Two Cheers for Free-Thinking
Year: 2006
Type: article
Abstract: The phrase around which this number of Paragraph has been organized 'theory and the early modern' opens up a set of questions, creates a certain productive friction, by implying that its two terms may be defined by their mutual opposition. Theory, whatever else it does, sets itself the task of formulating overarching propositions about texts in general; the early modern teems with historically embedded texts that are notable, among other things, for their rich and enigmatic particularity. In what ways, to what extent, can theory illuminate the early modern? Do early modern texts in fact resist the interpretations of theory? Questions of this kind become possible as soon as 'theory' and 'the early modern' two terms that by themselves notoriously elude definition are brought together in an oppositional relation. The scene is set for another skirmish between the systematic and the irreducible, the abstract and the empirical, the transhistorical and the timebound.
Source: Paragraph
Author: Richard Scholar
Language: English
Subfield: Classics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2047415372