Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance TextsTaking Wittgenstein's "Don't think, but look" as his motto, Richard Strier argues against the application of a priori schemes to Renaissance (and all) texts. He argues for the possibility and desirability of rigorously attentive but "pre-theoretical" reading. His approach privileges particularity and attempts to respect the "resistant structures" of texts. He opposes theories, critical and historical, that dictate in advance what texts must—or cannot—say or do. The first part of the book, "Against Schemes," demonstrates, in discussions of Rosemond Tuve, Stephen Greenblatt, and Stanley Fish among others, how both historicist and purely theoretical approaches can equally produce distortion of particulars. The second part, "Against Received Ideas," shows how a variety of texts (by Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, and others) have been seen through the lenses of fixed, mainly conservative ideas in ways that have obscured their actual, surprising, and sometimes surprisingly radical content. |
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Other editions - View all
Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts Richard Strier Limited preview - 1995 |
Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts Richard Strier Limited preview - 2023 |
Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts Richard Strier Limited preview - 2023 |
Common terms and phrases
Absalom and Achitophel argue argument assertion Bacon behavior Burton Cambridge Castellio chap Christian Church-porch conscience context Cordelia Coriolanus Cornwall courtier critic critique cultural deconstruction devout humanism distinction Donne's Eagleton early modern Edmund Elizabethan emphasis England English Erasmus essay Exclusion Crisis Fish Fish's Folio George Herbert Gloucester Gloucester's Goneril Greenblatt Hamlet Helen Gardner historical Historicism J. H. Hexter John Donne Kent King Lear language Lear's Leontes lines literary London Luther mean metaphor moral obedience Oswald Oxford perhaps philosophical phrase Phrygius poem Poetry political Ponet position prince Protestant question radical reading rebellion Reformation Regan Religion religious Renaissance resistance rhetoric Richard Richard II Satire III scene Schoenfeldt seems sense Shakespeare social Sonnets soul Stanley Fish stanza Stephen Greenblatt Strier suggest Tate Tate's Lear Tate's play Theory thou tradition trans true truth Tuve Tuve's University Press Utopia Whigs William Empson York