Introduction: Constructions of the Early Modern Subject
Mathew Martin
University of Alberta
mmartin@ualberta.ca
Martin, Mathew. "Introduction: Constructions of the Early Modern Subject." Interactive Early Modern Literary Studies Dialogues (1999): 1.1-4 <URL: http://purl.oclc.org/emls/iemls/dialogues/01/introduction.html>.
The early modern period, as we are coming to call it, abounds with texts that in one way or another struggle with the issue of what it means to be a self. These texts hold a special fascination for us, preoccupied as we are with the perplexities of our own subjectivities in a postmodern world. But to reach across four or five centuries and speak with the dead is a tricky endeavor, and the writers of the three position papers for this first of EMLS's new Dialogues feature have addressed both the fascination and the dangers of this project, a project that has absorbed considerable scholarly energy in the last several decades. The Dialogues editors posed to the three writers--Dr. Douglas Bruster, Dr. Jonathan Hart and Dr. Linda Woodbridge--the following question:
At least since Burckhardt's discussion of "The Development of the Individual" in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), the early modern subject has been the hero or villain of a number of historical and critical discourses. In the last two decades many scholars have used recent theoretical models--Marxist, feminist, psychoanalytical, the anthropological model of new historicism--to limn the contours of early modern subjectivity and to embed that subjectivity in larger developmental narratives. Other scholars--Debora Shuger, Katharine Eisaman Maus, and Jonathan Sawday come to mind--have argued that our understanding of early modern selfhood can be enriched by examining it in the terms and models of self-understanding available to early modern individuals and that such analyses problematize the linear narratives of transition from medieval to early modern selfhood which tend to be the result of the application of newer theoretical paradigms.
This issue raises a number of interesting questions. What exactly is the object these discourses intend to study? Is it the sets of discursive positions available to concrete individuals in differing socio-economic positions? Or is it the modes of attempted synthesis of contradictory positions or rebellion against oppressive ones? Would someone who believes in the existence of a soul or a universal human nature accept all or part of this kind of analysis? How then should modern scholars deal with the limits placed on their inquiries by the relativity of their own hermeneutic assumptions? Do recent theoretical paradigms "discover" an early modern subject (would an Elizabethan or Jacobean have recognized herself or himself as "early modern"?) or merely construct one from the scattered shards of their own reflections? If reconstruction of early modern subjectivity is possible, how can literary texts be used in such a reconstruction? In what ways is the reconstructed early modern subject a site of discursive struggle within the academy? What claims are being made about/on/on the behalf of this subject and why?
- The responses we received were diverse but illuminating, covering different ground but mutually informing, speaking to each other's concerns in a variety of interesting ways. The complex relationship between surveillance and the secret self as manifested in early modern rogue literature is the focus of Dr. Woodbridge's paper. Woodbridge warns against reading this relationship in the Foucaldian terms of subjective interiority produced by a culture of surveillance. By distinguishing betwen the literary realism of the rogue pamphlets and the realism of actual documentary reporting, Woodbridge suggests a reversal of the Foucauldian equation: the fearful recognition of the socially transgressive possibilities of the secret self generated tropes of investigation, discovery and surveillance that filled rogue literature and a range of other early modern discourse before finding--perhaps causing--systematic institutional embodiment. Turning from underworld to New World, Dr. Jonathan Hart approaches early modern European subjectivity from the margins of its formation, New World encounters between Europeans and the aboriginal peoples they struggled to other. Hart uses kidnapping and mediation both as concrete instances of the difficulties of generalizing about early modern European subjectivity and as metaphors for the problematic procedures we as twentieth-century scholars employ when we attempt such generalizations. Dr. Bruster's contribution concentrates entirely on methodological issues, but the colonial metaphor continues. In a series of highly provocative aphorisms Bruster suggests that too much critical writing on early modern selfhood is "costume drama," our concerns dressed up in period clothing. Bruster urges us to reevaluate and reform our research methods in order to become "resident aliens" in the period. He is well aware that his proposals are contentious, and indeed, fully in keeping with the Dialogue's spirit, they raise as many questions as they answer. The editors are sure that you will find these three papers to be as timely and as thought-provoking as they have. But, of course, we hope that they are only the beginning of a wider conversation in which we invite all readers interested in the issues raised here to participate.
