Sweeping Emblematics

Authors

  • Daniele Borgogni Università degli studi di Torino

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.62336/unibg.eac.32.515

Keywords:

Emblems and Devices, Hermeneutics, Representation, Entextualization, Projection and Mobility

Abstract

The article valorizes Renaissance emblematics as an inherently tensional form, steeped in interchange and transition. Movement was not only a thematized topic in emblematic compositions, it was their basic textual strategy to activate meanings and foster interpretation, explore the possibilities and scopes of new forms of communication, and pave the way for a participatory readership. Emblematics was in fact conceived as a brand-new and transdisciplinary textual mode, a mongrel form whose complex interplay of signs favored multiplied discursive models thanks to the constant relay between visual and verbal elements, forcibly made to cohabit the same representational space. Unsurprisingly, these innovative features were soon co-opted and channeled into manipulative practices functional to interpellating and “re-creating” readers, thereby contributing to transform this luxuriant form into a static site of coherence and symbolical expression. The article, on the contrary, reassesses the importance of emblematics as a multifaceted construct which requires a similarly multifaceted theoretical perspective approaching it as a wide-ranging cultural construct, a textual space which ushered in an idea of communication as projective and dislocating, which deployed idiosyncratic meaning procedures and set new hermeneutic parameters, which triggered an incessant mobility in the reading experience, which was teeming with cognitive potentials and ideological bearings.

Author Biography

Daniele Borgogni, Università degli studi di Torino

Daniele Borgogni teaches English and Translation Studies at the University of Turin. He specializes in early modern and modernist English literature, European emblematics, translation theory and practice, stylistics, and cognitive linguistics. He published the first Italian critical edition of Milton’s Paradise Regained; edited 1Henry VI, 2Henry VI, 3Henry VI, and Cymbeline for the latest Italian translation of Shakespeare’s complete works; co-edited a collection of essays on religious and literary discourse in early modern Europe, on short forms, and on transdisciplinarity.

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Published

03-06-2024

How to Cite

Borgogni, D. (2024). Sweeping Emblematics. Elephant & Castle, (32), 23–36. https://doi.org/10.62336/unibg.eac.32.515