Hyperboles - The Rhetoric of Excess in Baroque Literature and Thought

Erscheinungsjahr 2010
ISBN: 978-0-674-05331-1
Verlag: Harvard University Press

Buch, Englisch, Band 52, 695 Seiten, Format (B × H): 161 mm x 230 mm, Gewicht: 1104 g

Reihe: Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature

This book offers a detailed, comparatist defense of hyperbole in the Baroque period. Focusing on Spanish and Mexican lyric (Góngora, Quevedo, and Sor Juana), English drama (King Lear and translations of Seneca), and French philosophy (Descartes and Pascal), Christopher D. Johnson reads Baroque hyperbole as a sophisticated, often sublime, frequently satiric means of making sense of worlds and selves in crisis and transformation. Grounding his readings of hyperbole in the history of rhetoric and literary imitation, Johnson traces how rhetorical excess acquires specific cultural, political, aesthetic, and epistemological value. Hyperboles also engages more recent critiques of hyperbolic thought (Wittgenstein, Derrida, and Cavell), as it argues that hyperbole is the primary engine of a poetics and metaphysics of immanence.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Johnson, Christopher D.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Europäische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Sprechwissenschaft, Rhetorik
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Weltgeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Geschichte der Westlichen Philosophie
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Romanische Literaturen Lateinamerikanische Literaturen, Spanische Literatur außerhalb Europas

Über Autor(innen)

Johnson, Christopher D.
Christopher D. Johnson is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University.