Pleasure without Profit

The first chapter lays the groundwork for the rest of the study by pursuing three goals: it offers a preliminary investigation of the utility and value that early modern writers intended for their work, examines how and why pleasure disrupts those intentions, and establishes how this issue persists in the context of contemporary theoretical debates. Through close readings of passages from texts by early modern writers such as Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, George Puttenham, Andrew Marvell, and George Herbert, as well as contemporary theorists such as Fredric Jameson and Stephen Greenblatt, this chapter demonstrate the complexities and contradictions that pleasure instantiates within the standards of utility to which poets attempt to adhere. The use of pleasure as a means to valuable ends is constantly belied by its volatile contingency, which provides no guarantee that poetry can deliver the goods that it advertises. Extending its readings into the modern era, the chapter follows the dynamics of abjection and dialectical recuperation with which modern thinkers have attempted to master such contingency, often by projecting it onto questionably futile forms of desire embodied in queer sexualities.

Coda

The coda identifies the double binds that the book attempts to grapple with. Specifically, it explains the performativity of the study and argues that rethinking the pleasures and literariness of criticism offers one way of moving beyond the impasses that mark current debates over the value of literature and the humanities.

Beyond Sublimation

The final chapter begins by reconsidering the grand ends that Milton sets for his poetry: to “justify the ways of God to men.” Criticism has routinely portrayed a Milton who, because of his sublime intentions, must either reform or reject the disreputable pleasures and instabilities of the humanist and romance traditions that he inherits from writers like Sidney and Spenser. The chapter argue that with this increase in the grandeur of Milton’s poetic aspirations comes an increase in the risk of falling and thus failing. This risk of error and vanity, the chapter demonstrates, accounts for many of the structural instabilities, textual cruxes, and unresolved questions in Milton’s corpus, questions that it explores by attending to the forms and figures of un-sublimity, waste, and heterogeneity in his epic masterpiece Paradise Lost. Drawing on philosophers and theorists such as Hegel, Bataille, Lacan, Derrida, de Man, and Edelman, the chapter counters a tradition of scholarship that strives to resolve dialectically the ever-present friction between Milton’s poetry and his intentions. Against these sublimating tendencies and gestures in Milton scholarship, the chapter attempts to bring out the persistent, unsublatable negativity that pervades Paradise Lost.

Spenser’s Unhappy Ends

Chapter Four furthers the previous chapter’s examination of how the ironies of romance interfere with claims of intention and utility. It argues that Edmund Spenser’s stated intention to “fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline” unravels in the Legend of Courtesy, the final completed book of his romance The Faerie Queene. The chapter analyzes how the Legend of Courtesy not only betrays ambivalence toward the virtue of courtesy, but also puts extreme pressure on poetry’s reputed ability to supply any “vertuous and gentle discipline.” Through its investment in passivity over action, errancy over linearity, and misconduct over self-discipline, the Legend of Courtesy reveals the limits of the demand that poetry should inculcate askesis, or self-discipline. Like the texts of Ascham and Nashe, the Legend of Courtesy is marked by forms of parabasis: interruptions and digressions that inhibit the teleological flow of the text. The chapter demonstrates that these parabases are the source of romance’s distinctly unsettling pleasure, which ironizes Spenser’s virtuous intentions in ways that Spenser scholars have failed to address.

Art for Nothing’s Sake

Chapter Three initiates a two-chapter sequence on the most hotly contested literary genre in early modern England: romance. It offers close readings of two Elizabethan texts frequently cited for their condemnations of romance: Roger Ascham’s The Scholemaster and Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller. Critics generally take these texts at face value, citing them as unequivocal Protestant diatribes against the pleasures of romance and arguing that Ascham and Nashe project such pleasures onto the dangers of traveling abroad to Italy. The chapter draws on Paul de Man’s theory of irony in order to think about the disjunction between the texts’ didactic statements, on the one hand, and the mode in which those statements are delivered, or undelivered, on the other. In opposition to conventional readings that recuperate such disjunctions, the chapter analyzes how the rhetorical motions and narrative structures of these texts fail to line up with Ascham’s and Nashe’s more explicit condemnations of romance. Specifically, it show how the texts’ errancy and play, in the forms of digression, alliteration, and narrative interruptions, undercut their pedagogical intentions. Rather than simply celebrating such play, however, the chapter points to its high costs for both writers.

Bonfire of the Vanities

Chapter Two extends the work of the previous chapter by offering a more focused critique of the rhetorical and ideological strategies by which aesthetic pleasure has been devalued in both Renaissance and contemporary humanism. The chapter engages in an intensive analysis of Shakespeare’s Richard II in order to reveal how the forceful abjection of vain pleasures, as personified in King Richard and his sodomitical counselors, animates the play’s ideological machinery. It demonstrates further that, as a play, Richard II is itself a manifestation of the forms of futile pleasure that the dramatic world within the play aims to scapegoat. It ends by turning to the remainder of the second tetralogy to trace the plays’ reconstitution of pleasure’s vanity in the form of Prince Hal so that it can be reformed as useful once the prince is redeemed and assumes the throne as Henry V. This reading of Shakespeare’s texts is framed by an argument against commonplace narratives about the legacy of deconstructive theory. Just as Shakespeare’s second tetralogy stages and reinforces the submission of pleasure to use and vanity to virtue, so have critics tended to redeem the forms of queer pleasure for which deconstruction has been routinely vilified.

Futilitarianism: An Introduction

The introduction begins by addressing how current debates about the value of literary studies and the humanities often return to the English Renaissance. It then lays out the argument of the book, outlining the study’s archive, its organization, its methodologies, its contributions to literary studies, and its style.