Binding: Paperback
Description: 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.
Title: Poetry In A World Of Things Aesthetics And Empiricism In Renaissance Ekphrasis
Author(s): Eisendrath Rachel
Publisher: The University Of Chicago Press
Barcode: 9780226516615
Pages: 208 Pages
Publication Date: 4/6/2018
Category: Early Modern History: C 1450/1500 To C 1700