I think, to what panel #666 named the ‘dream of legibility’ that Spenser’s Faerie Queene deploys, the lure of allegory become a game of reading and decoding.

The notion that games, like texts, are constructed to persuade the player / reader to a position or world view, even it is only by habit, by the way they make you move around, reveals the extent to which games and stories share a common relation to rhetoric and world-building. This correlation forms the basis of Ian Bogost’s Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (2010), which coins the term ‘procedural rhetoric’ to explain how games build world-arguments. The iterative cast to ‘procedurality’ becomes a way of ‘creating, explaining, or understanding processes. And processes define the ways things work: the methods, techniques and logics that drive the operation of systems’, be those systems, mechanical organisational or conceptual. Games, in this way lend themselves to systems thinking. Or, better still, they orient the player to how processes appear to work in the system they represent / build.[vi] A procedural approach subtly refines the relatively familiar way of thinking of games as models of experiences, which they invite us inhabit as we take on a role. Games inculcate a sense that what we name the world is a complex system; that those systems are made possible by differing processes; and by leaving those processes partially open to view, a game can make them thinkable, or persuade you that they may be thought in certain terms and not others.[vii]

Viewed this way, a text such as the Faerie Queene begins to look something like a sixteenth-century allegorical Sim or theme park, filled with various levels or well-traveled rides (The Rock of Vile Reproach, The Bower of Bliss; The House of Busirane; Serena and the Cannibals, etc.) that we can experience directly as a player via our hero-avatar (Redcrosse Knight, Sir Guyon, Britomart, etc.) or vicariously by watching a play-through by another reader / Palmer-critic (please insert your favourites here). Indeed, much criticism seems to function in the mode of the epi-genre or plethora of extra-textual forms that supplement online games: play throughs or tutorials uploaded to YouTube; YouTube channels; fan-wikis, and so on. Rereading Spenser’s iconic letter to Sir Walter Raleigh, I find myself transported into what feels like the opening, expository, ‘cut scene’ in which an in-game character offers advice on how to proceed. The game, I learn, is all about character-building and maintenance (which can take ages), ‘to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline’. But, we have to be careful because ‘knowing how doubtfully all Allegories may be construed, and this booke of mine, which I have entitled the Faerie Queene, being a continued Allegory, or darke conceit’, its processes remain ‘open’ or only partially ‘closed’.[viii] Who knows what might happen, who knows who or what we might end up fashioning if we get it wrong? There may even be traps. Plus, there are twelve levels / virtues to work through, but only six (Holinesse, Temperaunce, Chastitie, Friendship, Justice, Courtesie) made the ‘build’. And the processes keyed to each of these virtues are complex. Their performance generates much more than an optimising ‘technology of self’, set of somatic and psychological routines, or regime, as Michel Foucault would call it, for making persons. They also generate an unruly excess that is sometimes personed by or personified into another possible avatar: you might ‘play’, for a while, as Una with her satyr reading group, as Duessa, Archimago or why not as Grill?

What is more, every technology of self proves to be coterminous with the production of an environing world, so each ‘level’ also introduces you to how that world seems to work via a staged or reduced sense of the ecological as or at play. Perhaps this is why the Faerie Queene proves to be so inviting or hospitable to ecological thinking: the text itself, by its opening and closing of an orientation to process, suggests a winking insight into the way a world might work. This at least is my hypothesis.[ix]

 

Three Play Throughs

One of my favourite playthroughs of late, one that wastes my time completely and leads me wonderfully astray in the process, is Chris Barrett’s ‘Allegraphy and The Faerie Queenes Significantly Unsignifying Ecology’ (2016). Barrett argues that the poem ‘is less allegorical—or, rather, more unallegorical—than it seems’.[x] Locating in allegory a semi-automatic propulsion into reading, a launching into allegoresis, Barrett describes something akin to the procedural rhetoric that Bogost deploys in his understanding of video games. The poem generates an ongoing awareness of allegory’s mechanisms (even auditions differing ideas of process, organic, mechanical, artificial, elemental). It does so by producing ‘a network of agentic and unsignifying beings whose resistance to allegorical assimilation suggests that the poem’s chief labor might be the cultivation of an ecological hermeneutic—an interpretive practice that acknowledges the intermittent insistence of a text on its interconnected elements’ refusal to be conceptually instrumentalized’ (1). Ecological awareness is a byproduct of the poem’s overly allegorical allegory which produces more than it needs and leaves a whole phylum of ways of being intact or unintegrated. Like Barrett, I too am drawn to ‘beings’, that, in her beautiful phrasing, are ‘unburdened by allegorical weight’ (18). Let Grill be Grill indeed.

 

Coining the term ‘allegraphy to mean not an “other Speaking” by readers but a kind of “other writing” offered by the text itself and invested in an at least temporary, tentative singleness’ (2), Barrett sponsors a way reading of the poem keyed to the way it produces a network that refuses to subject its subordinate or so-called minor figures to the dematerialising violence of allegorical closure. Or, at least, when that violence arrives, the allegorical closure leaves a remainder or reservoir of difference that testifies to other ways of being, as in the case of Grill. Putting Gordan Teskey’s still essential Allegory & Violence to excellent use, Barrett ‘thematizes narrative elements … that resist mobilization within an allegorical meaning-making program that privileges the co-optation of phenomena for symbolic work’ (2).[xi] Suggestively, these ‘elements’ turn out to be a diverse series of ‘emphatically corporeal beings, including a woman and a horse’ but also ‘the field or plain stretching beneath so much of the poem’ (3). After all, to the ecologically minded, the ‘playne’ on which a certain knight sits ‘pricking’ in the opening line of the poem should get equal billing with said knight. Both get mentioned in the quick plot summary we are treated to in the expository ‘cut scene’ of Spenser’s letter to Ralegh, so why should not they both be readerly avatars? Alerting  us to the manner in which these entities ‘resist … or evade … participation in the poem’s allegorical program’, Barrett asks us to attend to moments when they ‘render … nonsensical the signifying power of violent action and thematiz[e] … the precarity of description as dependent’ (3). In doing so, these entities both push and mark the limits to the apparently open world of the Faerie Queene. They draw attention to its processes and to the figure of (allegorical) process in and of itself.

If this reading appeals to you, it may be because what Barrett names ‘allegraphy’ might be understood to be part of allegory and allegorical systems already and so to clue us in to the way an orientation to ecological modes of reading re-energises a set of investments zoned at an earlier critical juncture as the difference between form and history or semiosis and rhetoric. One way of understanding deconstruction, especially in its Anglo-American guises, is as a refusal or retarding of allegorical systems on account of their profound violence.[xii] Barrett is deeply aware of the violence of allegory, and deeply committed to capturing and displaying its mechanisms for the reader, as such arresting phrases as this, ‘allegory makes it ethically viable for Guyon to beat up a little old lady’ (9), makes clear. Ultimately, it is this kind of salutary ars legendi or pedagogy for reading that Barrett sees the poem making potentially available. The essay concludes with the following call for a more ethical ‘regime’ for the making of a readerly ‘we’:

We need a mode that acknowledges that our narratives of meaning might miss the most crucial and immanent sense of beings and things as simply what they are, unsubstitutable and, in an era of catastrophe, irreplaceable too. The constituent participants in The Faerie Queenes unallegorical ecology are written to matter without our reading making them mean. If the poem makes us more inclined to think that phenomena unassimilable into a projected narrative are not incoherent but rather significant, if unsignifying, then The Faerie Queene might, in the twenty-first century, be successful in its most urgent work of ethical fashioning. (18)

The ethical fashioning at work here would now admit to the partial, reductive effect of our ways of reading and making worlds, of reducing the world to an environment. Fascinatingly, the underlying structure of the poem’s game-space remains intact in this call to attend to the critical futural possibility that it might, only now, finally, deliver on its stated aim to ‘fashion a gentleman’, by which Barrett means an actually ethical subject. For what she has prescribed is an altered and altering technology of self in the form of a program of reading that processes the world differently, attending to its allegorically weightless beings and preserving their worlds, individual and collective, all in the service of an altered sense of world-making or worlding.

This closing focus on pedagogy and on ways of reading or attunement resonates profoundly with the occasion and circumstances that lead Hillary Eklund to write the essay ‘Spenser’s Moral Economy as Political Ecology: Teaching the Bower of Bliss’, which appears in Jennifer Munroe, Edward Geisweidt and Lynne Bruckner’s Ecological Approaches to Teaching Early Modern Texts: A Field Guide to Reading and Teaching (2015). Written from a classroom in which Eklund wrestles with how the ‘values of works I teach, like the Faerie Queene, communicate with the claims that’ post-hurricane-Katrina New Orleans ‘makes on  the subset of its inhabitants that ops into my classroom two or three times a week’, she invites us to sit in on a recent course: ‘Renaissance Home Economics: Literatures of Household, Commonwealth, and Empire’, which introduces students to the extended text of georgic in early modern England.[xiii] A key component of the course requires that the class reckon with what it means to be reading early modern texts at this moment in New Orleans. How does the Faerie Queene, for example, come to mean in the context of an unevenly distributed ecological violence and an unevenly distributed economic recovery? Citing Linda Gregerson’s argument that Spenser ‘contrives the labors of allegorical knights …as a kind of ground work for a new political ecology’, Eklund argues that her own ‘presentist ecological investments stem from the historicist critical commitments’ of an approach that asks students (in whose number I am delighted to include myself really forever) to think hard and long about how a text (early modern or otherwise) builds and models our relation to the world.[xiv] The scene in which Eklund finds herself teaching, then, provides a sort of applied, pedagogical realisation of the argument Barrett makes. She reflects on the pedagogical labor that goes into fashioning not ‘gentlemen’ but certainly something that corresponds to gentle-persons, if by that designation we agree to understand ‘arm[ing] students with the critical sophistication to understand how the aesthetic works—how a text produces affects in its readers—and the intellectual agility to leverage critique in the service of action’ (146-47).

In one unit of the course, this energised, on-their-guard, collective of anti-allegorists work their way through ‘the ramifications’ of Sir Guyon, the Knight of Temperaunce’s, violent destruction of the Bower of Bliss ‘to the broader theme of moral economy [in the poem] … and to persistent questions of land use, labor, and habitation, in the post-Katrina environment of New Orleans’ (146). Guiding students through the Bower keyed to period discourses of profitability, temperance, idleness and control, Eklund describes the way they light on the very kinds of entities that Barrett might characterise as ‘unburdened by allegorical weight’ (18). Students react in all sorts of ways: remarking the poem’s boredom-effects (Amen); its plenitude; the strange fascination with over-producing aesthetic effects to which the poem itself might be said to belong; and reclaiming the positions of those rubbished by the violence of allegorical reading, such as Acrasia. Re-enchanting the Bower as more than a delusive supplement but a possibly instructive experiment in plant and animal husbandry, Palmer-critic Eklund confesses that, ‘like Guyon, I had a telos’ (152). Asking students to ponder the meaning of Verdant’s name, she invites them to consider the way ‘Acrasia has taken a gentleman and made him an accomplice in her project of stunting growth’ which serves as ‘an index to her poor husbandry’ (152). Acrasia, if you like, unfashions this gentleman. She renders the project of fashioning one an input to her own idle worlding that allows world-making to idle (is The Bower of Bliss an endless level of Minecraft?). Or, to reclaim Acrasia still further, she models the kind of pedagogy Barrett identifies and Eklund deploys in the classroom, both still fashioning person-readers but knowing that the ways in which we fashion them are coincident with the ways we make and model worlds.

In ‘Dilated Materiality and Formal Restraint in The Faerie Queene’ (2018) Debapriya Sarkar offers one possible explanation for this coincidence of forms of personhood and forms of worlding. Reading the way ‘Spenser incorporates physicalist philosophies of change into the wandering forms that characterise the early modern romance’, Sarkar redescribes the poem so as to show how ‘the genre’s formal techniques of digression and deferral refigure our understanding of substance itself’ or how the world works.[xv] This notion of mechanism or process is multi-scalar, operating at the level of cosmological as well as the personal and keyed to the way thinking, reading, might convert into action, political and otherwise. Crucially, for Sarkar, the poem operates with a theory of matter as ‘an unstable entity, subject to the possibilities and dangers of temporal passage’ and as so much ‘more than a static foundation of metamorphosis’. On the contrary, matter is ‘a participant in the dynamic processes—from shifts in perspective on selfhood, to the articulation of noninterventionist political action, to a deeper understanding of cosmic alterations’. New materialist conceptions of action that understand entities otherwise than human to be participants in a process are therefore especially friendly to the world Spenser crafts. They are allied philosophies separated by the strangely folded notion of temporality that gives us historical periods. Both premise their understandings on ‘what Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe, drawing on Aristotle, terms “general mimesis”: “an imitation of phusis [nature] as a productive force, or as poiesis”’.[xvi] It is this ‘general mimesis’ that allows ‘Spenser not only [to] … bring … forth a constantly changeable world’ but also to ‘exploit … the radical potentiality of mimesis, imitating nature’s processes of change rather than objects in the natural realm, to consider how ethics, politics, and existence evolve in his created world’. Or, to put it another way, the Faerie Queene is a really satisfying Sim.

Following Sarkar, we might say that the very potentiality Barrett and Eklund find in the Faerie Queenes de-allegorising game space, its refusal to resolve all the entities that populate that world into the dematerialising telos of its announced plots, depends on the orientation to process (the kind of world) the poem’s procedural rhetoric posits or persuades us to. The governing insight that ways of fashioning or making up people coincides with world making; that political ecology is coincident with moral economy; and so also that learning to read, pedagogy, gaming, might somehow ‘matter’, in the end, comes down to the notion of a general mimesis, a process that permits somewhat startling, and tremendously convenient, shifts in scale.

 

End Game?

In his essay ‘Rules for the Human Zoo: A Response to the “Letter on Humanism”’, Peter Sloterdijk describes the textual web of letters, essays and books, the ‘literature’, of humanism (humanitas), as a telecommunications device ‘to underwrite friendship’.[xvii] What we call the humanities today describes the residual form of this multi-temporal web of tele-friends, living and dead, whose text messages we dial up or scroll through and to which we respond with texts of our own. The world of letters is one great conversation or co-flight of shared air, which aspires to a ‘common love of inspiring messages’. The ‘crucial link’ in this ‘chain of transmission’, Sloterdijk argues, was the ‘Greek message to the Romans’ (12); followed by the textual networks we name ‘renaissance’, to which the Faerie Queene obviously belongs; and the ‘reading friendly national humanism’ of modernity, in which the nation state was ‘to some extent a literary and postal product’ whose citizens maintained the ‘fiction of a fateful friendship with distant peoples’ and mimed the role of sympathetically united readers of ‘national literatures’ (14). Of course, you had to be literate for your texts to count. You had to be able to ‘read and write’ to join the club or the club might be visited upon you in the form of the educational apparatus of colonial schooling. The conversation was a sorting mechanism premised as much on its exclusions as its recruitment and training up or ‘fashioning’ of new readerly friends.[xviii] All of which speaks to the urgency with which Barrett and Eklund write about the ends of reading and teaching and to the limits of these enterprises.

            If the project that was humanism now seems especially forlorn, that is, in part, because no program of literary study has necessarily led to the general improvement of its readers.[xix] The ‘communitarian fantasy’ at humanism’s heart was really just the ‘model of a literary society’ (13). However, as Sloterdijk observes, there remains more to humanism than ‘the bucolic assumption that reading improves us’ (16). Even if its core commitment to ‘anthropodicy … that is … a [positive] characterization of man with respect to his biological indeterminacy and his moral ambivalence’ has not produced a stable improvement of persons, its ‘credo … that human beings are “creatures capable of suggestion”’ remains a powerful, if entirely neutral, insight. The animals we name ‘human’ are trainable and their ‘training’ involves a relation to media. Humanism was a machine for making a species of animals variously able to read and write, and who then found themselves cross differentiated by the intersectional vectors of class, gender and race.[xx] And at this historical moment, it seems, following Barrett and Eklund, particularly important to side with all manner of beings otherwise systematically excluded from allegorical systems, remaindered, or pronounced as without history.

At the end of his essay, however, Sloterdijk remarks that, with the world of humanism seemingly in full retreat, it may seem that ‘the wise have abandoned us’ (27). ‘Letters that are not mailed’, he observes, ‘cease to be missives for possible friends; they turn into archived things’. Yet, even as the dust seemingly settles, and reading may seem like no more than some sort of time-wasting game, the point may be that humanism’s scenes continue play out. Its programs keep coming back in the form of fragments of scripts, a scenography of biopolitical tropes whose activations endure. What we are apt to call ‘our lives’, Sloterdijk implies, frequently take the form of ‘confused answer[s] to questions which were asked in places we have forgotten’ (27). How then are we to bring these scripts to light, make them available to view, critical appraisal and revision? With his turn to the library and the archive, Sloterdijk offers some hints. ‘Everything suggests’, he points out, ‘that archivists have become the successors of the humanists’ (27). Perhaps, now, then I can recognise my own amateur, gamer relation to Spenser studies, apprehending the text and field through a media transfer, as archival. If such is the case, then this realisation would invite me to understand the very project of this essay—my jaunty gamifying of a field—as something analogous to a media archaeology: trying to understand, in Sloterdijk’s terms, the way the text messages we send and receive today contain fragments of scenes, phrases, images, questions famed and posed long ago and the kinds of work they are understood to do in our historical moment. Sometimes these scenes are encrypted. Sometimes they are hidden in the plain sight of a poem whose world I process as a game that plays at ‘the dream of a legible environment’.

Space does not permit a full consideration of the occasion for Sloterdijk’s essay, which, as its title announces, is a reckoning wit Martin Heidegger’s 1946 pastoral ‘Letter on Humanism’.[xxi] Safe to say, Sloterdijk remains skeptical of the rhetorical self-interest to Heidegger’s post-World War 2 portrayal of an ascetic, hermetic shepherd-philosopher singleton who passively receives missives from Being, while Heidegger’s own ‘collected work stands as the measure and voice of the nameless Ur-Author’ [Sloterdijk, ‘Rules for the Human Zoo’, 19). That said, Sloterdijk reserves the possibility that there might still be something worth thinking about in this image of a society that no longer places ‘the human at the center, because they had realized that men exist only as neighbors of Being’ (19). Salvaging that possibility, however, would mean forgoing any fixation on ‘the image of strong men’, the isolated philosopher-shepherd, or in any concept of the ‘human’ that thereby ‘embodies the earthly copy of the original True Shepherd, God’ (27). Rather it would mean sponsoring the kind of orientation to the world and to reading that I find in the three essays I have had the pleasure of thinking with in this essay: modes of approaching the world that unsettle ontological differences between humans and other entities in the aim of making a more just world.

The question that remains, of course, and that hovers on the margins of each essay, is the extent to which the project of fashioning a person, or making up people, might itself already be a compromised relation to the world. And that the coincidence between making human persons and world making might itself need to be surrendered based on the understanding that, in Barrett’s words, ‘the most urgent work of ethical fashioning’ might lie in sharing that work, and broadening the notion of labor, to include other entities. Such a possibility would not mean game over even as it might mean an end to particular games. On the contrary, it would mean agreeing to be less allegorically burdened players in the games of others who , it is to be hoped, might redistribute play in ways that might neither be predicted (leveraged) nor incentivised.

            Game Over.

           

           


[i] For Steve Mentz’s report on the panel for the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), see https://www.asle.org/features/environmental-humanities-at-mla-2020/ Accessed September 10, 2020.

[ii] For an excellent genealogy of the word ecology that models early modern discourses as an archive of proto-ecological thinking, see Peter Remein, The Concept of Nature in Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019) along with his earlier essay ‘Oeconomy and Ecology in Early Modern England’, PMLA 132.5 (2017): 1117-1133.

            For a much more modest, Spenser-centric account, see Julian Yates, ‘Early Modern Ecology’, in Edmund Spenser in Context, ed. Andrew Escobedo (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 2016), 333-341.

[iii] On the automaticity of ‘feelings’ marking them as the borderline between a supposed ‘beast-machine’ and an equally supposedly nuanced, centred, ‘human’, ‘response’, and so as keyed to the workings of ideology, partially accessible but otherwise hidden systems, thresholds of being, see Jacques Derrida, The Animal Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).

            On the quasi-automaticity of the allergy or the symptom, see J. Hillis Miller, ‘Paul de Man as Allergen’, in Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory, eds., Tom Cohen, Barbara Cohen, J. Hillis Miller and Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 183-204.

[iv] One good starting point for this conversation that introduces many key voices is the 2015 special issue of Spenser Studies 30, edited by Ayesha Ramachandran and Melissa Sanchez on ‘Spenser and the Human’.

            Other signal contributions, for me, come from Linda Gregerson’s ‘Spenser’s Georgic: Violence and the Gift of Place’, Spenser Studies 22 (2007) and Alfred E. Siewers, ‘Spenser’s Green World’, Early English Studies 3 (2010) https://www.uta.edu/english/ees/fulltext/siewers3.html.

[v] @ibogost. Twitter, 7.00pm—28 June, 2020: https://twitter.com/ibogost Accessed September 14, 2020.

[vi] Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2010), 2-3.

[vii] The question of play has received very full analysis in and around Spenser studies thanks to Joe Moshenska’s excellent Iconoclasm As Childs Play (Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press) and his essay ‘Spenser at Play’, PMLA 133:1 (2018): 19-35.

[viii] Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (London and New York: Longman, 2001), 737.

[ix] On worldmaking and world-imaging as keyed to humanist thinking and a ‘ubiquitous cultural practice’ or set of contrasting practices as rival projects or images of the world sought to ‘synthesize new global experiences into a structure that would bind individual fragments into a collective unity’, see Ayesha Ramachandran, The Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), quotation at 67.

[x] Chris Barrett, ‘Allegraphy and The Faerie Queenes Significantly Unsignifying Ecology’, SEL 56: 1 (2016), 1. Unless otherwise indicated, subsequent references appear parenthetically in the text.

[xi] Gordan Teskey Allegory & Violence (Ithaca, NY.: Cornell University Press, 1997).

[xii] I refer to the embroiled status of allegory in the work of Paul de Man [Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays on the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd edition, rev. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, [1977] 1983)] and one particular strand of deconstruction amplified by Tom Cohen in Ideology and Inscription: Cultural studies after Benjamin, de Man, and Bakhtin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). In more recent work, Cohen elaborates on de Man and deconstruction’s usefulness in approaching questions of ecology, going so far as to read Timothy Morton’s Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2007) as following a carefully encrypted de Manian agenda, see Cohen, ‘Toxic assets: de Man’s remains and the ecocatastrophic imaginary (an American Fable)’ in Theory and the Disappearing Future: On de Man, On Benjamin, eds. Tom Cohen, Claire Colebrook, and J. Hillis Miller (London: Routledge, 2012), 114-17. I am grateful to Timothy Morton for this reference.

            In Spenser studies, this genealogy would extend back to and invite a rereading of such works as Jonathan Goldberg’s Endlesse Worke: Spenser and the Structures of Discourse (Baltimore, MD.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981) and Voice, Terminal, Echo (London: Routledge, Kegan & Paul, 1986) and the still wonderful Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Routledge, 1988).

[xiii] Hillary Eklund, ‘Spenser’s Moral Economy as Political Ecology: Teaching the Bower of Bliss’, in Ecological Approaches to Teaching Early Modern Texts: A Field Guide to Reading and Teaching, eds. Jennifer Munroe, Edward Geisweidt, and Lynne Bruckner (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2015), 145-54, at 145. Subsequent references appear parenthetically in the text.

[xiv] Gregerson, ‘Spenser’s Georgic’, 199; cited by Eklund, ‘Spenser’s Moral economy’, 147.

[xv] Debapriya Sakar, ‘Dilated Materiality and Formal Restraint in The Faerie Queene’, Spenser Studies 31/32 (2018): 137-66, at 157.

[xvi] Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, ed.

Christopher Fynsk (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 256–57; cited in Sarkar ‘Dilated Materiality’, 157. This model of a ‘general physics’ is a founding given for philosophers such as Michel Serres and in slightly different ways Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guatari, Bruno Latour and such allied thinkers as Donna Haraway, Jane Bennett, Timothy Morton.

[xvii] Peter Sloterdijk, ‘Rules for the Human Zoo: A Response to the “Letter on Humanism”’, Society and Space (2009) 27: 12. Unless otherwise indicated, subsequent references appear parenthetically in the text.

[xviii] On the longevity of humanism, see Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986).

            On the telephonic fantasies of humanism, specifically, actio in distans, see Gerard Passanante, The Lucretian Renaissance: Philology and the Afterlife of Tradition (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011).

[xix] News to this effect has been widely acknowledged. See, among others, Terry Eagleton’s still trenchant critique of liberal humanism in the first two chapters of Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983; repr., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), especially 30-31; and Frederic Jameson’s speculation that already in 1516 with the appearance of Thomas More’s Utopia, humanism had recognized the limits of rational thought in modifying human behavior: Henry VIII was exhibit A. Frederic Jameson, ‘Of Islands and Trenches, Of Islands and Trenches: Naturalization and the Production of Utopian Discourse’ Diacritics 7, no. 2 (Summer 1977): 19.

[xx] For this model of conceiving ‘race’ as the introduction of ‘a biological-type caesura within a population’ that allows ‘power to treat that population as a mixture of races, or to be more accurate, to treat the species, to subdivide the species it controls, into the subspecies known precisely as races’, see Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 254-55.

[xxi] Martin Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper, 1992), 217-65.

Comments

  • Comment deleted 2 years, 4 months ago

  • Comment deleted 2 years ago

  • Comment deleted 1 year, 11 months ago

  • Comment deleted 1 year, 11 months ago

  • Comment deleted 1 year, 11 months ago

    • Comment deleted 1 year, 11 months ago

  • Comment deleted 1 year, 11 months ago

  • Comment deleted 1 year, 10 months ago

  • Comment deleted 1 year, 10 months ago

  • Comment deleted 1 year, 10 months ago

  • Comment deleted 1 year, 9 months ago

  • Comment deleted 1 year, 9 months ago

  • FIFA 23 Coins 1 year, 6 months ago

    Life is a big and complex game. It's the largest open-world game known to date. We all begin with different starting stats and we're placed into a wide range of environments that can either give us advantages or disadvantages. <a href="https://www.buymmog.com/fifa-23/fifa-23-coins">FIFA 23 Coins</a>

    Link / Reply
    • Pinoy Tv Flix 2 months, 1 week ago

      sir can i asked a question?

      Link / Reply
    • insta pro 2 months, 1 week ago

      wow good app

      Link / Reply
  • FIFA 23 Coins 1 year, 6 months ago

    Gaming is the running of specialized applications known as electronic games or video games on game consoles like X-box and Playstation or on personal computers (in which case the activity is known as online gaming).

    Link / Reply
  • exterior roof paint 10 months, 2 weeks ago

    The curiously folded idea of time that offers us historical periods divides these related philosophical systems.

    Link / Reply
  • gb whatsapp 2 months, 2 weeks ago

    thanks sir

    Link / Reply
  • bitlife 3 weeks ago

    There were a lot of ideas that were brought up in this conference, especially this game

    Link / Reply

You must log in to comment.

50.3.5

Cite as:

Julian Yates, "Open Worlds? Spenser’s Ecological Game Play," Spenser Review 50.3.5 (Fall 2020). Accessed April 25th, 2024.
Not logged in or