Partiality: Sight, memory and eros in early modern England

The emergence of a "self" in the English Renaissance literature and culture is repeatedly constructed around two cautionary tales of mistaken sight: Narcissus, who drowns while trying to kiss his own reflection, and Actaeon, a hunter who spies the goddess Diana bathing and in consequence is from apart by his own dogs. Each of these characters instructs Renaissance readers that vision is erotically charged and fragmentation is the price of looking. As Sir Philip Sidney declared in Astrophil and Stella, "Your own eyes cannot see yourself." Yet these tales also insist that the "self" seeks for material completion in other objects. Drawing on treatises of the visual and descriptive arts, my project argues that the trope of scattered bodies operates as a model of proliferation, production and expansion for the subject of Renaissance love poetry rather than a model of loss. Demonstrating that the perspective position which distinguishes between desiring subjects and desirable objects in amorous poetry is neither stable nor secure, the dissertation explores the deliberate distortion of a reader's perspective (so-called "eccentric perspectives") as a function both of desiring subjects and of a network of social and psychical practices which produce them.;My project approaches partiality as an enabling condition by which the early modern period began to rethink its own fissured consciousness as the hybrid terrain of its encounters with others and objects. I argue that vision is a social act, that anxiety over the self's incompletion accompanies, or even masks, the work of such literary and material artifacts to reformulate "selves" within the abundant social economy of objects and others. What results from that exchange is a fundamental shift in the terms by which desiring subjects---and objects---may be thought: the alternative vision of which these texts speak arises from erotically charged surfaces which may be thought as collective but never unitive. Like the tales of Narcissus and Actaeon, they invoke a participatory economy when they are read or seen, an experience that challenges our contemporary narrative of the early modern subject that masters, rejects, or consumes its objects in order to exist.