Abstract
This essay is eco-friendly but trades in echoes. It reprises Paul Alpers’ iconic What is Pastoral? (1996) via the figure of a parenthetical repetition that demands to be reminded, one more time, ‘What was Pastoral (Again)?’ My answer or simply what follows will be ‘More Versions’, an addendum, if you like, to William Empson’s Some Versions of Pastoral (1935).
My favorite trope for dog tales is ‘metaplasm.’ Metaplasm means a change in a word, for example adding, omitting, inverting, or transposing its letters, syllables, or sounds. The term is from the Greek metaplasmos, meaning remodeling or remolding. I use metaplasm to mean the remodeling of dog and human flesh, remolding the codes of life, in the history of companion species relating … Metaplasm can signify a mistake, a stumbling, a troping that makes a fleshly difference … Woof!
Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003), 20–21.
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 84–85. Jonathan Goldberg’s reading of this section of Of Grammatology remains singularly important; see Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 16–27.
Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 67–68. Unless otherwise indicated, subsequent references will appear parenthetically in the text.
Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form [1974/5] (Routledge: London and New York, 1990), 78.
Quentin Skinner, ‘Sir Thomas More’s Utopia and the Language of Renaissance Humanism’, in Anthony Pagden, ed., The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 123–158. This essay is revised and reprinted as ‘Thomas More’s Utopia and the Virtue of True Nobility’, in Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), II, 213–244.
Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth and Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986).
Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984), 250–251.
Terry Gifford, Pastoral (New York and London: Routledge, 1999), 16.
Robert N. Watson, Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 66. For a similar reading of pastoral keyed this time to the rise of the machine, see Jonathan Sawday, Engines of the Imagination: Renaissance Culture and the Rise of the Machine (New York: Routledge, 2007), 294–309.
Leo Marx, ‘Pastoralism in America’, in Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen, eds, Ideology and Classic American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 45.
Paul Alpers, What is Pastoral? (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), x.
Martin Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 234.
Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 9–12, 13–45. Unless otherwise indicated, all subsequent references appear parenthetically in the text.
For an allied modeling on genre as rhizome, see Wai Chee Dimock, ‘Genre as World System: Epic and Novel on Four Continents’, Narrative 14: 1 (January 2006), 85–101.
Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 11.
William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (New York: New Directions, 1974), 11. Unless otherwise indicated, subsequent references appear parenthetically in the text.
David M. Halperin, Before Pastoral: Theocritus and the Ancient Tradition of Bucolic Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 211. Thanks to Carolyn Dinshaw for sending me to Halperin.
William Berg, Early Virgil (London: University of London, Athlone Press, 1974), 13–14 quoted in Halperin, Before Pastoral, 186.
John Fletcher, The Faithful Shepherdess, ed. Florence Ada Kirk (New York and London: Garland, 1980), 15–16.
Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life, 1400–1800 (New York, San Francisco and London: Harper & Row, 1967), 68. Pastoral exists in non-Western societies–but it is not indexed necessarily to shepherds or to sheep. Haruki Murakami’s Wild Sheep Chase, trans. Alfred Birnbaum (New York: Vintage Books, 1989) is a case in point. Sheep in Japan are a nineteenth-century Western import allied to nationalism, militarism, self-sufficiency and empire-building.
M. L. Ryder, Sheep and Man (London: Duckworth, 1983).
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 177–178 and 181.
Thelma Rowell, ‘A Few Peculiar Primates’, in Shirley C. Strum and Linda Fedigan, eds, Primate Encounters: Models of Science, Gender, and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 65–66.
William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part Two, ed. Roger Warren (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
Thomas Shadwell, The Virtuoso (1676), ed. David Stuart Rhodes and Marjorie Hope Nicolson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), 2.2.190–194.
Vinciane Despret, ‘Sheep Do Have Opinions’, in Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds, Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 360. See also, Vinciane Despret, Quand le loup habitera avec l’agneau (Paris: Seuill, 2002).
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2011 Julian Yates
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Yates, J. (2011). What was Pastoral (Again)? More Versions. In: Cefalu, P., Reynolds, B. (eds) The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230299986_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230299986_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-58902-9
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-29998-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave Media & Culture CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)