Search

This article seeks to establish that Donne advocates a fallen ontological dualism wherein the body is not a mere prison that repels the superior soul's or mind's progress towards God, but a cognitive agent that can perfect hu- man perception and drive us closer to the divine. This ontological outlook has significant consequences for our understanding of Donne's poetics and theology. It would seem that reading Donne serves to prod and complicate to the point of lexical and syntactic delirium. Yet, the poet's tendency to synthesize antitheses, to produce discordia concors, allows both himself and his readers to transgress, however momentarily and imperfectly, the boundaries posed by discursive reasoning, as it encourages a reading process wherein mind and body merge in order to expand their impoverished experiential and cognitive horizons. In short, this essay links Donne's philosophical and theological thought with his poetic practice, corrects reductive accounts of his mind/body dualism, and demonstrates how his figures short-circuit discursive reasoning in such a way as to convey the inexpressible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early modern tragedians present us with a theory of dramaturgy wherein the view of the body as the mind's instrument is reversed, articulating an ontology in which the mind becomes the body's instrument. During these moments, it is not the audience that create the meanings of the body's language. Rather, the cognitive and emotional states conveyed by the body are generated through a pre-linguistic mode of communication (i.e. gestures, sweat, trembling, etc.) shared by audience members and actors alike. In turning to somatic communication and perception, tragedians aim at conveying to audiences what cannot enter the symbolic order of signification and understanding: unutterable, tragic sorrow and pain. This approach to tragic dramaturgy is often employed by early modern playwrights in order to cause a sense of wonder in the audience members, which, in turn, arouses pleasure and opens new vistas of thought against which to reconsider Aristotle's theory of catharsis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]