Browsing by Author "Ellenzweig, Sarah"

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    Clothed with Salvation: Pastoral Power and Eighteenth-Century Anglican Satire
    (2016-06-27) Nelson, Jon Nnicholas; Ellenzweig, Sarah; Joseph, Betty
    Critics who work with eighteenth-Critics who work with eighteenth-century texts have long wrestled with the place of religion in the literary archive. Clothed with Salvation: Pastoral Power and Eighteenth-Century Anglican Satire approaches this topic from two perspectives: first from the recent academic debate over postsecularism, and second through the lens of pastoral power, a transitional concept developed by Michel Foucault in his 1977-1978 lectures at the Collège de France. Eighteenth-century literary studies is an especially promising field for bringing the two together. In the last thirty years, the discipline witnessed an explosion of work arising from the adoption of powerful analytical frameworks, the culturalization of its interests, and the expansion of its traditional archives. Moreover, there is now widespread familiarity with most other aspects of Foucault’s genealogy of modernity. In bringing together the postsecular and the pastoral, I argue that literary articulations of pastoral power became particularly productive in Anglican satire when writers responded to the shift from naïve religion to reflective religion. The dissertation advances a series of arguments about the literary dimensions of pastoral power that accompanied this change. It demonstrates (1) how the post-Civil War seventeenth-century anxiety over the pastorate colored the satirical representation of naïve religious belief; (2) how shepherd-flock and citizen-state games appear in tropes and figures of sovereignty and unrest during the Restoration; (3) how the workings of pastoral power made possible a satirical critique of contesting religious belief; (4) and how the typical techniques and strategies of pastoral technology became decoupled from salvation and repurposed in the satirical novel. Individual chapters explore these themes in the work of Samuel Butler, John Dryden, Jonathan Swift, and Laurence Sterne.
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    Ecologies of Innovation: Economy, Empire, and Environment in Eighteenth-Century British Literature
    (2021-04-29) MacDonnell, Kevin T.; Campana, Joseph; Ellenzweig, Sarah
    “Ecologies of Innovation: Economy, Empire, and Environment in Eighteenth-Century British Literature” examines how eighteenth-century literature shaped the reception and articulation of innovative modes of production in the Atlantic world. “Innovation” is a concept that is now as ubiquitous as it is elusive. And yet, attending to the cultural histories of innovation is essential to understanding our moment, from the conceptual foundations of global capitalism to the environmental legacies of colonialism. This project explores literary encounters with innovations in mining, shipping, plantation agriculture, and manufacturing that not only advanced Britain’s imperial ascendancy but also registered as forms of capitalist enterprise legible on a planetary scale. From Daniel Defoe, to Olaudah Equiano, to James Grainger, British writers negotiated the conventions of eighteenth-century literary culture with the innovations that were enabling capital accumulation and territorial expansion. By analyzing the interplay of literary and technical discourse in eighteenth-century Britain, I recast paradigmatic modes of the period’s literary culture—the novel, aesthetic philosophy, the slave narrative, and the georgic—as means of turning toward and responding to innovation. In the end, “Ecologies of Innovation” traces a prehistory of our troubled relationship with innovation, illustrating how and to what extent literature and language shaped the early expression of colonial capitalism.
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    Theophanic Reasoning: Science, Secrets, and the Stars from Spenser to Milton
    (2020-10-08) McAdams, Alexander Lowe; Campana, Joseph; Ellenzweig, Sarah
    Theophanic Reasoning: Science, Secrets, and the Stars from Spenser to Milton posits that early modern English literary figures use the concept of theophany, the material or transferred presence of God in the terrestrial world, to respond to the vacuum of doubt instigated after Nicolaus Copernicus published his astronomical observations in 1543. From heretical theories of the world-soul expressed through pagan Roman myth in Spenserian epic and Shakespearean drama, to the deeply spiritual and lively negotiation between man and the divine in Francis Bacon’s scientific writings and John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Theophanic Reasoning argues that Protestant writers use theophany as a cipher to reason, or rationalize, the anxiety accompanying the scientific method, which threatened to eliminate God the Maker from the universe entirely. As a literary history of religion and science, Theophanic Reasoning makes a critical intervention between religious studies and the history of science. In doing so, it argues that seventeenth-century literature acts as the gravitational force that pulls these now-disparate fields into cooperating orbits. Whereas current literary scholarship focuses on the history of science or the “religious turn” as separately evolving critical conversations, this dissertation returns to the original historical milieu of the seventeenth century by forging careful analysis of historical materials and Latin philosophical texts with recent research in Christian mystical theology and the esoteric branch of the history of science discipline. Thus, Theophanic Reasoning addresses a crucial gap in scholarship between literature and religion and literature and the long history of science. At the heart of this project is the early modern brokering between the ontological status of truth and lies, belief and proof. It argues that Protestant believers used verifiable proof of God’s presence—in the cosmos, in the atmosphere, on the human body—to explain and further buoy scientific experiment and reality. It seeks to answer the question of what happens to literature when two giant cultural shifts, the Protestant Reformation and the Cosmological Revolution, threaten to rend the very fabric of religious and intellectual life in England. With particular attention to early modern understandings of facticity and sensory experience, Theophanic Reasoning provides a religio-scientific reading practice to redefine the secularizing impulse of contemporary literary criticism. In turn, this dissertation seeks to restore the divine to its place in early modern conceptions of science, secrets, and the stars.