David Hillman, Joe Moshenska, and Namratha Rao, eds. Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual, vol. XXXVII. Companionable Thinking: Spenser with . . ., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023. 575 pp. ISSN 0195-9468, e-ISSN 2167-8529. $90.00 hardback.

Volume 37 of Spenser Studies is a big, fat, remarkable achievement. Essays by twenty-one contributors explore the possibilities of reading Spenser in company with such contemporary writers as Donna Haraway, Gilles Deleuze, Sianne Ngai, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Jacques Rancière, and many others—it’s a long list, well-stocked with the usual post-structuralist suspects but by no means limited to a Gallic pantheon. The essays tend toward brevity (a blessing in a volume of 575 pages), but each represents a serious exploration of the grounds on which its companion texts may be read with, or at times against, one another. The great virtue of this collection for Spenserians lies precisely in this box-of-chocolates approach. We are introduced to a wide and eclectic range of writers, most of them unfamiliar (I was previously acquainted with seven), and shown what they might have to offer to the study of our writer, often with surprising results. It is an experiment without precedent in our field. The editors are to be congratulated for their daring and originality.

The introduction consists of three brief but intriguing reflections, one by each editor, on the key terms of the volume’s title: “Companionable,” “Thinking,” and “With.” The essays are then divided into six clusters: “Companionable Bodies,” “Affective Companions,” “Imagined Companions,” “Companions and Doubles,” “Companionable Spaces,” and “Styles of Companionship.” Each cluster houses three or four essays, and each ends with a response from yet another contributor, in the manner of a conference panel. The collection as a whole concludes with an Afterword by Jeff Dolven.

To give each contributor his or her due in the space of a review is not possible, so I will not try for equal time, as if we were engaged in scholarly speed-dating. After 45 pages of introductory material from the editors—recommended reading, though I slight it here—the collection proper begins with an intriguing essay by Kat Addis, who reads Spenser in company with Caribbean intellectual Sylvia Wynter to seek a radical redefinition of the “human” in “humanism.” Supriya Chaudhuri follows by bringing Donna Haraway to the table for a bit of “theory in the mud”: “Denying privilege to the human, Spenser employs speculative, interlaced fictions to argue for the persistence of life-forms emerging from the earth’s damaged soil” (73). The combination of overlapping subjects and divergent evaluations makes this opening pair a good bet for a graduate seminar assignment. Across the volume, many such opportunities open to attentive reading.

If bodies are our means of engaging with the environment, they are also vulnerable to forms of violence, from within and without. Megan Bowman takes a surprising turn into disability theory with the work of Rosemarie Garland-Thomson in order to highlight the emotional violence wrought by staring, a potentially hostile and dehumanizing form of looking that she links to the growth of anatomy in sixteenth-century medical practice. Yet without pulling any punches when it comes to the way “staring for the sake of knowledge can lead to stigma and prejudice” (111), she manages to tease out of Spenser’s text an ethics of staring that “seems to advocate a reasoned, temperate, and empathetic response to violence… that ends in mutual recognition and respect” (115). This essay is followed by one of the more ambitious offerings in the collection, as Joe Moshenska and Ayesha Ramachandran introduce us to the work of Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro by way of a cunning thought experiment: without at first identifying the episode, they redescribe Malengin’s encounter with Artegall and Talus as if he—Malengin—were the knightly hero and they the villainous giants who destroy him. This canny bit of defamiliarization inducts us into the “ontological turn” in anthropology that is exemplified by the work of Viveiros de Castro. The section concludes with a brilliant response from the late Michael Schoenfeldt, a source of bittersweet pleasure for those who knew him.

The second cluster of essays, “Affective Companions,” finds Spenser in company with Gilles Deleuze, Val Plumwood, Jean-Luc Marion, and Sianne Ngai, with a response from Drew Daniel. Lydia C. Heinrichs reimagines the ubiquitous open plain of The Faerie Queene landscape as the Deleuzian “plane of immanence” in a bracing analysis that, among other things, yields up this gem: when the Redcrosse knight melts at the start of canto vii, “It is as if his armor, rather than shielding him from the onslaught of forces from without, were in fact intended to contain the fluid physicality of the body within, a metamorphic intensity hidden by the knight’s red-crossed shell” (166). Courtney A. Druzak draws on Val Plumwood’s ecofeminist theory to offer a surprising new look at Duessa’s embodied forms, while Joseph D. Parry uses Jean-Luc Marion to explore “Spenser’s phenomenology of marriage” (196), in the process bringing new life to the conventional eternizing claim as grounded in “a way of being [and loving] that does not intend its own end, even in the face of its certain end” (201). Patrick Aaron Harris also finds a novel approach to the Amoretti in the affordances of Sianne Ngai’s aesthetic of “cuteness”: “Cuteness… is an affective display of pitiful or pathetic desire that enables the cute object to demand attention, intimacy, and care from its owner… Spenser’s Amoretti engages in a performance of pity that upsets the familiar Petrarchan power dynamics and necessitates a different means of interpreting the affective negotiations between lover and beloved” (215). Drew Daniel responds to all four (and their rubric) with intelligent appreciation.

The third cluster of essays under the rubric “Imagined Companions” turns to Kwame Anthony Appiah, Johan Huizinga, and Paul Ricoeur. One of the many high points of the collection, for me, is Andrew Wadoski’s ingenious recourse to Appiah’s concept of “epistemological cosmopolitanism” and his commitment to “counterfactual modes of thinking” (248-9) to uncover in The Faerie Queene the development of an ethics of the counterfactual that works in counterpoint to Spenser’s “illiberal… self-professed ideology” (262). Abigail Shinn demonstrates the continuing value that Huizinga’s classic Homo Ludens may still have for cultural analysis by elucidating the way the antithetical play of popular and elite cultural elements in The Shepheardes Calender “challenges the reader to imagine new possibilities for English poetry” (265). Judith Anderson, to whose memory the volume is dedicated, brings her usual subtlety and rigor to an exploration of the ways Ricoeur’s narratology enables new perceptions of “the intimacy of narrative with human time” in The Faerie Queene (283).¹ An amiable and provocative response from Leah Whittington rounds out the section.

The fourth essay cluster, “Companions and Doubles,” carries Spenser into the realms of Trans Studies (with Julia Serano), Kristevan semiotics, Derridean “adestination,” and W. E. B. Du Bois on “the Veil” that renders black lives invisible to the white majority. Melissa Sanchez leads off with a wide-ranging and ambitious analysis that deploys Spenser and Serano to develop mutual ideological critiques, situating the analysis within a richly annotated discussion of the field of trans studies and capped off with a mini-meta-essay on the politics of citation. It is a remarkable performance, albeit one that I found deeply disorienting as the technical vocabulary accumulated: I had no idea the prefix “trans-” could be attached to so many different adjectives and nouns. My one regret about this essay is that, as ideological critique so often seems to do, it flattens The Faerie Queene into its cultural context, treating it as no different in kind from texts by Anthony Eden, say, or Peter Martyr. This is the point at which one needs to consider texts not only as representations of eroticism but also as objects of it. Sanchez’s brilliant work leaves me sad because it makes loving Spenser harder to do.

Emily Sarah Barth describes Amoret as an allegorical figure of Kristevan semiotic “excess.” The reading is persuasive, although the companionship seems mostly one-way: Kristeva reads The Faerie Queene; Spenser does not read Kristeva. Something similar may be said of Eric Langley and Luke Prendergast’s foray into The Post Card: beneath the play on “adestination” and “destinerrant,” what appears is an easy fit between errancies as, once again, Derrida reads Spenser but Spenser does not read Derrida. Hannah Crawforth places Spenser beside W. E. B. Du Bois, and while Spenser doesn’t escape judgment—he is “careless of the racial implications of his allegory” (393)—the comparative analysis does illuminate the functioning of allegory in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) while demonstrating the limits of allegory in Spenser’s Legend of Temperance. Kathryn Murphy’s response explores the essays’ shared interest in what she calls “the bizarre numerosity of The Faerie Queene” (417).

Under the rubric “Companionable Spaces,” the fifth cluster finds Spenser in company with Henri Lefebvre, Deleuze and Guattari, and Wittgenstein. Focusing on the production of social space in The Faerie Queene, Richard McCabe offers a lucid account of the tension inherent in the effort at once to mirror and to refashion the realm of England, and he carries this analysis back to Lefebvre, finding within his failed effort to develop “a unified theory of space” a deeply Spenserian dynamic in which allegory “repeatedly destabilizes its own premises” (427). With Yulia Ryzhik, we return to the “rhizomatic” model of reading, now by way of Mammon’s cave, exploring both the affordances and the pitfalls of plateaus that may always turn into prisons.

Gordon Teskey finds an intriguing set of parallels between Spenser’s cursus from the Calender to The Faerie Queene and Wittgenstein’s from the Tractatus to the Philosophical Investigations, a comparison that eventuates in a persuasive sense of Spenserian allegory as a language game. In a dense and pointed response to the trio of essays in this cluster, Emily Vasiliauskas draws on Zadie Smith’s short story “Meet the President!” to link the logic of allegory to that of voyeurism: the poem’s spaces, she writes, “seem always already penetrated by sovereign forces that define the meaning of events in accordance with a privileged point of view, rather than in accordance with what Arendt would recognize as an authentically political contest over reality” (486). If that is a language game, it is one played for high stakes: “the more legible the allegory, the more it is coming for us” (490). Has anyone ever accused Spenser of excessive legibility? (Bonfont would say no.)

Under “Styles of Companionship,” we find Spenser in company including Jacques Rancière, Theodor W. Adorno, and Roland Barthes. Owen Kane finds in Rancière’s special sense of “reverie” a way of understanding how the Legend of Courtesy renegotiates the social, political, and aesthetic canons of decorum that inform ideals of community. Moments that suspend the purposive force of allegory allow scenes and characters to be displaced in ways that open into new norms of communal life. J. D. Eynard turns to Adorno’s concept of dissonance as a form of “alienation effect” in order to shed light on Spenser’s use of discordant sound—both in the narrative and in the style—to prompt virtuous action in Book II of The Faerie Queene and in the Mutabilitie Cantos. For me, this essay illustrates its own thesis, since I find Adorno’s scorn for jazz and cinema to be utterly misguided, based on an unrealistically totalizing and ideologically suspect view of popular culture, while the valorizing of alienation flies in the face of millennia of poetic theory which stress the value of pleasure as an end of poetry. My deep disagreements with Adorno do ironically make this essay, for me at least, among the more stimulating pieces in the volume.

Stephen Guy-Bray’s turn to Barthes and The Pleasure of the Text forms an intriguing contrast with Eynard’s contribution, focusing as it does on the textual production of jouissance, particularly in a close reading of Amoretti 75, “One day I wrote her name upon the strand.” I have quibbles with the close reading of this sonnet: e.g., the “second hand” of line 3 refers primarily not to the appendage at the terminus of the human arm but, in the words of the OED, to “the action of the hand in writing.” (Think Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance.²) But the real charm of the essay lies in its personal, almost confessional, evocation of the complex and enduring pleasure of Spenser’s texts—and of Barthes’. (My own engagement with S/Z in the 1980s was transformative; I read and reread my copy until it fell apart.)

In “Companionable and Uncompanionable Reading,” Rachel Eisendrath offers an astute and sympathetic account of the three essays in this final cluster that admirably performs the duty of a response—that is, to heighten appreciation and understanding of them. She reminds me of what I liked in Eynard’s piece, and helped me see my own reaction to it as part of this cluster’s subject, a style of companionship that does not exclude the occasional combative impulse.

Jeff Dolven closes the volume with a characteristically gracious and illuminating meditation on the dynamics of conversation both within The Faerie Queene and among its proliferating interlocutors. It is not an easy conversation—Dolven finds Spenser’s narrator to be a solitary voice, in contrast to the poem’s “distinctively affordant” (563) capacity: “Spenser’s poem is so riven with contradictions that it somehow already complies with any structure of thought and counterthought to which we might invite it” (563-4). The essays in this collection certainly confirm that impression.

For all its forward-looking brio, the volume has strong ties to the past, dedicated to the late Judith Anderson and featuring a postmortem appearance by Michael Schoenfeldt. Both were deeply learned critics whose work remains bracingly open to the demands of what we nickname “theory.” Their loss, together with the works they have left us, serve as a reminder that critical conversations, odd creatures that they are, depend upon and are enriched by the voices of the dead: Anderson, Schoenfeldt, Spenser, Barthes, Deleuze, Plumwood, Guattari, Derrida, Du Bois, Adorno, Huizinga, Ricoeur, Lefebvre, Wittgenstein—a roll-call that reflects the distinctly commemorative feel of this volume, and reminds us that for all there is to deplore in our past, there is much to love, while we still can.

David Lee Miller

University of South Carolina