Inter-standing Bodies in Early Modern British Culture
Inter-standing Bodies in Early Modern British Culture

Author(s): Ana Maria Tolomei
Subject(s): French Literature, Theory of Literature, British Literature
Published by: Universitatea Petrol-Gaze din Ploieşti
Keywords: dialogue; cultural constructs; body image; Early Modern Culture;
Summary/Abstract: My paper aims at the analysis of dialogue as a form of recuperation while re-shaping and re-organising physical and non-physical bodies (either social, political or moral) in need of a “treatment” in Early Modern British and French Cultures. This kind of dialogue implies movement starting from under-standing to inter-standing and from curing to preserving private and public, individual and collective, dominant and dissident bodies in ordinary or extra-ordinary circumstances. I am interested in the way in which bodies as cultural constructs can be activated or re-activated in a Bakhtinian dialogical manner. I am also interested in the way in which “speaking with the dead” represents in Greenblatt’s view a manifestation of the circulation of the14social energy within written and visual texts. Furthermore, my inquiry leads to the analysis of the images of the self and the other, of the centre and the margins through cultural, national or religious clichés. The physical and non-physical bodies of the self and the other as well as bodily ornaments can also be interpreted from the Derridian perspective of the double-edged “pharmakon” as both “remedy” and “poison” as well as “artificial” and “natural” cultural constructs.

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