Hyperboles: The Rhetoric of Excess in Baroque Literature and Thought

by Christopher Johnson

This book offers a detailed, comparatist defense of hyperbole in the Baroque period. Focusing on Spanish and Mexican lyric (Góngora, Quevedo, and Sor Juana), English drama ( King Lear and translations of Seneca), and French philosophy (Descartes and Pascal), Christopher D. Johnson reads Baroque hyperbole as a sophisticated, often sublime, frequently satiric means of making sense of worlds and selves in crisis and transformation. Grounding his readings of hyperbole in the history of rhetoric and literary imitation, Johnson traces how rhetorical excess acquires specific cultural, political, aesthetic, and epistemological value. Hyperboles also engages more recent critiques of hyperbolic thought (Wittgenstein, Derrida, and Cavell), as it argues that hyperbole is the primary engine of a poetics and metaphysics of immanence.

695 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2010

About the author

Christopher Johnson, an independent verbal branding consultant, received his PhD in linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley, and has worked at Lexicon, one of the country's top naming firms. He lives in Seattle, Washington.