Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes

2013
Author(s)
Publisher
University of Chicago Press
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Blood. Invention. Language. Resistance. World. Five ordinary words that do a great deal of conceptual work in everyday life and literature. In this original experiment in critical semantics, Roland Greene considers how these five words changed over the course of the sixteenth century and what their changes indicate about broader forces in science, politics, and other disciplines.
Greene discusses a broad swath of Renaissance and transatlantic literature—including Shakespeare, Cervantes, Camões, and Cavendish—in terms of the development of these words rather than works, careers, or histories. He creates a method for describing and understanding the semantic changes that occur, extending his argument to other words that operate in the same manner. Aiming to shift the conversation around Renaissance literature from current approaches to riskier enterprises, Greene also challenges semantic-historicist scholars, proposing a method that takes advantage of digital resources like full-text databases but still depends on the interpreter to fashion ideas out of ordinary language. Five Words is an innovative and accessible book that points the field of literary studies in an exciting new direction.

About the Author

Roland Greene

Roland Greene's research and teaching are concerned with the early modern literatures of England, Latin Europe, and the transatlantic world, and with poetry and poetics from the Renaissance to the present.

His most recent book is Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes (Chicago, 2013). Five Words proposes an understanding of early modern culture through the changes embodied in five words or concepts over the sixteenth century: in English, blood, invention, language, resistance, and world, and their counterparts in French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese.

Other books include Unrequited Conquests: Love and Empire in the Colonial Americas (Chicago, 1999), which follows the love poetry of the Renaissance into fresh political and colonial contexts in the New World; and Post-Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations of the Western Lyric Sequence (Princeton, 1991), a transhistorical and comparative study of lyric poetics through the fortunes of the lyric sequence from Petrarch to Neruda. Greene is the editor with Elizabeth Fowler of The Project of Prose in Early Modern Europe and the New World (Cambridge, 1997). His essays deal with topics such as the colonial baroque, Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene and Amoretti, Sir Thomas Wyatt's poetry, and Shakespeare's The Tempest.

Greene is editor in chief of the fourth edition of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (2012). Prepared in collaboration with the general editor Stephen Cushman and the associate editors Clare Cavanagh, Jahan Ramazani, and Paul Rouzer, this edition represents a complete revision of the most authoritative reference book on poetry and poetics.

In 2015-16 he served as President of the Modern Language Association. His theme for the 2016 Annual Convention in Austin, Texas was Literature and Its Publics: Past, Present, and Future.

At Stanford Greene is co-chair and founder of two research workshops in which most of his Ph.D. students participate. Renaissances brings together early modernists from the Bay Area to discuss work in progress, while the Poetics Workshop provides a venue for innovative scholarship in the broad field of international and historical poetics.

Greene has taught at Harvard and Oregon, where for six years he was chair of the Department of Comparative Literature. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

For more information about his past and future courses, publications, conference papers and invited lectures, and professional activities, see Professor Greene's page in the Department of Comparative Literature.