Overview

We have become used to looking at art from a stance of detachment. In order to be objective, we create a “mental space” between ourselves and the objects of our investigation, separating internal and external worlds. This detachment dates back to the early modern period, when researchers in a wide variety of fields tried to describe material objects as “things in themselves”—things, that is, without the admixture of imagination. Generations of scholars have heralded this shift as the Renaissance “discovery” of the observable world. In Poetry in a World of Things, Rachel Eisendrath explores how poetry responded to this new detachment by becoming a repository for a more complex experience of the world. The book focuses on ekphrasis, the elaborate literary description of a thing, as a mode of resistance to this new empirical objectivity. Poets like Petrarch, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare crafted highly artful descriptions that recovered the threatened subjective experience of the material world. In so doing, these poets reflected on the emergence of objectivity itself as a process that was often darker and more painful than otherwise acknowledged. This highly original book reclaims subjectivity as a decidedly poetic and human way of experiencing the material world and, at the same time, makes a case for understanding art objects as fundamentally unlike any other kind of objects.

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9780226516615

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Reviews

Why do we value critical objectivity? This is the basic question of Eisendrath's book, a study of some early encounters between art and empiricism, and of the literary strategies by which a poem or a painting might save itself from mere objecthood. Petrarch, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare are its heroes, but it is just as much a book for our times, a beautifully written tutorial in how to tell the difference between a work and a thing, and why that difference matters. --Jeff Dolven, Princeton University In this terrific and wide-ranging book, Rachel Eisendrath provides a nuanced account of Renaissance defenses of aesthetic pleasure that challenges the traditional association of the early modern period with new scientific notions of objectivity. At the same time, she makes a powerful contribution to contemporary debates in the humanities about 'distant reading, ' 'surface reading, ' 'the new materialism, ' and 'thing theory, ' in the process reasserting the traditional virtues of humanistic education. Poetry in a World of Things is an exceptionally well-informed, theoretically sophisticated, and beautifully written work. -Victoria Kahn, University of California, Berkeley--Victoria Kahn, University of California, Berkeley

First of all, Eisendrath is a superb close reader, as demonstrated by her treatment of her central Renaissance texts. Along the way there are interesting asides on Mantegna, Cervantes, John Webster, and others. Around these are woven readings of classical literature and art, including the Aeneid, Homer, and Roman wall painting. A third layer is the argument about empiricism versus aestheticism in the Renaissance, on top of which is an intermittent discourse on ruins, topped by a layer of modern and contemporary criticism. Particularly interesting is her invocation of a double-dyad of German scholars of the early-mid twentieth century: (inevitably) Benjamin and Adorno and (interestingly) Auerbach and Spitzer. -- The Spenser Review Why do we value critical objectivity? This is the basic question of Eisendrath's book, a study of some early encounters between art and empiricism, and of the literary strategies by which a poem or a painting might save itself from mere objecthood. Petrarch, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare are its heroes, but it is just as much a book for our times, a beautifully written tutorial in how to tell the difference between a work and a thing, and why that difference matters. -- Jeff Dolven, Princeton University Rachel Eisendrath's exhilarating Poetry in a World of Things sees the emergence of these two phenomena--empirical objectivity and artistic lifelikeness--as intimately related. Her focus is on the Renaissance technique of ekphrasis, or lively description, a technique related to the new interest in observational detail which characterizes the emergence of objectivity in history and natural philosophy. What Eisendrath's subtle handling brings out is the extent to which this new emphasis on observed material evidence, this sense of the pastness of the past and the particularity of the natural world, can be registered in texts and images that convey a consciousness of the emotional complexity - the art - involved in knowing, depicting, describing and therefore bringing to life. --Lorna Hutson, Merton College, Oxford The Review of English Studies In this terrific and wide-ranging book, Rachel Eisendrath provides a nuanced account of Renaissance defenses of aesthetic pleasure that challenges the traditional association of the early modern period with new scientific notions of objectivity. At the same time, she makes a powerful contribution to contemporary debates in the humanities about 'distant reading, ' 'surface reading, ' 'the new materialism, ' and 'thing theory, ' in the process reasserting the traditional virtues of humanistic education. Poetry in a World of Things is an exceptionally well-informed, theoretically sophisticated, and beautifully written work. -Victoria Kahn, University of California, Berkeley-- Victoria Kahn, University of California, Berkeley

...Eisendrath convincingly demonstrates the importance, complexity, and ongoing fascination of early modern ekphrasis. -- Renaissance Quarterly First of all, Eisendrath is a superb close reader, as demonstrated by her treatment of her central Renaissance texts. Along the way there are interesting asides on Mantegna, Cervantes, John Webster, and others. Around these are woven readings of classical literature and art, including the Aeneid, Homer, and Roman wall painting. A third layer is the argument about empiricism versus aestheticism in the Renaissance, on top of which is an intermittent discourse on ruins, topped by a layer of modern and contemporary criticism. Particularly interesting is her invocation of a double-dyad of German scholars of the early-mid twentieth century: (inevitably) Benjamin and Adorno and (interestingly) Auerbach and Spitzer. -- The Spenser Review Why do we value critical objectivity? This is the basic question of Eisendrath's book, a study of some early encounters between art and empiricism, and of the literary strategies by which a poem or a painting might save itself from mere objecthood. Petrarch, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare are its heroes, but it is just as much a book for our times, a beautifully written tutorial in how to tell the difference between a work and a thing, and why that difference matters. -- Jeff Dolven, Princeton University Rachel Eisendrath's exhilarating Poetry in a World of Things sees the emergence of these two phenomena--empirical objectivity and artistic lifelikeness--as intimately related. Her focus is on the Renaissance technique of ekphrasis, or lively description, a technique related to the new interest in observational detail which characterizes the emergence of objectivity in history and natural philosophy. What Eisendrath's subtle handling brings out is the extent to which this new emphasis on observed material evidence, this sense of the pastness of the past and the particularity of the natural world, can be registered in texts and images that convey a consciousness of the emotional complexity - the art - involved in knowing, depicting, describing and therefore bringing to life. --Lorna Hutson, Merton College, Oxford The Review of English Studies In this terrific and wide-ranging book, Rachel Eisendrath provides a nuanced account of Renaissance defenses of aesthetic pleasure that challenges the traditional association of the early modern period with new scientific notions of objectivity. At the same time, she makes a powerful contribution to contemporary debates in the humanities about 'distant reading, ' 'surface reading, ' 'the new materialism, ' and 'thing theory, ' in the process reasserting the traditional virtues of humanistic education. Poetry in a World of Things is an exceptionally well-informed, theoretically sophisticated, and beautifully written work. -Victoria Kahn, University of California, Berkeley-- Victoria Kahn, University of California, Berkeley

Author Information

Rachel Eisendrath is assistant professor of English and chair of Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University.

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