Feeling Faint: Affect and Consciousness in the Renaissance - Couverture souple

Pertile, Giulio J.

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0810139189 ISBN 13 : 9780810139183

Editeur : Northwestern University Press, 2019

Synopsis

Feeling Faint is a book about human consciousness in its most basic sense: the awareness, at any given moment, that we live and feel. Such awareness, it argues, is distinct from the categories of selfhood to which it is often assimilated, and can only be uncovered at the margins of first-person experience. What would it mean to be conscious without being a first person--to be conscious in the absence of a self?

Such a phenomenon, subsequently obscured by the Enlightenment identification of consciousness and personal identity, is what we discover in scenes of swooning from the Renaissance: consciousness without self, consciousness reconceived as what Fredric Jameson calls "a registering apparatus for transformed states of being." Where the early modern period has often been seen in terms of the rise of self-aware subjectivity, Feeling Faint argues that swoons, faints, and trances allow us to conceive of Renaissance subjectivity in a different guise: as the capacity of the senses and passions to experience, regulate, and respond to their own activity without the intervention of first-person awareness.

In readings of Renaissance authors ranging from Montaigne to Shakespeare, Pertile shows how self-loss affords embodied consciousness an experience of itself in a moment of intimate vitality which precedes awareness of specific objects or thoughts--an experience with which we are all familiar, and yet which is tantalizingly difficult to pin down.

A propos du livre

À propos de l?auteur

GIULIO J. PERTILE is a lecturer in early modern literature at the University of St. Andrews.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Northwestern University Press
• Date d'édition: 2019
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0810139189
• ISBN 13: 9780810139183
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 200
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: GS1 Slovakia; https://www.gs1sk.org; ; Nantersk� 23; Žilina; 010 08; Slovaquie