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• W2336150231 abstract "Previous articleNext article FreeRoland Greene Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes. Roland Greene. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Pp. vii+210.Tobias GregoryTobias GregoryCatholic University of America Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreFive Words is a study in semantic change in the lineage of William Empson’s The Structure of Complex Words (1951) and Raymond Williams’s Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976). Roland Greene describes the book’s method as “critical semantics”: “literary criticism with words, rather than authors or works, as the primary objects of investigation” (12). Like Williams, Greene tracks diachronic changes in meaning; his focus, however, is on the early modern period, understood as roughly 1525–1675. In place of Williams’s encyclopedia-style entries on over 150 words, Five Words provides chapter-length essays on “invention,” “blood,” “language,” “resistance,” and “world.” Greene allows that his choice of words was “almost arbitrary”: “what matters is that they are at work everywhere in the period, with unpredictable outcomes” (13).For each of his five words Greene devises an elegant, ad hoc semantic category. Invention is a “palimpsest,” in that a newer sense emerges over an older one without erasing it: the older meaning, invention as discovery, is gradually supplanted by a sense of invention as conception, something made rather than something found. Language is a “semantic pendent,” half of a pair of terms “neither dependent on nor independent of one another” (53): the older word “tongue” (langue, lengua, lingua) is joined in the sixteenth century by the newer word “language” (langage, lenguaje, linguaggio, linguagem)—the terms sometimes used interchangeably, sometimes distinguished. Resistance is a “semantic cartone”: the image is that of a painter’s cartoon, or preliminary monochromatic sketch. At the start of the sixteenth century—Greene’s example comes from Rojas’s La Celestina (1499)—resistance “renders a stock of attitudes in a crude black on white” (81); in later examples (Camões, Sidney, the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega) resistance is by stages colored in “until we can recognize the modern sense of the term” (83). Blood is a “conceptual envelope, the coherence of which depends on the continued validity of its complementary allegories”; by around 1600 “most of the received allegories around blood have been compromised, and the envelope is frayed” (108–9). World is a “semantic engine,” which “generates effects not only in its near set of corresponding terms but across a cultural terrain” (158).Five Words, like Greene’s previous work, is informed by his broad linguistic range. The book draws on texts in English, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Latin; it is particularly at home in English and Iberian literatures. “Blood,” for instance, begins with the anonymous 1590s English play A Warning for Fair Women, then moves back through sixteenth-century revisions of Galenic physiology, Sidney, Marguerite de Navarre, Gascoigne, and The Merchant of Venice, and ends with Don Quixote. Such seamless movement between languages creates the impression of early modern Western Europe (its Romance-language-speaking areas plus England, at least) as a single semantic landscape, across which changes spread from one region to another. This picture applies well to words whose meanings change in the same direction in the several related languages; perhaps this was a criterion for Greene in choosing his five. It would apply less well to words that take different paths in different languages. Take “habit,” for example: in English the sartorial sense predominates through the early modern period and gradually gives way to the modern sense of custom or behavioral pattern. In Italian those meanings split into two words, abito and abitudine. For words like this, we would need a ramifying account, starting with the common root (Latin habitus) and subdividing into language-specific narratives of change. Further complicating the picture would be those versatile, elastic words in one language that lack single equivalents in another, like the early modern Italian virtù—a familiar challenge for anyone who teaches Machiavelli in English translation.Greene explores each of his words through sensitive, detailed readings of a handful of texts, mainly vernacular literature. The readings include such illuminating moments as the discussion of competing senses of “blood” in The Merchant of Venice: family, ethnicity, common humanity. These senses resonate in Shylock’s “if you prick us, do we not bleed?” speech: “Undercut by the construction of blood as family, religion, and destiny that Shylock and the Venetians endorse alike, this seeming appeal to common humanity sends a message that not even Shylock himself believes in…but here he is thinking aloud, considering the several bloods that are available to him and choosing an emergent sense that will allow him, before the speech is over, to make a fresh case for revenge against the Christians.…Shylock’s speech cynically masks his own complex views of what blood allows” (128–29). This passage shows how successfully Greene’s approach can work as literary criticism. It asks not simply what a word denotes but rather how it functions in a broader discursive sense. There is nothing semantically complex about “bleed” in “if you prick us, do we not bleed?,” but that Shylock is thinking here of blood as something we all share, while he more often thinks of blood in terms of family ties—“My own flesh and blood to rebel!”—is a detail worth noticing. It points toward a fresh understanding of the famous speech, whose power is usually located in the common-humanity appeal.How representative of period usage are the texts Greene chooses? One might say that it does not matter: this is a work of literary criticism, which concerns itself with creative, exceptional uses of language. But the book also aims to give a factual account, or five accounts, of semantic change over the period, and to that end its examples need to be representative. To demonstrate that, one would want to employ an evidence base as socially and generically varied as possible—one that includes, to the extent that we can recover them, the words of early modern fishwives, farmers, and bureaucrats as well as those of Shakespeare and Cervantes. Even if the study restricted itself to humanist-educated or “high” culture, one would want more attention to Latin prose, the main medium for international intellectual exchange throughout the period. Of course, to include such materials would make for a different sort of book, more prosaic and less literary. To point this out is not to say that Greene should have written that kind of book; it is to say that “critical semantics” may contain an intrinsic tension between its two terms. Criticism seeks out the eloquent case; semantics seeks to describe typical usage as it changes over time. The two projects need not be antithetical, but they are distinct.What might digital resources contribute to a study of this kind? Greene takes up the question in an afterword. Word-frequency searches, he points out, can tell us that “Langage in French, language and especially lenguaje in Spanish become highly visible in the 1560s and remain so into the new century” (174). But such information “puts us only at the beginning of the process of reading and sifting. It leaves us to distinguish important usages from trivial ones or to discern concepts in the absence of the words themselves” (174). This is a point worth making, one that need not entail a rejection of quantitative approaches, whose proponents would, I expect, grant that they seek not to replace the function of the critic but rather to provide her with some new tools. If langage and its cognates emerge in the 1560s, that fact is good for a reader of Five Words to know; it supports Greene’s choice of Du Bellay’s Déffense et Illustration de la Langue Française (1549) as a chronological starting point in the “language” chapter. The database query performs useful preliminary labor on the semantics side, before the work of criticism gets started. One can emphasize the usefulness or the preliminary status. In light of recent claims for digital humanities as the future of the discipline, Greene’s emphasis on critical judgment is salutary. Within a decade, perhaps, new PhDs in literature may feel that they need to include charts and graphs in their work to have a chance at getting hired, just as their precursors in the 1980s felt that they needed to include French philosophy. Let us welcome new sources of information, digital and otherwise, but it will remain “a critic’s job of work” to determine what it all means. Five Words reminds us of the importance of individual critical intelligence and offers a strong example of such intelligence at work. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 112, Number 3February 2015 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/678502 Views: 365Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article." @default.
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