دانلود کتاب Fecal Matters in Early Modern Literature and Art: Studies in Scatology

Feces, urine, flatus, phlegm, vomitus - unlike ourselves, our most educated forebears did not disdain these functions, and, further, they employed scatological references in all manner of works. This collection of essays was provoked by what its editors considered to be a curious lacuna: the relative academic neglect of the copious and ubiquitous scatological rhetoric of Early Modern Europe, here broadly defined as the representation of the process and product of elimination of the body's waste products. The contributors to this volume examine the many forms and functions of scatology as literary and artistic trope, and reconsider this last taboo in the context of Early Modern European expression. They address unflinchingly both the objective reality of the scatological as part and parcel of material culture - inescapably a much larger part, a much heavier parcel then than now - and the subjective experience of that reality among contemporaries.
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"This collection of essays was provoked by what its editors considered to be a curious
lacuna: the relative academic neglect of the copious and ubiquitous scatological
rhetoric of Early Modem Europe, here broadly defined as the representation of the
process and product of elimination of the body's waste products (feces, urine, flatus,
phlegm, vomitus). Our most educated forebears, different from ourselves, did not
disdain it - if such proof may be found in the mere proliferation of examples - and,
further, employed it in all manner of works, not just in the crude jokes of comic
ephemera. This neglect led to the idea of an anthology that would invite
reconsideration of the many forms and functions of scatology as literary and artistic
trope. The results emphasize that while the Rabelaisian corpus may yet serve as the
standard referent, hallmark or even touchstone of the scatological in Early Modem
European works, critical inquiry must move beyond this so that readers may extend
and deepen their understanding of what the Oxford English Dictionary dismisses
simply as 'dirty literature.'

Worthy children of a Classical, Romantic and, most tellingly, bourgeois
aesthetic, we can hardly be blamed for several centuries of discomfort, in both our
teaching and our writing, when faced with works that deal with that last taboo, what
Victor Hugo evocatively called the 'last veil' clouding our vision of the truth. 1
Sexuality in all its myriad forms has long been the darling of academic readers, a once
marginalized, now legitimate field of critical investigation, commentary and theory
building. Scatology, however, arguably an even more universal function than sexuality,
still retains the power to make us blush, to provoke shame and embarrassment.
Discussion of excrement is generally relegated to one of two extremes: the objective,
clinical discourse of medical and social sciences (e.g., gastroenterology, psychology,
anthropology) or the subjective, gross indecency of infantile insult or juvenile jest (e.g.,
South Park). The contributors to this volume reconsider this last taboo in the context of
Early Modem European artistic and literate expression, addressing unflinchingly both
the objective reality of the scatological as part and parcel of material culture -
inescapably a much larger part, a much heavier parcel then than now - and the
subjective experience of that reality among contemporaries.

Even more illuminating for the argument that links the essays in this
volume, Elias's primary cultural marker, Erasmus - whose 1530 conduct manual,
the De civilitate morum puerilium (On Good Manners for Boys), is an important
milestone in the 'civilizing process' - not only announced the advent of the
specific socio-historical scatological moment, as it were, that would become ours,
but also that he was himself aware of participating in one. A curiously revealing
case in point, the Adagia, compiled over the course of his career, explicate many a
proverbial scatological act (of micturition, of excretion) toward which the
commentator demonstrates a predictable - following the Eliasian thesis - and
telling reserve. Yet adage 3.7.1, Scarabaeus aquilam quaerit ('A dung-beetle
hunting an eagle'), acknowledges, as much as any other contemporary work treated
in the following pages, a relationship to excrement different from our own:

The fact that it [the dung-beetle] uses the droppings of animals for its own
purposes is a matter of praise, not accusation. As if doctors do not do exactly the
same, not only making ointments with a variety of animal and even human
excrement, but prescribing it in medicines for the sick (297)4

Moreover, he continues, in explicit recognition of his own historically determined,
and thus intrinsically mutable, relationship to the scatological:

But is it also true that men are offended not so much by excrement itself as by the
current view of it; to the earliest mortals this substance was not so disgusting as it
is to us, for they called it by the very auspicious name of laetamen ['manure,'
from laetare, 'to gladden'] and they had not hesitation in giving the god Saturn the
nickname of 'Sterculeus' [from stercus, 'dung, shit'], and this was a compliment if
we believe Macrobius. (298)5

Erasmus, both harbinger and codifier of a 'civilizing process,' of a new 'scatologically-
challenged' habitus-in-the-making that would forever distance us from
our excrement, noted himself, and with all the troubled 'objectivity' of an ethnographer,
his own and his contemporaries' distance from an earlier scatological
golden age, 'if we believe Macrobius.'

That this Erasmian/Eliasian shift coincides with the same historical
moments and spaces inhabited by the works discussed in this anthology - works
constitute so many witnesses to and agents of that change - is worth exploring as a
hypothesis for dispelling some of the inevitable and discomfiting 'ambiguity'
surrounding excrement, for clearing away, as it were, the taboo on serious treatment
of scatology in art and literature. What 'clouds' our ability to appreciate the frequent
Early Modern recourse to excremental rhetoric, whether in text or in image, is, as
Erasmus suspected, our own socially, culturally and historically determined distance
from an earlier scatological golden age. Traced anthropologically, sociologically,
culturally and historically, the Early Moderns arguably shat differently (not to
mention ate, drank, digested, pissed, farted, vomited and spat differently) as well as
inherited and cultivated a different understanding of those paradoxically both natural
and grotesque acts. Explorations, however tentative, of that difference should
render Early Modern Europeans' less abashed use of scatology less ambiguous,
less unsettling, more meaningful. Although far from comprehensive, the following
essays on some of the period' s cultural artifacts begin to do just that, looking for,
to paraphrase Douglas, the system in the dirt, for ' . .. if uncleanness is matter out of
place, we must approach it through order' "