Kalas 2007

Kalas, Rayna. Frame, Glass, Verse: The Technology of Poetic Invention in the English Renaissance. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007.

"My aim is to render visible both the special orchestration of language that framing once named and the pictorial logic of the modern frame. And my method is guided by the premise that this earlier form of framing stands in distinction, but not in opposition, to the modern frame. To stand in opposition to the modern frame is precisely to be framed by its logic. And the early modern framing of language, though it shares none of the abstract logic of the modern quadrilateral frame, does share something of that very frame's practical and liminal character. The central claim of the book, then, is that a predominant strain of poetic language and theory in the English Renaissance recognized poesy as techne rather than aesthetics, and figurative language as framed or tempered matter, rather than verbalized concepts." (xi)

Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology" -- "To read this essay through the language of framing brings forth the possibility of realizing poetry as a kind of technology and of recognizing technology in a way that admits the presence of poetry within it." (xiv)

"For a great many English writers of the 16c, the principal question was not how words relate to things, but how the crafting of language related to the crafting of things." (xvi)

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"Taking into account the techne of poesy makes it possible to recognize poetic language as an instrument of figuration that partakes of worldly reality rather than as an artifact or concept that reflects reality by observing the mimetic conventions of pictorial representation. In short, by distancing Renaissance poetry from its modern reception as an aesthetic object, this book seeks to restoe poesy to its earlier use as a technology and a form of making." (1)

"Whereas for modern readers the imaginative register of the poem is a form of ideality, for Renaissance readers who understood the imagination to be a kind of visceral platform of sensory processing from which the higher function of the intellect draws its reason, the imagination testifed to the physical embodiment of the mind. Like the word seen on a page or a sound that is heard, the poetic image or conceit leaves an impression on the imagination, which is itself of this world; the imagination is created matter, not spiritual essence." (2)

"Because the word was both Logos and matter, because at the Creation God framed the universe of matter and the crystalline spheres of the heavens, because all of matter was a mirror of the divine idea, innovations in framing, glassmaking, and poesy were perceived uniquely to mingle matter and meaning, the finite and the infinite, the natural and the artificial, the word and the image." (3)

"My aim is to reinvigorate a sense that the temporality of the Renaissance accommodated the poetic sensibility that certain universals or general principles abide in particularities, and thus that the particularities of English poetry can and should inform our overall sense of the Renaissance." (5)

"In England, framing had a rich conceptual, lexical, and material history quite independent of painting, before it became associated with pictorial enclosure. In the 16c, framing referred to the immanence of a being or a thing: its internal orchestration rather than its external demarcation. Framing described a thing in potentia coming into presence as matter." (8)

"All acts of framing were shaped and determined by the materials framed -- for this reason Renaissance framing is more aptly described as a technology than as an idea or a concept." (8)

archaeological method

"Just as Foucault looked to the Classical era to expose the relationship of the subject to representation, and to avoid crafting a world picture of his own, I look to the Renaissance to expose the epistemology of subject and object in the framing of discursive concepts, and to avoid framing the Renaissance. Whereas Foucault finds a tabula in the place of the aesthetics of the picture, I propose a technology of framing in the place of the epistemology of framing." (21)

"By stripping away the mystification of progressive diachronic time, and the framed periods that are its counterpoint, my aim is to reconstitute the tangible, material, and temporal underpinnings of transparency in language and representation and to explore the material craft of figurative language -- the 'how' of its revealing -- as both techne and poesis." (21)