Some very dignified , centuries old poetry in this post

This week I read a rather broad selection of poetry and then moved into the theoretical texts that will provide background and springboards for my overall project.  Since poetry is not my main focus I read “selections,” which basically means “everything for these authors in the Norton Anthology of Literature,” with the exception of Cavendish and Hutchinson, who got short shrift, so I tracked down additional materials for them elsewhere.

Poetry

Shakespeare, William
Donne, John
Jonson, Ben
Marlowe, Christopher
Marvell, Andrew
Milton, John
Crashaw, Richard
Herbert, George
Herrick, Robert
Cavendish, Margaret
Hutchinson, Lucy

Theory

Van Oenen, Gijs – “Interpassive Agency: Engaging Actor-Network Theory’s View on the Agency of Objects” Theory & Event 14.2
Wolfe, Cary – “Introduction: What Is Posthumanism?” in What is
Posthumanism?
Lacan, Jacques – Ecrits (selections)
Kristeva, Julia – Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection
Ngai, Sianne – Ugly Feelings

I don’t have a big philosophical point for you this week; Ngai’s work (though rather shaky, in my opinion, when discussing the affect of early modernity and of Shakespeare in particular) produces the idea of the “stuplime,” a specifically contemporary affect combining elements of sublimity and tedium, or “shock and boredom,” which seems to be to have a lot to say about the way games criticism is done — the way we talk about games, especially when we don’t like them, is very stuplime.  There’s a sketched plan for a blog post on that, coming as a full thing sometime in the future.

Meanwhile, here’s a Herrick poem:

Upon Jack and Jill. Epigram.

When Jill complains to Jack for want of meat,
Jack kisses Jill and bids her freely eat:
Jill says, Of what? says Jack, On that sweet kiss,
Which full of nectar and ambrosia is,
The food of poets. So I thought, says Jill,
That makes them look so lank, so ghost-like still.
Let poets feed on air, or what they will;
Let me feed full, till that I fart, says Jill.

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