Overview

The Risks of Simile in Renaissance Rhetoric is a groundbreaking study of the fascination with simile in Renaissance rhetoric and poetics. Moving Renaissance studies beyond the limitations of new historicism, Shirley Sharon-Zisser demonstrates that Renaissance rhetoricians anticipated the interest of psychoanalysis in the links between desire and language. The book traces the erotics of simile and of the related rhetorical categories of figure, trope, metaphor, and the primal substance of signification in Renaissance rhetoric books. Sharon-Zisser shows Renaissance rhetoricians associate simile with archaic maternality, with pastoral, with the omphalic, with multiple forms of sexuality, and with the jouissance of asymmetrical approximation. The psychoanalysis of Renaissance aesthetics of simile shows the structure of desire is not, as Lacan would have it, metonymic. Desire has the structure of the similaic.

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9780820445816

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Reviews

'The Risks of Simile' is a landmark book of immense learning and profound originality. No treatise on rhetoric between the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries, however obscure, has escaped the author's attention. The book is also solidly grounded in the rhetorical thought of Antiquity. By masterfully using a psychoanalytical framework, as well as a variety of twentieth-century methodologies, Shirley Sharon-Zisser demonstrates how aware Renaissance rhetoricians were of the links between sexuality and language. The book, which completely reshapes its own field of inquiry, will become and remain an indispensable scholarly tool for years to come. (Alexandre Leupin, Louisiana State University; Author of 'Barbarolexis: Medieval Writing and Sexuality') 'The Risks of Simile in Renaissance Rhetoric' stands alone as a book that counters and remedies voguish but attenuated and often non-coherent work on sexuality and textuality in a presumed age of post-theory. Challenging both new historicists and formalists, Sharon-Zisser provides a rigorous and brilliant analysis of the connections between rhetoricity and eroticism in early modern rhetorical theory. I strongly recommend this important book to anyone working on the history of rhetoric, modern critical theory, feminism and gender studies, medieval and Renaissance poetics, and psychoanalysis. Sharon-Zisser's book is a vindication of theory's best achievements in modern intellectual work. (James J. Paxson, University of Florida; Associate Editor of 'Exemplaria: A Journal of Theory' in Medieval and Renaissance Studies)

Author Information

The Author: Shirley Sharon-Zisser is Lecturer in English at Tel Aviv University, and has been a Visiting Fulbright Scholar at Cornell University. She has been guest editor of special journal issues on the erotics of rhetoric in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. She is the author of numerous articles on medieval and Renaissance literature, on psychoanalytical theory, and on rhetorical theory from a philosophical and psychoanalytical perspective. She is editing the first collection of essays to be published on Shakespeare's 'A Lover's Complaint'.

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