Subjectivity and the Signs of Love

Download or read book Subjectivity and the Signs of Love written by James M. Hembree and published by Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers. This book was released on 1997 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Centering his analysis on the consequences for self-representation of the epistemic shift to modernity, Dr. Hembree reassesses the cultural importance of one of the early seventeenth-century's neglected masterpieces of prose fiction, Honoré d'Urfé's L'Astrée. He argues that the narrative, published in five volumes from 1607 to 1627, provides an intellectual bridge between the rejection of ontological guarantees of identity and meaning in Montaigne's Essais, and the formulation of subjective consciousness as a new foundation for self-knowledge in the writings of Descartes. Suspended between medieval and modern paradigms of self-representation, L'Astrée contributed to the reconceptualization of the self and the social symbolic order that occurred in the early modern period. Therein lies its relevance for twentieth-century readers who, like d'Urfé's contemporaries, are caught in a semiotic crisis engendered by yet another cultural divide.