Summary – Tutorial Assignment

I ‘Introduction’, Arthur F. Kinney

1. Kinney proposes a distinct ‘Tudor’ aesthetic (occasionally called by him the Tudor poetic), as expressed in painting and writing, that centres on two principles. a) The first is pluralism, in the works, in perspectives, and in readers.b) The second is plenitude, i.e., a world which is teeming, varied, and constantly

changing, depicted through a focus on its material aspect (in paintings, this focus is on actual material objects, which are not used as “scaffolding” for a “fictive space”).

2. Tudor readers “received texts by intervening in them to establish meaning”.a) As a modern instance of this, Kinney compares two readings, by Greenblatt

and Jardine, of the Holbein painting ‘The Ambassadors’ – each orders their reactions through their own aesthetic, and arrives at diametrically opposed readings.

b) Here Kinney introduces integration v. discord as a theme. Later in the Introduction, integration v. plenitude is used to describe the Tudor aesthetic.

c) Greenblatt bases the Tudor poetic in Renaissance humanism, commenting that it joins Platonic epistemology with Aristotelian mimesis – Kinney echoes this in describing Sidney’s conception of the poet.

3. More or less following Greenblatt, Kinney, too, bases the Tudor aesthetic in Renaissance humanism (see 2(c) above). a) The expectations of the text as well as the picture of the reader expanded. The

culture celebrated (as Hooker does) that each reader can reflect on the text, which is a “mirror to the self” (the “glass” imagery is echoed with reference to Tudor pedagogy and rhetoric at 5(b) below).

b) Carrying forward the ‘pluralism and plenitude’ formulation, Tudor writers abstract like philosophers but also create a varied, material world, opening up and inviting readers to join in the production of meaning.

4. Characteristics of Tudor literaturea) The texts were not passive receptacles of culture, but constructed/ discovered

themselves from its plurality and plenitude, including the “inherited” classical models. Question: Is a text ever a passive receptacle?

b) The works used one language, but various lexicons and linguistic formations.c) The “cultural moment” was inscribed through various, elastic genres which

encouraged “different concerns of different readers on different occasions”.

5. The above discussion of the relationship between texts and culture expands into one on written works – not only “literary” ones but Tudor rhetoric and Tudor pedagogy. a) Written works intervened in and directed culture – orderly speech could

promote social order and irresponsible speech, unrest.

b) Pedagogy and rhetoric based in the pluralism of humanism are tools, not themselves informed by a strict ideology. They can be compared to “an optical glass to view the world”.