'Tis all one': 'The Anatomy of Melancholy' as belated copious discourse

Formalist readings of The Anatomy of Melancholy which seek to domesticate the unclosed, disjunctive quality of the work derive from an unquestioned assumption that Burton's intentions are recoverable and that the reader must shape the work's chaotic instances into evidence of order. It assumes a critical timelessness which ignores discursive and cultural particularity. It fails to see that the text embodies and is expresses into existence by a vast system of codes different from those of the contemporary critic.;Renaissance interpretive structures not only licensed but valued contrariety and unclosed expansion. Because its episteme understood the things of the world as essentially unknowable, the accumulation of observed information from multitudinous and contradictory aspects constituted truth. When one perceives how thoroughly such knowledge was embedded in discourse, the centricity of rhetorical skills in the Renaissance emerges as does the importance of Erasmus's de Copia, a seminal text for comprehending, acquiring, and performing copious discourse. The Anatomy of Melancholy can be read most appropriately by perceiving that its extemporaneous and contradictory quality reflects this rhetorical and epistemological position.;The Anatomy of Melancholy embodies the structure and performative quality of de Copia; however, the former challenges rather than affirms the discursive practices of the latter. Burton's work recognizes the unsettling anxiety inherent in the centrifugal thrust of Erasmian discourse, seeing that endless elaboration is a sign of absence, and an endless pursuit of unreachable presence. The Anatomy confronts the paucity inherent in verbal plentitude as it reaches out for what is unavailable. It connects this absence with man's fallen condition. Man's corporeality genalogically connects him with the initial moment of privation. His body is matter descended from matter inside of which there is always loss. To overcome loss, one must overcome matter and mattering.;Some respite is offered inside the thoroughly textualized geneology of Democritus Jr. who, like his father laughs at and cuts up everything. His activity underscores the pleasure of writing per se by valuing writing above getting things right.;Renaissance discourse contours an Anatomy unlike contemporary closed versions. This dissertation proposes that what it has uncovered about the discursive practices of the period might apply to more centrally canonical texts as well.