Buch, Englisch, 200 Seiten, Paperback, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 159 g
Reihe: Rethinking the Early Modern
Affect and Consciousness in the Renaissance
Buch, Englisch, 200 Seiten, Paperback, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 159 g
Reihe: Rethinking the Early Modern
ISBN: 978-0-8101-3918-3
Verlag: Northwestern University Press
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 Frederic 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.