Lit. In The Renaissance Essay, Research Paper

Literature in the Renaissance

When we look at Renaissance writers in this period, we find their sensitivity to the risk of anachronism far more developed. Petrarch who was the first to formulate the risk with authority and supplied it with the metaphor that his successors would echo. Later in Petrarch s life emperor Charles IV asked him a query concerning the authenticity of two letters purportedly written by Julius Caesar and Nero. Petrarch responded with a furious jeremiad exposing the fraudulence of the two fakes by means of stylistic and historical analysis.

The Book of the Courtier at a glace is kind of anachronism that is universal in complex societies. All of us wear and make and build and write, our rituals and styles and folkways, are condemned to anachronism insofar as they and we endure into an estranging future. The things that survive are dated and in the negative implications of that term lays the potentiality for pathos. The drifting of the written word has been a theme of western thought form Plato to Derrida. If culture continues this drifting within certain limits, it will serve as a institutionalize period of writing.

If literary texts like buildings and objects are dated, then we can ask whether and how a text deals with its own period. Saul Morson writes a text or genre will be vulnerable to parody to the extent that it ignores or claims to transcend its own originating context; parody is most readily invited by an utterance that claims Tran historical authority. This text somehow acknowledges its historicity self-consciously would seem better fitted to survive its potential estrangement that a text that represses history.

Writers tend to displace the threat of becoming vestigial to their characters, thus attempting to affirm their control and manifest their awareness. To recognize writers drama of the survivor is to invest one s work with a little more plasticity. To stage a tragedy of anachronism is perhaps the most effective way of exorcising it, just as for the critic; perhaps, speaking about obsolescence is a defense against becoming obsolescent. Our literature seems fated to dramatize its historical misgivings with merciless persistence, comically and cruelly returning to relics that are reproachful, inescapable, and emblematic.