Literary histories of specific genres like tragedy or epic typically concern themselves with influence and deviation, tradition and innovation, the genealogical links between authors and the forms they make. Renaissance scholarship is particularly suited to these accounts of generic evolution; we read of the afterlife of Senecan tragedy in English drama, or of the respective influence of Virgil and Lucan on Renaissance epic. My study of epic poetry differs, though: by insisting on the primacy of material conditions, social organization and especially information technology to the production of literature, I present a discontinuous series of set pieces in which any given epic poem—the Iliad, the Aeneid, or The Faerie Queene—is structured more by local circumstances and methods than by authorial responses to distant epic predecessors. Ultimately I make arguments about how modes of literary production determine the forms of epic poems. Achilleus’ contradictory and anachronistic funerary practices in Iliad 23, for instance, are symptomatic of the accumulative transcription of disparate oral performances over time, which calls into question what, if any artistic ‘unity’ might guide scholarly readings of the Homeric texts. While classicists have conventionally opposed Virgil’s Aeneid to Lucan’s Bellum Civile on aesthetic and political grounds, I argue that both poets endorse the ethnographic-imperialist ideology ‘virtus at the frontier’ under the twin pressures of Julio-Claudian military expansion and the Principate’s instrumentalization of Roman intellectual life in its public library system. Finally, my chapter on Renaissance English epic demonstrates how Spenser and Milton grappled with humanist anxieties about the political utility of the classics and the unmanageable archive produced by print culture. It is my hope that this thesis coheres into a narrative of a particularly long-lived genre, the epic, and the mutations and adaptations it underwent in oral, manuscript, and print contexts.

Texte remanié de: Th. Ph. D.--New Haven (Conn.)--Yale university. / Notes bibliogr. Index.

Thèse de doctorat : Philosophie : Paris 12 : 2004. Thèse de doctorat : Philosophie : Università degli studi di Padova : 2004. / Thèse électronique uniquement consultable au sein de l'Université Paris 12 (Intranet). Thèse soutenue en co-tutelle. Titre provenant de l'écran-titre. Bibliogr. f. 303-335.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 252-266).

My dissertation revises our assumptions about the Renaissance commonplace that poetic monuments last longer than marble ones. We tend to understand the commonplace as being about the materiality of artistic media and thus the comparative durability of text and stone. In contrast, I argue that English Renaissance poets and theorists treat the monument of verse as a space where their hopes for the poem’s future converge with broader cultural concerns about the reception of the ancient past and the place of English vernacular poetry within the hierarchy of classical and contemporary European letters. In Renaissance poetics manuals, authors appropriate a newly classicizing architectural vocabulary to communicate confidence in the lasting power of English poetic structures. Through their use of architectural metaphors, they defend their vernacular against charges of vulgar barbarism and promote the civilizing potential of English verse. Yet if lyric poets also turn to architectural metaphors to make claims about poetry’s enduring quality, they simultaneously disclose a deep unease about the perils of textual transmission. Indeed, monumentalizing conceits often appear most powerfully in poetic genres predicated on failed hopes and frustrated desires, that is, in the sonnet sequences and complaints of Edmund Spenser, Samuel Daniel, and William Shakespeare. In acknowledging the fragility of the textual and architectural remains of antiquity, lyric poets from Spenser forward consider their own textual futures with an entirely new sense of urgency. I argue, however, that their unease about the future of their art has as much to do with the genres in which they write and their suspicions about the shifting reading practices of future audiences as it does with the material vulnerability of the medium that transmits that art. In the sonnet sequence in particular, lyric poets who monumentalize their beloved partake in—and anxiously question—early modern practices of constructing funeral monuments for the living. I argue that these poets’ fantasy of entombing those who are still in the prime of their lives turns out to be less about a future rebirth than an obsessive, premature preparation for death. / text

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In this thesis, I investigate the nature of geometric knowledge and its relationship to spatial intuition. My goal is to rehabilitate the Kantian view that Euclid's geometry is a mathematical practice, which is grounded in spatial intuition, yet, nevertheless, yields a type of a priori knowledge about the structure of visual space. I argue for this by showing that Euclid's geometry allows us to derive knowledge from idealized visual objects, i.e., idealized diagrams by means of non-formal logical inferences. By developing such an account of Euclid's geometry, I complete the "standard view" that geometry is either a formal system (pure geometry) or an empirical science (applied geometry), which was developed mainly by the logical positivists and which is currently accepted by many mathematicians and philosophers. My thesis is divided into three parts. I use Hans Reichenbach's arguments against Kant and Edmund Husserl's genetic approach to the concept of space as a means of arguing that the "standard view" has to be supplemented by a concept of a geometry whose propositions have genuine spatial content. I then develop a coherent interpretation of Euclid's method by investigating both the subject matter of Euclid's geometry and the nature of geometric inferences. In the final part of this thesis, I modify Husserl's phenomenological analysis of the constitution of visual space in order to define a concept of spatial intuition that allows me not only to explain how Euclid's practice is grounded in visual space, but also to account for the apriority of its results.

This dissertation examines the Christ-centered homiletics of Edmund Clowney and Sidney Greidanus in contrast with the human author-centered hermeneutics of Walter Kaiser. Chapter 1 frames the dissertation by presenting the consequence of preaching and the marks of redemptive-historical preaching. Chapter 2 presents Walter Kaiser's author-centered hermeneutic. Kaiser's hermeneutic is presented because it is used as a plumb line to assess if and how redemptive-historical preaching drifts from an author-centered hermeneutic. Chapter 3 introduces Edmund Clowney as one of the seminal thinkers in redemptive-historical preaching. It considers Clowney's Christ-centered biblical theology and how that informs his use of symbolism and typology to preach Christ. Chapter 4 juxtaposes Greidanus' seven ways of preaching Christ from the Old Testament alongside Kaiser's author-centered hermeneutic. Attention is also given to Greidanus' sermons from the Old Testament. Chapter 5 presents summary conclusions, documenting some of the frequent cleavages between Kaiser and redemptive-historical preaching. It concludes with ways to implement the dissertation findings for preaching the Old Testament.