Read an Excerpt
The Intervention of Philology
Gender, Learning, and Power in Lohenstein's Roman Plays
By Jane O. Newman The University of North Carolina Press
Copyright © 2000 University of North Carolina Press
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8078-8122-4
Introduction
Gender, Knowledge, Philology: The Case of Daniel Casper von Lohenstein
Lohenstein at the Crossroads: Early Modern Studies and the Politics of Location
Eve Sedgwick begins her Epistemology of the Closet axiomatically. I begin here in a similar fashion, since some of the issues addressed in this introductory chapter may seem to take the reader somewhat far afield from this study's primary subject, namely the work of philology in the production of early modern gender identity in the Roman plays of the early modern German playwright, Daniel Casper von Lohenstein (1635-83). Like Sedgwick's axioms, my propositions here address the "groundings" of this subject both within its own matter and as a result of its location in a late-twentieth-century critical world. Designed to serve as connective conceptual arteries between the postmodern theory and the historical subject matter of this book, they signal the coordinates of its situation as a discussion of seventeenth-century, German-language texts informed by a number of late-twentieth-century academic debates about gender, method, and the geography of the disciplines.
The guiding principles of my analyses may be formulated in the following way: (1) things both are and are not what they seem; and (2) what you see depends on where you stand, what you look at, and when you look. At stake here is the relationship between our objects of study and the methods with which we study them; these relations determine the material, ideological, historical, historiographical, aesthetic, and epistemological categories of all knowledge-producing projects and claims. My two statements depend on one another in dialectical fashion; what appears to be the case from one historically specific, methodological and theoretical position or analytical and even literal location will appear otherwise if the position, moment, and method of critical "spectating" are changed. It is the project of this book to produce such a change in our understanding of gender ideology in the early modern period in Europe precisely by approaching a specific set of texts from disciplinary, theoretical, geographical, chronological, and methodological standpoints, or points of view, that have not been considered compatible with those texts to date. In the process, new knowledge about the relation between gender and history, history and textuality, and textuality and gender will emerge.
The specific and separate communities to which such a project might speak-scholars of early modern Europe and its dramatic and historiographical traditions, as well as historians of early modern schooling, students of the history of sexuality and gender, postmodern theorists of gender, textuality, and performance, Germanists, and those interested in the tools and products of philological text work-will each find some familiar landmarks in the heterogeneous discursive economies and landscapes of this book; other parts of its matter and method will be new. The critical and substantive polyglossia of the readings may cause different kinds of interpretive static for different readers; after all, previously discrete disciplinary languages and cultures are asked to cohabit here. Yet, these difficulties are as intentional as they were unavoidable. My project has matured during a period when the postmodern reorganization of knowledge systems has become so conventional as to itself represent a new orthodoxy. Moreover, it has developed during a time that may come to be known as the post-Cold War era, when the very act of writing for a scholarly audience in the Anglo-American West about a series of dramatic texts originally written in the middle to late seventeenth century in areas that now belong for the most part to Poland must function as a provocation of sorts, in that it calls attention to both the literal and the figurative shifting of borders and boundaries in numerous ways. What happens to the concept of "Europe," for example, when we look at the end of the twentieth century to the cultures of what is now east central Europe, cultures obscured by Cold War rhetoric and realities from western scholarly vision for the past fifty years or more? Indeed, what image of the early modern "origins of the West" do we get when we displace our perspective from Italy and England in that period, for example, to territories still "European" but, from a modern perspective at least, decidedly east? These are obvious questions, as one colleague has put it, to anyone in the United States who has been involved in the study of any European cultural tradition other than the Anglo-American one over the past number of years. They need to be confronted by all scholars of early modern Europe, however, as we try to make sense of the altered disciplinary environment and geography of the late-twentieth-century U.S. academy, in which the very study of Europe at all has itself come under attack.
The traditional "idea of the Renaissance," for example, and its central issues, genres, and figures have been crafted, with some few exceptions, out of primarily Italian, English, and occasionally French and Spanish sources for some one hundred years or more. The study of the cultures of central and eastern Europe during the early modern period has been left primarily to specialists during this time, and there has been comparatively little cross-fertilization between the discrete fields. Yet, at least one of the most influential scholars of the period, namely Jacob Burckhardt, who set the tone for Italocentric Renaissance studies, was not only himself heavily implicated in the fraught ideological and political debates over the status of the nation and its relation precisely to the states of central Europe in particular in the late nineteenth century, but was well aware of the fact that, as focused as he may himself have been on "the Renaissance" in Italy, the issues that were central to the period crossed multiple borders to both the north and the east. Subsequent accounts of the Renaissance by Cassirer, Warburg, Saxl, and Kristeller (accounts underread in the late twentieth century for the geographies of knowledge with which they work) actually portray the period in a similarly complex fashion, caught as much in their authors' own varying and historically specific projects of self-location and self-orientation in a greater central Europe torn apart by the upheavals of World War I and World War II as in the matter of a more heterogeneous sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe that included not only English- and Romance-language areas, but extended into the polyglossic eastern and northern territories of both the Holy Roman Empire and other early modern states as well. What would happen, then, to the late-twentieth-century map of early modern studies in the United States in particular if we were to challenge its borders by introducing the complex cultures of central and eastern central Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries into the picture? How would its "central questions" and recent scholarship's answers to them change if we were to redraw the disciplinary map? The potential focus within any future early modern studies on "new" (newly visible, newly accessible) central European texts like those with which this book is concerned was made materially possible by the Wende, the "turn" that occurred in eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s, and by the reconfiguration of power and knowledge and corresponding redefinitions of margins and centers that resulted from the dissolution of the "Iron Curtain." Orienting ourselves in these materials as well as in the aesthetic, ideological, and historical issues that concerned a larger and more diverse early modern occidental world may take some time. Yet, the methodologies, chronologies, and disciplinary routines directly impacted by geopolitical developments both before and since 1945, including the organization of literary studies in such a way as to include the study of only a select subset of western European nation-states, must and will give way to the new points of view constructed by a post-1989 world.
The notion of a new point of view originating in central and eastern central Europe intersects with the rhetoric of spectatorship with which I began, for we now have access to and can see a different early modern period than the one previously considered as practically coterminous with the borders of what was until recently a primarily western European Community. Recognizing this difference is crucial to my specific object of study, namely Daniel Casper von Lohenstein's dramatic corpus, and specifically to those of his plays that stage scenes of political intrigue from a classical Roman past. Lohenstein was one of the major literary figures of German-speaking central Europe in the early modern period. He lived and wrote his plays in Silesian Breslau, now Wroclaw, Poland. His intellectual world was populated by both learned tomes hailing from a more familiar Renaissance and early modern tradition in Italy, Holland, and France and by a (to us) somewhat less well known set of seventeenth-century documents testifying to contemporary literary, political, and scientific developments in central Europe as well as in Silesia itself. Lohenstein's was a heterogeneous citational community, then. Seeing his plays both in dialogue with the textual culture of this world and as a series of literal productions of grand dimensions even for the early modern stage becomes possible if we look at them through the multiple lenses of postmodern gender theory, early modern historiography and political theory, the practice of learned annotation and publication, and the history of institutions of schooling as well as of the complex realities of local and imperial authority in central Europe at the time. Gender and power and how they are produced in a dynamic of both literal and textual concealment and revelation were crucial to Lohenstein's texts when they were written and staged. Yet only passing attention has been paid to these dimensions of his work by scholars of the German Baroque; critics involved in the exciting debates about the politics of gender and drama in the early modern period, especially in England, over the past fifteen years have been similarly oblivious to the ways in which central European documents like Lohenstein's plays might impact their claims. Producing a new visibility for his (in more ways than one) obscure texts by means of historical-philological study and gender critique is thus the project of this book.
Lohenstein's plays are monuments to the highly learned, highly politicized, and yet, finally, also highly conventional school culture of the early modern period that explicitly addressed issues of gender, power, and political subjecthood in terms of their relationship to the legacies of the classical past. They did so, moreover, by using cross-dressed adolescent schoolboy actors to stage exotic, often lascivious scenes of political intrigue, seduction, torture, and murder derived from contemporary editions of ancient texts. In their local conditions of textual and stage production and reception, Lohenstein's dramas thus provide a window onto what appears to be a very bizarre version of the early modern period, a version that nevertheless can be read as not so very anomalous once considered against the background of the textual and material cultures out of which it emerged. Indeed, his plays were produced by an academic culture in some respects not unlike our own, training grounds, even factories, both for the production of workers for a variety of early modern and late twentieth-century professions. Seeing them in the light of the schoolboys' gradual professionalization and asking ourselves just how much the plays complied with and how much they resisted the literal and ideological tasks of the schools allows us to reflect on both their and our own investments in a variety of historical, theoretical, methodological, and institutional debates as we attend to the business of studying the learned cultures of earlier periods in a postmodern world.
The fit I am describing between Lohenstein's plays and the late twentieth century may appear somewhat uncanny. Yet, if N. Katherine Hayles is correct, all texts are "permeable membranes through which flow the currents of history, language, and culture," both historical and our own. As we register the specifics that make these peculiar German plays so intriguing as local historical artifacts, we can "listen in on" a variety of messages about gender, knowledge, and power embedded in them: their origins in a very specific and complex political culture on the eastern frontiers of the West, for example, their explicit interest in and devotion to both displaying and dissecting the origins of sexually extravagant behavior, their bloated learnedness, finally, and polyhistorical intertextual nature, which dictated that whatever encounter with cultural diversity, confessional-political contentiousness, or learned controversy that marked the early modern period and was inventoried in books would be noted, explored, and cataloged within the boundaries of the texts themselves. The questions that can be posed about these issues as they become visible within the historical text work of Lohenstein's plays also resonate with contemporary readers, and will do so whenever we consider difficult artifacts from this or any other earlier period that lies so very close to the literal, ideological, and textual origins of the "civilized" western self.
These particular artifacts, Lohenstein's four Roman plays, of course also stylize themselves as reviving these origins precisely in their re-presentation of classical scenes. How are we to reconcile the reputed otherness of a corpus of texts as peculiar as Lohenstein's, which have so often been taken for artifacts of the bizarre, with their simultaneous indebtedness to traditional materials and rhetorical and historiographical techniques and concerns? Indeed, how will the landscape of what we have taken to be the "traditional" mechanisms of knowledge transmission and institutions of schooling among "our" learned ancestors change if phenomena like Lohenstein's plays become visible precisely as conventional for at least one version of the period's fascination with reviving the past? My intention in posing such questions is not to exploit what some might maintain is the "marginal" field of German Baroque literature by making a subset of what are admittedly some of its more extreme textual products into exponents of political textuality or queer hybridity, of postmodern gender theory or deconstructive historiography avant la lettre. Rather, my project concerns the methods (including my own) by which what John Guillory has called "cultural capital" is and can be (re)created and transmitted, specifically in early modern European studies, and the impact that these methods have upon our image of ourselves as it is indebted to this particular textual past.
The focus of my initial axioms on seeming and being, on the implications of visibility for both knowing about and reading historical artifacts and for theoretical reflection, may appear either pedestrian or naive in an academic discussion conducted in post-Heisenbergian discursive time. The "story of how and why positivism failed" is a familiar one, as Hayles notes. We have known for some time that how we know something directly impacts what it is that we know, and thus that there can be no inert objects of knowledge apart from the knowledge that produces them; "observations are always shaped by preexisting assumptions," she writes. What we see depends on where we stand and how we look. Yet, considering the early modern period and the materiality of its texts as themselves articulating this self- consciousness has occurred in only a limited number of studies to date.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Intervention of Philology by Jane O. Newman Copyright © 2000 by University of North Carolina Press. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
