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)