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Literary Theories of Circumcision City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 6-2017 Literary Theories of Circumcision A. W. Strouse The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/2037 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] LITERARY THEORIES OF CIRCUMCISION by A.W. STROUSE A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York. 2017 © 2017 A.W. Strouse All Rights Reserved ii Literary Theories of Circumcision A.W. Strouse This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in English in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Approved: _________________________________ ______________ Steven F. Kruger, Committee Chair Date _________________________________ ______________ Mario DiGangi, Executive Officer Date Supervisory Committee: Glenn Burger Michael Sargent THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii ABSTRACT Literary Theories of Circumcision by A.W. Strouse Advisor: Steven F. Kruger “Literary Theories of Circumcision” investigates a school of thought in which the prepuce, as a conceptual metaphor, organizes literary experience. In every period of English literature, major authors have employed the penis’s hood as a figure for thinking about reading and writing. These authors belong to a tradition that defines textuality as a foreskin and interpretation as circumcision. In “Literary Theories of Circumcision,” I investigate the origins of this literary- theoretical formulation in the writings of Saint Paul, and then I trace this formulation’s formal applications among medieval, early modern, and modernist writers. My study lays the groundwork for an ambitious reappraisal of English literary history, challenging the received understanding of pre-modern literary theory’s sexual politics. Whereas feminist medievalists have emphasized the heteronormative valence of pre- modern literary theory, this study demonstrates that, within the school of preputial poetics, the male anatomy queerly embodies the plasticity and multiplicity of rhetoric. I also argue for the necessity of thinking about post-medieval literature from a pre-modern theological framework that, in its spiritual orientation and in its use of genital metaphors, sidesteps the discourses of identity and sexuality that often have preoccupied queer theorists. iv Chapter 1 examines how, in response to Paul’s teachings about circumcision, early Christian theologians used the foreskin as a key term for theorizing allegory and for using allegoresis to appropriate pagan philosophy. Chapter 2 examines how Paul’s metaphor developed into a conceit, by which the foreskin came to structure attitudes toward various rhetorical devices (especially allegory, concision, and witticism, as well as marriage plots). Chapter 3 examines how monastic applications of the trope changed in response to the rise of medieval humanism, so that rhetorical circumcision governed the negotiation between doctrine and liberal learning, especially as this negotiation interrelated with shifting modes of masculinity. Chapter 4 tracks the vernacularization of theological constructions of the literary- theoretical foreskin: I argue that a literary theory of the foreskin structures the narrative trajectory of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, as the poem’s protagonist ventures from a literal to an allegorical perspective. I argue that the narratological “circumcision” of the poem’s textual body aligns the genre of the Arthurian romance with the more explicitly religious material of the rest of the Gawain manuscript. Chapter 5 considers how theological constructions of marriage-as-uncircumcision shape the narrative trajectory of “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” especially as that poem’s protagonist ventures from a literal to an allegorical perspective. I argue that the Wife stages a “circumcision” of the flesh of marriage in order to promote the spiritual aspect of conjugal matrimony. Chapter 6 surveys the metaphor’s uses among Puritans, arguing that Puritan attacks upon the Renaissance theater as “uncircumcised” can provide a framework for understanding how v Measure for Measure and Merchant of Venice intertwine marriage plots with threats from overly literal antagonists (Puritan Angelo and Jewish Shylock). The study’s Coda examines uses of the trope by Pound and Williams, who reflect upon modernism by redefining Paul’s theories of circumcision. vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I dedicate this study to New York City and to the taxpayers who supported my doctoral fellowship with their hard-earned pay. Also, please allow me to thank: my dissertation adviser, Steven F. Kruger; my readers, Glenn Burger and Michael Sargent; and my dear teachers, especially Leonard Cassuto, Marlene Hennessy, Wayne Koestenbaum, Henry Shapiro, and Arvind Thomas. A portion of Chapter 1 appeared as “Macrobius’s Foreskin” in JMEMS 46.1 (2016). I am grateful to the journal’s editorial staff and to the issue’s editor, Marion Turner. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1: Allegorized Circumcision and Circumcised Allegory 1 Chapter 2: Preputial Rhetoric and Circumcised Narratology 44 Chapter 3: Exegetical Circumcision in Monastic Contexts 97 Chapter 4: The Circumcised Body of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 130 Chapter 5: The Wife of Bath and the Circumcision of Marriage 169 Chapter 6: Circumcising Marriage in Merchant and Measure 200 Coda: The Modernist Praeputium 238 WORKS CITED 250 viii Chapter 1: Allegorized Circumcision and Circumcised Allegory Literature and philosophy often deal in fables that readers do not necessarily see as literally true. The proverbial tortoise and hare, for example, obviously never raced one another, even if the “slow and steady” moral still resonates. One ancient literary theorist writes that the fantastic elements of such tales constitute a “fleshy and alien foreskin.” According to this theory, a reader can make use of literary fiction by “circumcising” it—by cutting off the fabulous sheath of allegory and exposing the work’s profound, truthful kernel. By this conceit, writing resembles a penis, and myth a foreskin; meaning a glans, and reading amputation. The metaphor may affront standards of good taste—much like the mutterings of Antonin Artaud, who once claimed that history exists “in letters of blood on a dark parchment of scrotums and foreskins” (118).1 The formulation, however, actually belongs to Saint Gregory, the Cappadocian Father and fourth-century Bishop of Nyssa. Many other Catholic theologians developed such literary theories of the foreskin. Gregory belongs to a long line of Christian thinkers who, beginning with Saint Paul, understood reading and writing in terms of the prepuce. In this study, I will track how Paul’s discussion of circumcision has served as a prooftext for divergent theories and practices of allegory. Allegory, of course, does not consist of any one single method. The term “allegory” refers to a wide diversity of readerly maneuvers. Many 1 I quote foreign language sources in English using the translations listed in the Works Cited, or, where I undertake a close reading of a Latin work, I cite the Latin in text and provide my own translation parenthetically. In rare cases where an in-text citation of the Latin seems to me excessive, but where a diligent reader may wish to consult the text, I provide the Latin in a footnote. notions of allegory differ from and even oppose one another. As Jon Whitman explains, “To attempt a history of allegorical interpretation in the West would almost be to attempt a history of Western cultural change itself” (5). This study merely attempts to tell a small part of that history: I argue that Paul’s reading of “circumcision” has functioned as a key term in the history of allegory, so that the foreskin serves as a crucial conceptual metaphor for theorizing and practicing various forms of allegory. To begin to tell that history, this chapter will consider Paul’s seminal discussion of circumcision in his epistle to the Romans, and it will account for the cultural forces, both Jewish and Greco-Roman, that shaped Paul’s inauguration of a preputial hermeneutics. I will examine, as well, the influence of Paul’s formulation on other Patristic writers. When Christians like Paul tried to convert the Greeks and Romans, they preached to an audience who saw preputial pruning as ridiculous, if not barbaric (Gollaher, 32). Paul, a circumcised Jew who himself circumcised Timothy, categorically rejected the necessity of physical circumcision (Phil. 3:5; Acts 16:3). Paul’s apparently contradictory stance toward preputiotomy has resulted in considerable critical confusion. As I will discuss, contemporary scholars have not developed any consensus about the precise meaning of Pauline circumcision as it pertains to allegory; instead, Paul’s views on circumcision have generated an interpretative crux, so that Pauline circumcision productively fuels a multitude of allegorical approaches. Since Paul considered himself the recipient of a mystical mission, his philosophy may evade rational argumentation. In order to harness the mysterious nature of Paul’s praeputium, I explore how this ambiguous
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