Cannibalism and myth in Renaissance poetics
Description
The innutrition or enrichment metaphor, commonly used by Renaissance philologists to promote the fertilization of the French language and of French literature with Latin 'nutrients,' portrays language as solid matter. This materiality is often translated by corporeal images and metaphors of ingestion. Du Bellay's suggestion in the Deffence et illustration de la langue francoyse that French writers 'devour' and 'digest' the ancients in order to enrich their own language is part of a larger move to naturalize the Renaissance text This dissertation explores the hybridization that occurs in Renaissance poetics as a function of the 'cannibalistic' mode of imitation through innutrition. The issue is traced through analyses of the poetics and poems of four authors, Sceve, Ronsard, Desportes, and D'Aubigne, as well as through Montaigne's essai I,31, 'Des Cannibales,' a late prose treatment. In particular, the economy of desire which circulates through myths of consumption or 'consuming myths' is studied. Renaissance literary legacies such as Ovidian metamorphosis, Petrarchan fire and ice, the Platonic androgyny myth, and Christian incarnation and transubstantiation are explored for the relation they establish between identity and form In the poems of Maurice Sceve and of Ronsard, rhetorical or metaphorical cannibalism is seen to function as a means of authorial identification with an absent beloved by way of a feminizing fusion with her. Cannibalism as a poetic figure in the poetry of Desportes and d'Aubigne enters more overtly into the realm of political and religious conflicts. D'Aubigne's Tragiques reenacts the horror of war and religious persecution by mimetically staging their violence in his text. In Montaigne's 'Des Cannibales,' anthropophagy abroad sparks discussion of cruelty at home, as cannibalism of antiquity meets its match in the New World This study shows that it is in the realm of Self versus Other that cannibalism is most deeply inscribed in these works, The ambivalence inherent in the notion of devouring what is like oneself--whether out of desire or aversion for the object in question--contributes to the tension and movement of each author's text