TITLE:

RE-THINKING THE LOGOS: MATERIALITIES OF WORD AND IMAGE IN THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE (MESA REDONDA)

Participants:

Zenón Luis-Martínez* (Chair) - Jorge Casanova García* - Cinta Zunino Garrido** - Elena Domínguez Romero*

Institution:

Universidad de Huelva - Universidad de Jaén

E-mail:

zenon.luis@dfing.uhu.es      

During the sixteenth century in England the logocentrism of the Middle Ages was confronted by an exploration of new possibilities in linguistic and rhetorical standards, in poetic forms, in tenacious aesthetics challenges. New materialistic views of the world propelled these explorations which, even though powerful enough to accommodate a renewed attention to physical nature, did not succeed in completely erasing the logocentric. Thus, the journey from logocentrism to visual representation is a round-trip, and in the late-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it re-centres the word at the heart of all debates, nurturing new ways of talking about representation, of thinking about the visual, and of considering the logos.

The present round-table discussion addresses the context of these challenges and re-definitions in order to suggest ways in which English Renaissance authors go from a renewed materiality of the word and its procedures to new paths for image production and reproduction. Issues of fitness and unfitness in interpretation, the adequacy or inadequacy of words to meaning and intention, and the use of the visual as a guarantee for the verbal, will guide the different parts of the discussion.

The first speaker will turn to the materiality of the printed word in order to account for issues concerning the reading process in the case of English poetic miscellanies. Using the pastoral anthology Englands Helicon as a case in point, the main argument will be to differentiate between composition strategies that understand the miscellany as an integral body made up by composite implicit narratives, and actual reading practices that confront the text and its parts as scattered limbs of a corpus.

The second speaker will analyse a frequent device in the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, consisting in comic and tragic characterisation through a deliberate use of rhetorical inadequacy. Failing to say what one means ultimately amounts to a sort of performative failure whose ethical implications can be summed up by Stanley Cavell’s well-known question in his philosophy of language: “must we mean what we say?”. Characters who fail to say what they mean become a common object of mockery and satire, whereas characters who refuse to mean what they say indulge in practices of linguistic transgression frequently associated with tragedy.

Finally, the third speaker will introduce the problem of the verbal and the visual in the seventeenth-century lyric, exploring the emblematic mode (a term coined decades ago by Peter M. Daly) as a shaping code of a genre as logos-orientated as the epigram.The poetry of Ben Jonson and others, when read in the light of the emblem, reveal a visual potential in words which are frequently the effect of their own linguistic nature.

The round-table discussion will consist in short presentations and a proposal of several topics for discussion drawn out from specific images and texts, thus using a workshop format.