Carl’s Reviews > Joy of the Worm: Suicide and Pleasure in Early Modern English Literature > Status Update

"Hamlet's historically situated sense of generic auto-belatedness is that he fails to live up to the codes proposed by the heroes and heroines of ancient Greek tragedy. In private he collapses in disgust at his incapacity to align himself with the unworkably distant yet emotionally powerful patterns modeled by the megethos of the agents within the Greek tragic art that precedes him;"

"Deploying gender travesty, tavern slumming, "turning Turk," or other feigned religious conversions, early modern plays stage decorum as a dialectic of norms and exceptions across typological boundaries, allowing early modern authors and audiences to put selfhood's fungibility to the test." p96-97

"Precisely because of the standing tensions provided by decorum's pretended fixity, early modern plots draw power from the delicious spectacle of relentless cross-class and cross-gender and cross-confession masquerade." p.96

"These acts of valedictory tenderness transmute obedience into pathos so that we within the audience can admire and invest in the muffled thrill of subjection unto death, perhaps finding in our own sobs as we watch this scene a tender tightening of the chains that bind us to our children, our partners, our work colleagues, our bosses, our leaders, our nation. [65]" p.88

"But neither Langley nor Freud are quite adequate to the sheer flippancy of Sidney's achievement here at the level of tone: the weird joy of self-satisfaction that thrums within this witty verbal display at the prospect of self-killing. This perverse affective fold of extreme self-regard in the midst of apparent self-hatred registers the comedic work of genre as it modulates a tragic action with comedic potentiality"

I have also long been fascinated with the concept of suicide. Interestingly to me, Daniels calls it, "self-killing," a term, that in his view encompasses a broader array of acts and ideas in the course of literary and cultural history.

this work of scholarship and literary theory is exceedingly difficult reading. and yet through it i experience great pleasure in terms of both nostalgia for my days as a mediocre college English major vainly hoping to go on to PhD study in that field, and in exploring, as far as time allows, the roots and branches of its densely referenced literary discourse.

p. 22: "when such joy is experienced at the prospect of one's own death, it might well look like the farthest shore of 'masochism,' perhaps bearing out Anne Sexton's remark in a letter about self-destructive fantasies that 'suicide is a form of masturbation.'"