Abstract ▼ AI-Helper

Since Arthur Marotti"s influential essay on the Eliza be than sonnet sequences was introduced to the disciplinary world of English Renaissance literature in 1982, Donne"s Songs and Sonnets ills been one of the most disputed domains of literary study. It attracted many scholars am critics who armed t...

Since Arthur Marotti"s influential essay on the Eliza be than sonnet sequences was introduced to the disciplinary world of English Renaissance literature in 1982, Donne"s Songs and Sonnets ills been one of the most disputed domains of literary study. It attracted many scholars am critics who armed themselves with the critical methods of deconstruction, new historicism, cultural materialism am feminism. Despite their different critical orientation, these critics showed a common interest in approaching Donne"s love lyrics in the context of socio-cultural history. If we are to map out the cognitive topology of Donne"s love lyrics in the socio-cultural context, Niklas Luhmann"s theory of the social system can be a very efficient tool of analysis. According to Luhmann, the Western society in the early modem era was in the process of transition from the stratified to the functional one, producing the differentiated domains which became less receptive to their environments. As the functionally differentiated society became more complex, each domain evolved the self-referential system, inhibiting the ability of any given system to select information from others. In the context of Luhmann"s narrative of modernity, Donne"s love lyrics that proclaim the "mutual love" of an atomic pair of lovers can be interpreted as evolving the symbolic media of communication among the differentiated domains. Donne"s lovers withdraw to their self-referential "pretty roomes", displacing the differentiated domains as metonymic vehicles and giving a negative unity to the social world. While they invite the reader into the be bedchamber or other private space, they cancel this gesture of admission by generating a fog of obscurity. Producing the external world as metonymic displacement, Donne"s love lyrics such as "The Good-morrow", "The Sun Rising", "The Canonization", and "A Valediction: forbidding mourning" are voyeuristically open but informationally closed space. So we can say that the discursive closure of Donne"s lyrics reflects the absolute subject"s autonomous domain of desire which began to emerge and gain its force in the early modem era of the western world. They lay on the threshhold of modernity in the history of sexuality.

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