Jonathan Hart

University of Toronto, Centre for Reformation and Reniassance Studies, Fellow

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Musing

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (cb... more We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (cbf) for our publishing activities. This publication is licensed under a Creative Commons License, Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2 .5 Canada: see www.creativecommons.org. The text may be reproduced for non-commercial purposes, provided that credit is given to the original author.

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The Delirium of Making

Canadian review of comparative literature, 2009

This is and is not a book about John Milton. Although Gordon Teskey expresses many important insi... more This is and is not a book about John Milton. Although Gordon Teskey expresses many important insights and provides suggestive close readings of the great poet's work, he also manages to produce a book about poetry, poetics and literature itself. The achievement is akin to what Northrop Frye achieved in Fearful Symmetry, which was a key study of William Blake but also was a pretext to Anatomy of Criticism and his studies of the Bible. Like Frye, whose graduate seminar on Milton was marvellous, Teskey has a theoretical imagination. The dazzling range of Delirious Milton addresses the notion of delirium for the reader of Milton and poetry by delighting and challenging the reader of his own book. Part of the dazzling brilliance of Teskey's elegantly written work is its range among the arts and languages, philosophy and literature, past and present. In a brief space, it is hard to do justice to Gordon Teskey's achievement. Here, then, I shall touch on a few shards of this prismatic work that is so perceptive about the role of perspective. Milton is a touchstone for Teskey because Milton's poetics are almost inseparable from his revolutionary views of politics, theology, physics, nature, reality and God. Like Frye and Teskey, Milton has a theoretical imagination, which may mean that he has a poetic approach to ways of seeing through the means of making. Creation-so important for God and the poet-is at the heart of the matter. How does a Christian poet create a poetry of God's creation? How do modern readers in a world that hovers between the Christian and the post-Christian contend with that relation of human and divine creativity? How do such readers use their literary and

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Sonnets, London, 1609, by William Shakespeare

Papers of The Bibliographical Society of Canada, 2004

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O’Meara, John. Remembering Shakespeare: The Scope of His Achievement from Hamlet through The Tempest

Renaissance and Reformation, 2018

Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y ... more Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d'utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne. https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ Cet article est diffusé et préservé par Érudit. Érudit est un consortium interuniversitaire sans but lucratif composé de l'

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Responses to Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization: A brief Note / Réponses à Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization: Note liminaire

Canadian Review of Comparative Literature Revue Canadienne De Litterature Comparee, Jun 30, 2011

Having written on this collection when it was in draft form on the internet, I decided to have a ... more Having written on this collection when it was in draft form on the internet, I decided to have a forum about the finished collection of this report of the American Comparative Literature Association and to invite eminent scholars in the field to respond the book in a way and length of their choosing given the necessary deadline for a response to a recent publication. I was fortunate that three distinguished scholars-Jean Bessiere (Nouvelle Sorbonne-Paris III), Roland Le Huenen (Toronto) and Ann Rigney (Utrecht)-agreed to this request. Here, I express my thanks to them once more. It was also important to respond in English and French, not simply because they are the official languages of Canada and the International Comparative Literature Association, but because in the age of globalization, so much is published in English that it is key to have other perspectives. It was also desirable for the sake of diversity to seek points of view that also come from outside the United States.

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Comparative Milton and Poetics

Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée, 2016

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Translating Empire, Translating Cartier and Léry into English: text and context in comparative narratives of expansion and the new world

Ilha do Desterro A Journal of English Language, Literatures in English and Cultural Studies

This article provides comparative texts and contexts between Brazil and Canada in the Atlantic wo... more This article provides comparative texts and contexts between Brazil and Canada in the Atlantic world, not simply an Inter-American comparison, but a trans-Atlantic and global typology. It focuses on the translation of empire through translation, particularly of part of Jacques Cartier’s narratives about Canada by John Florio in 1580 and of Jean de Léry’s account of the voyage to Brazil in Samuel Purchas’ collection in 1625. English travel or encounter literature is in the service of contact, exploration, encounter and possible possession and settlement. The Spanish, through Columbus, and the Portuguese as well as the French are part of this comparative literature and these cultural texts, which are intertextual and translational, among themselves and with English culture and literature. The encounter between the Indigenous peoples and Europeans in the New World, in Brazil and Canada is central to changing the literature and cultures of the Americas, Europe, Africa, and of the world ...

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Violence and Movement: Conflict, Genocide and the Darker Side of ‘Travel’

Interlitteraria, 2021

Abstract: Travel is often thought to be an adventure, an exploration, a way of knowing self and w... more Abstract: Travel is often thought to be an adventure, an exploration, a way of knowing self and world, a break from the stresses of everyday life, a vacation. But there can be a dark side to travel, as in voyages that are part of invasion, conflict and enforced transport. Here, I wish to concentrate on conflict, domination, murder and genocide and do so, at various moments, by referring to the Norse sagas, including the encounter with the Skrælings in the New World and, more briefly, Columbus’ and the Spaniards’ violent treatment of the Natives in the New World and the German transport, torture and murder of Jews in the Shoah, or Holocaust.

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The Mapping of Center and Periphery, and the Geography of Otherness

Primerjalna književnost, 2021

Some literatures, like Canadian literature, may be considered minor because Canada is not a major... more Some literatures, like Canadian literature, may be considered minor because Canada is not a major power. But in reality, Canadian literature and other literatures, large or small, are part of a cultural history that is not merely local or even national, but international. The territories of culture and literature in literal or metaphorical terms shift over time. Using a comparative method, this article examines texts—such as The Saga of Eric the Red and works by Columbus, Verrazzano, Jeannette C. Armstrong, Marie Annharte Baker and Carrie Best—to demonstrate the shifting boundaries of time and space and to explore the connections between cultures and literatures in Canada, Europe and the Atlantic and international worlds as part of a longstanding globalization. The article demonstrates that the hybridity resulting from cross-cultural contact and colonization typically blurs the distinction between center and periphery, revealing the historical fluidity of the political boundaries on...

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Aesthetics and Ethics Intertwined: Fictional and Non-Fictional Worlds

Interlitteraria, 2018

Montaigne and Las Casas are important thinkers and writers, as are many others, including Shakesp... more Montaigne and Las Casas are important thinkers and writers, as are many others, including Shakespeare, as a poet, whose work is complex enough in its modernity that it would be hard to condemn him as a poet as Plato did Homer. Aristotle analyzed Greek tragedy to see how it worked in terms of a framework of anagnorisis and catharsis, that is, recognition and the purging of pity and terror. Shakespeare revisits and reshapes Homer in Troilus and Cressida and remakes Plutarch in Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra while playing on the classical epic and mythological themes in Venus and Adonis and Rape of Lucrece. Plato, a poet as well as a philosopher, and a great writer if one does not like those categories, may have feared the poet within himself. Although assuming with Plato that philosophy is more universal and just than poetry, Aristotle takes the analysis of poetry and drama seriously in Poetics, and also discusses ethics, aesthetics and style in Rhetoric. So, while I discuss P...

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Shakespeare in Theory and Practice

Interlitteraria, 2019

The article is about theory and practice in Shakespeare, but while he used the word “practice,” h... more The article is about theory and practice in Shakespeare, but while he used the word “practice,” he never employed the term “theory.” After discussing practice a little, I shall examine how Shakespeare refers to poetry and poets, philosophy and philosophers with some brief connections with art, theatre, music, painting and mimesis. Shakespeare showed no inclination for criticism or theory in essays or non-fiction prose, but, as can be seen, for instance, in Hamlet’s instructions to the players, his work, poetry and plays, contain if not a theory of art, theatre and poetry at least some representations of and reflections on such matters by speakers, narrators and characters.

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Introduction to Voices of Life, Illness and Disabilities in Life Writing and Medical Narratives

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 2018

I In ntr tro oduc duct tion t ion to V o Voices of Li oices of Life fe, Il , Illnes lness a s and... more

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The Voices of Life and Death in Shakespeare’s Narrative Poems

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 2018

Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, English Language and Literature Commons, and the Poet... more Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, English Language and Literature Commons, and the Poetry Commons Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press selects, develops, and distributes quality resources in several key subject areas for which its parent university is famous, including business, technology, health, veterinary medicine, and other selected disciplines in the humanities and sciences. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography of the Modern Language Association of America, and Scopus (Elsevier). The journal is affiliated with the Purdue University Press monograph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies. Contact:

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Poetry and the First World War

The Poetics of Otherness, 2015

This pacific mood was merely transient, While Britain vas outside the war it was remote from the ... more This pacific mood was merely transient, While Britain vas outside the war it was remote from the hearts of the British people, for most of whom Serbia and Sarajevo were no more than names. The threats to neighbouring France and to 'little Belgim', however, were swiftly realised, and the proclamation of war on 4 August brou^t with it a change of attitude that was overwhelming. The,Times for 5 August reported that the crowds which gathered to hear the Proclamation of War read "were filled with the war spirit", and the Daily News, which two days earlier had affirmed that "there is no war party in this country", now described how "The enthusiasa culminated outside Buckingham Palace when it became known that war had been declared", Newspapers and periodicals of ttie first month of the war did much to encourage the wave of fervent patriotism and war-eagemess which swept over the country, and it was not long before every available wall bore the famous poster of Eitcdiener with its pointing finger and arresting caption "Tour King and Country Need Tou", On 12 August The, Times was able to report that "there was again a large queue of young men waiting outside the Central Recruiting office at Great Scotland-yard yesterday to respond to Lord Kitchener's call for 100,000 men. The wozk of enlistment proceeded briskly all day, and new recruits were-5 s w o m in at the rate of between 80 and 100 an hour," There was scarcely a discordant voice ax^rwhere in the country. Internal strife and party faction were forgotten. The fitting spirit of Ireland was diverted from civil to world war, and divisions of Irishmen were soon ready to join in the greater conflict. Amidst all this enthusiasm it is sobering to read a letter from Lord Weardale in The Times for 5 August, This letter shows him to have been one of the most clear-sighted statesmen Britain could boast of in those troublous days. This is what he wrote for publication the day after war was declared: The indignation of Austria at the crime of Sarajevo is as natural as the racial and religious sycqjathy of Russia with the Servian people; but what rational man can contend that such a question and such tmporary antagonisms can justify the horrors of a great Emrapean war-the worst, perhaps, the world has ever seen-with its countless dead and maimed, its ruined homes, its irremediable industrial losses? Both victors and vanquished can only emerge from such a conflict bankrupt in resources and in ell the hi^er attributes of humanity. w > g #• His vas the voice in the wilderness proclaiming the true and deadly character of the war. Before long he would be joined by otiiérs who spoke not from a lively apprehension of what war could moan, but from the terrible eaperlence of twentieth century warfare. Keaawfaile the var was on end enlistment continued, and among those who enlisted during the next few years were the young men idio were to become the voice and the conscience of their age-the poets of En^andi Edzpund Blundmi, Rupert Brooke, Robert Graves, Robert Nicdiols, Vilfred Oven, Siegfried Sassoon, to mention only some of the better known. Vhen war broke out Siegfried Sassoon, who was the oldest of these young men I have mentioned, was twenty-ei^t; Edmund Blunden was seventeen. Even the most sensitive scarcely foresaw the horrors that were before them. Althcu^ Wilfred Owen wrote in 1914, War broke: and now the Winter of the world With perishing great darkness closes in.ĥ e yet wrote home in a letter to his mother when he first joined the fitting forces in France: "Ihere is a fine heroic feeling 3. Collected Poems, p, 129.-7about being in France# and X an in perfect epirits. A tinge of ezcitenent is about It was mainly this "tinge of excitement" xdiich prevailed during the flMt two years of the war. In his journal for August 1914 Aubrey Herbert wrote# "The men were very pleased to have been under fire, and compared notes aa to how they 5 felt," but the Battle of Hone in which his men were engaged was followed by the Battle of Le Gateau and of the Marne and tlm first Battle of Tpres. Meanwhile Antwerp had fallen and the hopes of peace "before Christmas" began to recede. The tone of reports from the Front began to changet The Tinea reported from the Battle of Kons that "[The British soldier] was cheerful, steady and confident."^ Biz weeks later another report told how the wounded were "as happy and as eager to be well enou^ to go to the front again as if they 7 were schoolboys going home for the holidays." But a sourer note was creeping into the reports; first, the confession that war and the idea of war were two very different things; 4. 1 January 1917, Collected Letters, p. 421. 5. Kons. Ansae end Kuts. p. 48. 6. 23 August 1914. 7. 8 October 1914* 8 «# "I had not the slightest conception what war could mean, even 8 in the wildest flights of fancy"; secondly, descriptions of the real horrors of war; "Tou cannot imagine what a battlefield is like after a battle-a huddled mass of corpses, some of which have been lying there since the q fighting round here in October last...." and thirdly, the beginnings of condemnation; By the touchstone of the men it has broken this war is judged and the makers of this war. And more than ruined villages end desecrated churches these soldiers pronounce condemnation. They, idio have given 80 much, are, in a sense, without joy and without enthusiasm; rather they shun recollection. There is no sest in the killing of men.... The war is revealed as a thing gross and dull-witted, a crime even against the ancient, chivalrous spirit of war.^D uring 1915 the frontiers of war were extended and its horrors intensified. Early in the year Zeppelin raids wore made on England; in February the Germans began their D-boat 8. Letter from an Officer, The Times.

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The Poetics of Otherness

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New Historicism: Taking History into Account (Review Article)

ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, 1991

AHE NEW HISTORICISM is about ten years old. In the turmoil of contemporary theory, shelf-life may... more AHE NEW HISTORICISM is about ten years old. In the turmoil of contemporary theory, shelf-life may not equal half-life. New historicism still excites readers and remains fully charged. Rather than speculate at length on the future of this loose confederacy or multivalent movement, I would like to discuss its attractions and accomplishments and mention its occasional shortcomings. The essays that Vesser has collected in The New Historicism 1 deserve careful reading and provide insights and pleasures. This review concentrates on the recent changes to new historicism, on its use of anecdote or narrative, on the techniques it shares with other methodologies, and on its disparities, which may have implications for its future. 2 Louis Montrose says that although in 1980 Michael McCanles was the first to use "new historicism," Stephen Greenblatt's use of the term in 1982 gave it currency (32, n. 6). 3 New historicism has recently undergone three great changes. First, in the United States it has become the dominant discourse in studies of the English Renaissance. Second, it has extended its range of practitioners to include those interested in feminism, deconstruction, Marxism, and other discourses. Third, it has moved outside the Renaissance to other periods just as deconstruction came to range beyond romanticism. Scholars and students of the English Renaissance cite Greenblatt more than any other critic. It took a few years for the full import of Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980) to be felt. The paradoxes and subtle qualifications that mark the opening of this ARIEL:

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Images of the native in renaissance encounter narratives

ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, 1994

IF BY THE early eighteenth century Jonathan Swift could satirize the proliferation of travel lite... more IF BY THE early eighteenth century Jonathan Swift could satirize the proliferation of travel literature, by the 1990s, especially in the wake of the commemoration of Columbus's first voyage, we might feel even more saturation, perhaps in particular regard to commentary about the European voyages and their records and narratives. Nor is Swift the first to offer resistance, ambivalence, and indignation in the face of European imperialism. In fact, the ambivalence, if not the reluctance, with which the monarchs of Europe, even Ferdinand and Isabella, received Columbus's enterprise of the Indies represents an opposition from within before the encounter with the other that de Certeau, Todorov, and Greenblatt discuss. During the encounter between the Spanish and Natives in 1492, this ambivalence about the American enterprise continues, even within the "Columbus" texts, and soon after a horror about its excesses occurs within Europe itself. In light of the Spanish contact with the indigenous peoples, Thomas More made his Utopians disdain the gold that the Spaniards so valued and that so motivated them to make war on and enslave the Natives. Bartolomé de Las Casas describes the Spanish abuse of the indigenous peoples and sides with the latter, saying that the Spaniards burned them alive and dashed the heads of their babies against rocks all for the greater glory of Christ and the 12 apostles (3: ch. 29; see also Sale 157, Todorov 139-41). It was difficult for Columbus to convince others to launch his project, and ever since the results of the encounter with America have been contested.1 Columbus as a subject or self, as a self-fashioning writer or person, becomes a difficult concept because he has been con

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Redeeming The Tempest: Romance and Politics

Cahiers Élisabéthains: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies, 1996

Since the Romantics the criticism of Shakespeare's The Tempest has been allegorical. Perhaps taki... more Since the Romantics the criticism of Shakespeare's The Tempest has been allegorical. Perhaps taking their cue from Coleridge, who said that the appeal of the play was to the imagination, subsequent critics appealed to the fantastic and to aesthetic allegories. Schlegel identified Ariel with air and Caliban with earth; Campbell saw The Tempest as the Shakespeare's farewell to his art; Lowell equated Caliban with brute understanding, Ariel with fancy and Prospero with imagination. When I was an undergraduate the Romantic reading of this playas the playwright's farewell to his art was still going strong. But for some time another kind of allegory was going on, that is the political allegory. Once a minority position, the political allegory has, in the last decade, overtaken the aesthetic allegory. My task is to find a version of The Tempest that acknowledges the political and aesthetic dimensions of the play but that discovers a middle ground between them. Although allegorical interpretation may be unavoidable in regard to The Tempest, I want to minimize it, as others have mined this vein, and to try to point up its stresses and intricacies as a means of moving along to a different type of critique. This attempt, then, is to redeem The Tempest from too much redemption.' As the traditional aesthetic allegory of this play has been synthesized into the history of Shakespearean criticism, I want briefly to outline the shift to political allegory, particularly in light of post colonialism, before proceeding to my own analysis. Between about ninety and a hundred and twenty years ago, a shift seems to have happened in interpretations of The Tempest. Whereas in 1873 Daniel Wilson thought that The Tempest was a social Darwinist work, in 1904 W. T. Stead objected to the imperialism and sided with indigenous cultures. In this century a central debate over the use of canons as a means of promoting tradition and empire has occurred in English-speaking countries. Shakespeare has been at the heart of that debate as in those countries he occupies the centre of literature and education in the humanities. In traditional criticism, Prospero's art and power were sometimes identified with Shakespeare's and Europe's while Caliban was sometimes associated with the physical, moral and political dependency of non-European peoples. As an understandable reaction to this European position, some writers in Africa and the Caribbean set out to use The Tempest for their own literary and political purposes. Between 1957 and 1973, most African and large Caribbean colonies won their independence. Dissenting intellectuals and writers from these regions decided to appropriate The Tempest as a means of supporting decolonization and creating an alternative literary tradition. 2 In The Tempest African

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Columbus and the Native

Columbus, Shakespeare, and the Interpretation of the New World, 2003

In Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, after his journey to Brobdingnag, Gulliver reports on how... more In Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, after his journey to Brobdingnag, Gulliver reports on how Captain Thomas Wilcocks, who has rescued him, receives Gulliver’s report of the land of the giants: The Captain was very well satisfied with this plain Relation I had given him; and said, he hoped when we returned to England, I would oblige the World by putting it in Paper, and making it publick. My Answer was, that I thought we were already overstocked with Books of Travels: That nothing could now pass which was not extraordinary; wherein I doubted, some Authors less consulted Truth than their own Vanity or Interest, or the Diversion of ignorant Readers. That my Story could contain little besides common Events, without those ornamental Descriptions of strange Plants, Trees, Birds, and other Animals; or the barbarous Customs and Idolatry of savage People, with which most Writers abound. However, I thanked him for his good Opinion, and promised to take the Matter into my Thoughts.1 The relation that Swift gives to Gulliver in the 1720s is anything but plain. If by the early eighteenth century Swift could satirize the proliferation of travel literature, by the 1990s, especially in the wake of the commemoration of Columbus’ first voyage, and in light of a new millennium, people often felt even more saturation, perhaps in particular regard to commentary about the European voyages and their records and narratives. Caution, skepticism and humility are therefore advisable in facing this topic, realizing that, like Gulliver, it is easy to deny vanity vainly.

Alternative Critique

Fictional and Historical Worlds, 2012

Jonathan Hart

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