Open Subjects: English Renaissance Republicans, Modern Selfhoods and the Virtue of Vulnerability

ISBN-13: 9780748664870 / Angielski / Miękka / 2012 / 232 str.

James Kuzner

Opis

Studies of the republican legacy have proliferated in recent years, always to argue for a polity that cultivates the virtues, protections, and entitlements which foster the self's ability to simulate an invulnerable existence. James Kuzner's original new study of writing by Spenser, Shakespeare, Marvell and Milton is the first to present a genealogy for the modern self in which its republican origins can be understood far more radically. In doing so, the study is also the first to draw radical and republican thought into sustained conversation, and to locate a republic for which vulnerability is, unexpectedly, as much what community has to offer as it is what community guards against. At a time when the drive to safeguard citizens has gathered enough momentum to justify almost any state action, Open Subjects questions whether vulnerability is the evil we so often believe it to be.

Spis treści

Acknowledgements; Preface: Vulnerable Crests of Renaissance Selves; 1: Legacies of Republicanism, Histories of the Self; 2: 'Without Respect of Utility': Precarious Life and the Politics of Edmund Spenser's Legend of Friendship; 3: Unbuilding the City: Coriolanus, Titus, and the Forms of Openness; 4: 'That Transubstantiall solacisme': Andrew Marvell, Linguistic Vulnerability, and the Space of the Subject; 5: Habermas Goes to Hell: Pleasure, Public Reason, and the Republicanism of Paradise Lost; Epilogue: The Futures of Open Subjects; Index.