Eating and Becoming: Ethics and Poetics of Commensality from Donne to Milton

我的研究将追溯早期现代英国文学中的共处或共同进餐的伦理和诗学，特别是考察从唐恩到弥尔顿的诗人作品中渴望和并入之间的关系。响应大卫·戈尔茨坦提出的“一种新的饮食哲学范式……始于早期的现代口腔”，并借鉴玛吉·基尔古尔的共融和自相残杀的概念作为伦理关系的范畴，我的项目将通过参观早期现代英国文学中的四个共有性遗址来思考饮食在蒂莫西·赖斯所说的相互关联的自我“领域”中的地位。我将考察约翰·多恩和乔治·赫伯特的圣餐诗学；亨利·沃恩将赫伯特的诗学纳入其中的文学影响的“喂养关系”；琼森和赫里克关于食物和饮料的诗歌中的欢乐和社交；以及弥尔顿的“失乐园”中对人类主人和神圣主人的好客伦理。这个项目在早期现代英国想象中引出了进食、进食和伦理之间未被探索的关系，这个项目将试图通过它作为主题的作者星座来重新定义并重新定义对这三个因素的对待；同时，它将开辟与艺术史、医学史和神学的跨学科对话的途径。

My research will trace the ethics and poetics of commensality, or eating together, in early modern English literature, examining in particular the relationship between aspiration and incorporation in the works of poets from Donne to Milton. Taking up David Goldstein's call for 'a new paradigm for philosophies of eating...that begins in the early modern mouth' and drawing on Maggie Kilgour's concepts of communion and cannibalism as categories of ethical relationality, my project will consider the place of eating in what Timothy Reiss calls the interlocking 'spheres' of selfhood by visiting four sites of commensality in early modern English literature: the altar, the book, the feast, and the garden. I will examine the eucharistic poetics of John Donne and George Herbert; the 'feeding relation' of literary influence in Henry Vaughan's incorporation of Herbert's poetics; conviviality and sociability in Jonson and Herrick's poetry of food and drink; and the ethics of hospitality towards a human host in country house poetry and towards God, the divine host, in Milton's Paradise Lost. Drawing out the underexplored relationships between eating, aspiration, and ethics in the early modern English imaginary, this project will be an attempt to reframe and so redefine the treatment of all three by the constellation of authors whom it takes as its subjects; it will, at the same time, open up avenues of interdisciplinary dialogue with the history of art, history of medicine, and theology.