Imitating Authors

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Burrow
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Property ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
John Milton ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
Mary Shelley ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
English Renaissance ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Kazuo Ishiguro ◽  
The Enlightenment

Imitating Authors analyses the theory and practice of imitatio (the imitation of one author by another) from early Greek texts right up to recent fictions about clones and artificial humans. At its centre lie the imitating authors of the English Renaissance, including Ben Jonson and the most imitated imitator of them all, John Milton. Imitating Authors argues that imitation is not simply a matter of borrowing words, or of alluding to an earlier author. Imitators learn practices from earlier writers. They imitate the structures and forms of earlier writing in ways that enable them to create a new style which itself could be imitated. That makes imitation an engine of literary change. Imitating Authors also shows how the metaphors used by theorists to explain this complex practice fed into works which were themselves imitations, how those metaphors changed, and how they have come to influence present-day anxieties about imitation human beings and artificial forms of intelligence. It explores relationships between imitation and authorial style, its fraught connections with plagiarism, and how emerging ideas of genius and intellectual property changed how imitation was practised. Imitating Authors includes detailed discussion of authors who imitated (notably Virgil, Lucretius, Petrarch, Cervantes, Ben Jonson, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, and Kazuo Ishiguro) and of the theory of imitating authors in Plato, Cicero, Quintilian, Longinus, Castiglione, the Ciceronian controversies of the sixteenth century, in legal and philosophical discourses of the Enlightenment, and in recent discussions about computer-generated poems.

Archaism and Innovation In Spenser's Poetic Diction

PMLA ◽  
1932 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 144-170 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. R. McElderry
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
English Renaissance ◽  
Cultural Activity ◽  
Literary Language ◽  
French And English ◽  
Poetic Diction ◽  
The Subject

The traditional comment of Ben Jonson that “in affecting the ancients Spenser writ no language,” amplified by objections of nineteenth century philologists against Spenser's supposed inaccuracy in reviving old words and his lawlessness in coining new ones, has been much qualified by recent critical analysis. Professor Renwick has emphasized the relation of Spenser's diction to the general Renaissance problem of developing and enriching the modern tongues as mediums for serious literature. In somewhat greater detail Miss Pope has traced the course of Italian, French, and English Renaissance criticism on the subject of literary diction and its relation to Spenser's practice. From these studies Spenser's experiments in language are seen to have a dignity of purpose quite different from the freakishness implied in Jonson's petulant remark and all too often assumed by previous critics. Though Spenser was the first great English poet of the sixteenth century, general cultural activity had been vigorous. Printing had made possible the vogue of translations, both scriptural and purely literary, and English as a literary language assumed a growing importance.

Rhetoric, Commonplacing, and Poetics

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Hadfield
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Rhetorical Theory ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Popular Work

Chapter 4 examines a variety of treatises and debates about rhetoric and its value, and whether the art of persuasion could be a dangerous tool in the hands of the unscrupulous or even whether it was a skill that risked corrupting the user, dangers that were identified by Quintilian, whose Institutio Oratoria (The Orator’s Education) shaped so much rhetorical theory and practice in the Renaissance. The chapter explores the practice of commonplacing, noting down particular maxims which could then serve as the basis of explorations of issues, a practice that, like rhetoric, generated anxiety about truth, falsehood, and lying. Particular attention is paid to Erasmus’s Colloquies and Lingua; William Baldwin’s A Treatise of Moral Philosophy, the most popular work of philosophy in sixteenth-century England; the use of commonplaces in Montaigne’s Essays; George Puttenham’s use of proverbs and figures in his Arte of English Poesie (1589); and Sir Philip Sidney’s understanding of poetry as lying in The Defence of Poetry.

Religion and Toleration from the Enlightenment to the Post-Secular Era

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rainer Forst
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Fundamental Question ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Reason ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Pierre Bayle ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter addresses the classical question of the relationship between enlightenment and religion. In doing so, the chapter compares Jürgen Habermas's thought to that of Pierre Bayle and Immanuel Kant. For, although Habermas undoubtedly stands in a tradition founded by Bayle and Kant, he develops a number of important orientations within this tradition and has changed his position in his recent work. The chapter studies this change to understand Habermas's position better. It also draws attention to a fundamental question raised by the modern world: what common ground can human reason establish in the practical and theoretical domain between human beings who are divided by profoundly different religious (including antireligious) views?

Pocket Maps and Public Poetry in the English Renaissance

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Lecky
Keyword(s):  
Edmund Spenser ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
English Renaissance ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
William Davenant ◽  
Samuel Daniel ◽  
The Government ◽  
Political Agents ◽  
Cheap Print ◽  
Print Industry

If maps are instruments of power, then it matters that in Renaissance Britain they were often found in the pockets of ordinary people. Pocket Maps and Public Poetry in the English Renaissance demonstrates how early modern British poets paid by the state adapted inclusive modes of nationhood charted by inexpensive, small-format maps. It places chapbooks (“cheapbooks”) by Edmund Spenser, Samuel Daniel, Ben Jonson, William Davenant, and John Milton into conversation with the portable cartography circulating in the same retail print industry. Domestic pocket maps were designed for heavy use by a broad readership that included those on the fringes of literacy. The era’s de facto laureates all banked their success as writers appealing to this burgeoning market share by drawing the nation as the property of the commonwealth rather than the Crown. This book investigates the accessible world of small-format cartography as it emerges in the texts of the poets raised in the expansive public sphere in which pocket maps flourished. It works at the intersections of space, place, and national identity to reveal the geographical imaginary shaping the flourishing business of cheap print. Its placement of poetic economies within mainstream systems of trade also demonstrates how cartography and poetry worked together to mobilize average consumers as political agents. This everyday form of geographic poiesis was also a strong platform for poets writing for monarchs and magistrates when their visions of the nation ran counter to the interests of the government.

Moral Philosophy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael N. Forster
Keyword(s):  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Role Models ◽  
Moral Character ◽  
Moral Values ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Character Formation ◽  
First Order ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Self Formation

Herder develops a number of very important principles both in meta-ethics and in first-order morality. In meta-ethics he argues for a form of sentimentalism, but a form of it that acknowledges a role for cognition in the sentiments involved and which emphasizes their radical variability between periods and cultures. He also invents a “genetic” or “genealogical” method predicated on such variability and applies it to moral values in particular in order to make them better understood. And finally, he develops an ambitious theory and practice of moral pedagogy that rests on his sentimentalism and which accordingly focuses on causal influences on moral character formation, such as role models and literature. In first-order morality he invents an important pluralistic form of cosmopolitanism to replace the more usual but problematic homogenizing cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment; an influential ideal of individual Bildung, or self-formation; and a distinctive ideal of humanity.

THE “HARD FORM” OF SCULPTURE: MARBLE, MATTER AND SPIRIT IN EUROPEAN SCULPTURE FROM THE ENLIGHTENMENT THROUGH ROMANTICISM

2008 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 455-486 ◽  
Author(s):  
LINDA WALSH
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
External Appearance ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Familiar World ◽  
A Site ◽  
Aesthetic Values

The apparently distinct aesthetic values of naturalism (a fidelity to external appearance) and neoclassicism (with its focus on idealization and intangible essence) came together in creative tension and fusion in much late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century sculptural theory and practice. The hybrid styles that resulted suited the requirements of the European sculpture-buying public. Both aesthetics, however, created difficulties for the German Idealists who represented a particularly uncompromising strain of Romantic theory. In their view, naturalism was too closely bound to the observable, familiar world, while neoclassicism was too wedded to notions of clearly defined forms. This article explores sculptural practice and theory at this time as a site of complex debates around the medium's potential for specific concrete representation in a context of competing Romantic visions (ethereal, social and commercial) of modernity.

The Adult Literacy Process as Cultural Action for Freedom

1970 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-225 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paulo Freire
Keyword(s):  
Adult Literacy ◽  
Third World ◽  
Literacy Skills ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Sound System ◽  
Authentic Dialogue ◽  
Positive Action ◽  
Literacy Process ◽  
World Perspective

Dr. Freire writes from a Third World perspective, but with obvious implications for education in general. He rejects mechanistic conceptions of the adult literacy process, advocating instead a theory and practice based upon authentic dialogue between teachers and learners. Such dialogue, in Freire's approach, centers upon codified representations of the learners' existential situations and leads not only to their acquisition of literacy skills, but more importantly to their awareness of their right and capacity as human beings to transform reality. Becoming literate,then, means far more than learning to decode the written representation of a sound system. It is truly an act of knowing, through which a person is able to look critically at the culture which has shaped him, and to move toward reflection and positive action upon his world.

scholarly journals The Birth of the Idea of Perfectibility: From the Enlightenment to Transhumanism

2019 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 113-131
Author(s):  
O. A. Vinogradova ◽  
A. V. Ugleva (Yastrebtseva)
Keyword(s):  
Human Mind ◽  
Social Progress ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Historical Science ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
Age Of Enlightenment ◽  
Human Feature ◽  
Favorable Conditions ◽  
Modern Technologies

Starting from the Age of Enlightenment, a person’s ability of self-improvement, or perfectibility, is usually seen as a fundamental human feature. However, this term, introduced into the philosophical vocabulary by J.-J. Rousseau, gradually acquired additional meaning – largely due to the works of N. de Condorcet, T. Malthus and C. Darwin. Owing to perfectibility, human beings are not only able to work on themselves: by improving their abilities, they are also able to change their environment (both social and natural) and create favorable conditions for their existence. It is no coincidence that perfectibility became the key concept of the idea of social progress proposed by French thinkers in the Age of Enlightenment, despite the fact that later it was criticized, above all, by English authors, who justified its organic and biological nature and gave a different evolutionary interpretation to this concept, without excluding perfectibility from the philosophical vocabulary. In this article, we address the opposition and mutual counterarguments of these two positions. Beyond that, we draw a parallel with some of the ideas of S. Kapitsa, who proved to be not only a critic of Malthusianism but also a direct disciple of Condorcet. In the modern age, the ideas of human self-improvement caused the development of transhumanist movement. Condorcet is more relevant than ever, and today his theory of the progress of the human mind, which influenced the genesis of modern historical science, needs a re-thinking in the newest perspective of improving the mental and physical human nature with the help of modern technologies.

scholarly journals Gayatri Spivak leitora de Paradise Lost: um texto transdisciplinar

2009 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-119
Author(s):  
Luiz Fernando Ferreira Sá
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
John Milton ◽  
Paradise Lost ◽  
Postcolonial Theory ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
Gayatri Spivak

Resumo: Em Paradise Lost, de John Milton, épico e império se encontram dissociados. Contrário a muitas leituras tradicionais, essa escrita do início da Era Moderna inglesa intersecta o pensamento pós-colonial de várias maneiras. Ao usar o circuito pós-colonial de teoria e prática textual de Gayatri Spivak, este artigo desenvolve uma desleitura em contraponto desse texto de Milton: Paradise Lost poderá finalmente libertar-se de seu conteúdo colonial e liberar seu conteúdo pós-colonial.Palavras-chave: Gayatri Spivak; pós-colonialismo; John Milton.Abstract: In John Milton’s Paradise Lost epic and empire are dissociated. Contrary to many misreadings,32 this all-important writing of the English Early Modern Age intersects postcolonial thinking in a number of ways. By using Gayatri Spivak’s circuit of postcolonial theory and practice, this article enacts a contrapuntal (mis)reading of Milton’s text: Paradise Lost may at last free its (post)colonial (dis)content.Keywords: Gayatri Spivak; postcolonialism; John Milton.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document