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This chapter explores the meaning of literariness in the aftermath of Kantian aesthetics. It focuses on the work of Søren Kierkegaard and J. M. Coetzee. It argues that, despite the strong formal differences between the texts of Kant, Kierkegaard, and Coetzee, all are engaged in a conversation about the kinds of belief we address to things that we make, and all three contribute to the construction of a specifically modern, formalist idea of literariness. This modern idea of literariness represents a declension from the heroic idea of poetic making characteristic of the early modern period.

This chapter argues that literariness in the Western tradition has been defined by a tension between making and believing, between an emphasis on poiesis as construction and the various attitudes of belief the reader or audience brings to a text or performance. It traces this tension from the work of Plato and Aristotle to the early modern period, when the centrality of rhetoric and maker’s knowledge (the idea that we can only know what we make ourselves) fundamentally shaped the conception of the literary work. It argues that modern concepts of literariness represent a declension from the heroic conception of poetic making characteristic of the early modern period.

This essay argues that Ernst Kantorowicz's The King's Two Bodies is intended as a contribution to twentieth-century debates about political theology and that modern students of political theology can learn from Kantorowicz's association of political theology with legal fiction.

Milton scholars have accepted at face value Milton's linking of the Son in Paradise Regained with patient or longsuffering Job. This article argues that Milton's representation of the Son is equally indebted to the Job who questions God's justice in the central dialogue of the book of Job. Job's rhetoric also is a model for the Son's ironic mode of speaking and for Milton's own literary relationship to Scripture.

This essay explores the importance of the early modern period for the work of the German jurist Carl Schmitt. It argues that Schmitt' s misreading of Shakespeare and Hobbes can in turn shed light on Schmitt' s own aestheticizing of politics. / Representations 83. Summer 2003 q The Regents of the

This study argues that English royalist prose romance of the 1650s should he read as a contribution to seventeenth-century debates about the role of the passions in forging political obligation. Taken together, Percy Herbert'sPrincess Cloria(1653-61), Richard Brathwaite's Panthalia (1659), and William Sales’ unfinishedTheophania(1655), chart a trajectory from a politics of narrow self-interest — which contemporaries identified with Hobbes — to a politics of aesthetic interest. In response to Hobbes’ critique of vainglory, they extend an invitation to imaginative identification. In doing so, they anticipate the eighteenth-century cult of sentimentality and the emerging discipline of aesthetics.

We should be careful since not all indifferent things which appear indifferent are. Florentines can disguise and color any thing; and it is now adays the common exercise of the greatest wits of the world to transform good into evil, evil into good, and both into indifferent; so that in these days scant any thing is as it appears, or appears as it is.In linking the rhetorical machinations of the “Florentine” or stereotypical Machiavel with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theological and political debate concerning the doctrine of “things indifferent,” this quotation from William Bradshaw invites us to reconsider the usual histories of Machiavellism in Renaissance England. In particular, it suggests that the association of Machiavelli with rhetoric in the English Renaissance is more complicated than it might first appear.

A NUMBER OF critics have recently argued that the aim of literary studies should be not the interpretation of individual texts but the study of the conventions of interpretation, and thus of the production and reception of texts, in different historical periods.2 Scholars in the field of Renaissance studies have accordingly made renewed attempts to characterize the changing role of the reader from the early Italian to the later Northern Renaissance. Both Terence Cave and Cathleen Bauschatz have suggested that the active role of the reader is only recognized in the sixteenth century. Before that time, the text itself is seen to be authoritative and the reader the passive recipient of its meaning.3 Whether this reception is governed by a patristic, Augustinian notion of allegory or by a conservative Ciceronianism, the imperative is the disappearance of the reader as a "willful, independent subject" (Cave 150). In Augustinian terms, the problematic act of reading is replaced by an "epiphany of grace": "caritas equals claritas." With Erasmus, Rabelais, and Montaigne, on the other hand, an active rhetoric of quotation is said to emerge from the earlier passive or submissive practice of imitation (Cave 156).4 The literary text is no longer the privileged authority but, rather, something to be dismantled or plundered by would-be authors who, in critically appropriating other texts, redefine the roles of the eventual readers of their own. The redefinition is apparent not least of all, according to Cave, in the fact that "the figure of the reader emerges in textual practice" (152). In other words, the reader in the act of making sense is a theme of sixteenth-century texts in a way that is not true of earlier works. The first problem with this "history" is that it ignores the programmatic statements and rhetorical practice of the early quattrocento humanists who were concerned about defining reading not simply as an act of allegorical or Ciceronian appropriation but as the productive, practical exercise of the reader's judgment (see Kahn, "Pontano's Rhetoric" and "Rhetoric of Faith"). In fact, it was because these authors recognized the potential arbitrariness of interpretation that they wanted to engage and thereby actively educate the reader. Furthermore, this process of education was seen to be not only compatible with but actually dependent on the rhetoric of quotation (i.e., the willful manipulation of prior texts) that Cave and others find characteristic of sixteenth-century works. What is new in the sixteenth century is not the stress on the activity of reading but the refusal, by some authors, to make moral and pedagogical claims for that activity. Yet ambivalence about these claims, an ambivalence embodied in the literary representation of the reader, is apparent in many works of the early Renaissance. This ambivalence leads us to the second problem with Cave's and Bauschatz's histories. While the suppression of the act of reading may be the ideal in some texts of the earlier Renaissance, there are so many exceptions-so many ironic commentaries on this hermeneutic utopia-that the argument soon loses all heuristic value. As the epigraph from the Familiares illustrates, Petrarch in particular was aware of reading as a dangerous activity, one that could only succeed if guided by divine truth, that is