Emergences of literature: Reading and history in Sidney's poetics

摘要

Sidney's treatise on poetry is a theoretical work that aims at describing poetic discourse as an autonomous field independent of the social and moral constraints associated with 'poetry' in western history from the Greeks onward. While Sidney's terminology and references derive from the convention of the discourse on poetry starting with Aristotle and Plato, the conceptual and structural use to which this lexicon is put articulates the outline of a new discourse which will be consolidated in the course of the seventeenth century as 'literature.' The recognition of this duality in terminology, of topical continuity and functional change, is indispensable to understanding Sidney's treatise which, on account of the overdetermined nature of its language, has been interpreted through the twentieth century as a text that fails to attain the conceptual coherence expected of a theoretical work. These expectations have been determined largely by principles of criticism deriving from Romanticist notions of coherence.;The hermeneutic difficulty presented by the treatise consists in part of the complexity of its formal features that have led to its exclusion from the field of theoretical discourse. It resides equally in its nature as a text belonging to the instance of the emergence of the discourse of 'literature.' These specific complexities render a close reading all the more compelling if not the valid method for approaching the treatise.;The Sidnean theory of poetry may be traced along two vectors elaborating the topics of the critique of history as the discourse of a referential and utilitarian notion of language, and a theory of reading that engages what is given in the treatise as the radical poetic dimension of language. The latter is described not only with reference to poetic texts but also as an abstract model which contains the primary, generative pattern from which other linguistic modes (notably the historiographic and philosophical) derive.;Chapters consist of a survey of ways in which ethics and poetry have been aligned historically, the survey of the treatise's criticism, Sidney's comparative approach to history and poetry, the theory of reading.