Timothy J. Reiss

“[D]uring the second half of the sixteenth century and the first third of the seventeenth there developed both a real and a felt series of disjunctions: within a social order driven by violence, certainly, but also of society from the divine, of knowledge form the world, of poetic and rhetorical practice form political and cultural needs.” This development was shared across most of Europe. “In the particular case of poetics,” the “sixteenth-century debate was characterized by a consensus on its distance from reality, however defined, and by a growing sense of the poet’s authority.” The “complex elaboration of ‘literature,’” then, was both “a reply to that sense of disjunction” and a “main element in the formation, consolidation, and order of something like a new social compact, itself dependent, among other things, on new forms of authority.”… (más)