In a Tortoiseshell

The following excerpt is from my term paper for ART 431: Art, Culture, and Identity in Medieval Spain. Students were able to explore an object of their choice from medieval Iberian visual culture, framing their argument within the relevant course themes of culture, religion, and medieval notions of race in the Iberian Peninsula. Through visual and historical analysis, comparison, and critical engagement with current scholarship, my classmates and I contributed to a lively discourse about the nuanced ways in which social and cultural groups co-existed in medieval Iberia.

Excerpt

In the extravagantly illustrated Rylands Haggadah, a dark blue-skinned, wide-stanced figure barges forward, wielding a curved saber above his head and tucking a bright red shield close to his torso (Fig. 1). He is the mischievous “Wicked Child,” serving as a symbolic example of how Passover seder participants should not engage with the commandment to remember the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt. Though the figure has traditionally been interpreted as portraying the threat posed by rejecting Jewish tradition, I argue that he serves a dual role in the work as a soldier and enslaved individual, representing both biblical and medieval slavery, and reflecting how medieval notions of foreignness influenced the haggadah’s pedagogical program.

Contrasts between the Wicked Son and intellectual figures in the haggadah highlight the Wicked Son’s connection to storytelling and interpretation in relation to enslavement. The Wicked Son and Wise Son’s differing relationships to the physical text suggests their attitudes towards learning, characterizing the Wicked Son as enslaved by his resistance to tradition. The Wicked Son storms rightwards with his sword pointed towards the text itself. In particular, the tip of the sword occupies a gap in the page’s paragraph structure where the paragraph about the Wise Son ends. Therefore, the Wicked Son specifically targets the Wise Son’s text, which advocates for traditional Passover rituals. In contrast, the Wise Son interacts more closely and tenderly with the text of the page. While the Wicked Son attacks the actual text participants use during the Seder, the Wise Child holds a miniature version of the haggadah which reads, in very small print, “What does the Wise Child Say? What are the testimonies, the statutes and laws…” He engages in the very same act as the Seder participants in a self-referential show of authority. Specifically, he points to the word “והחוקים” meaning “the statutes,” referencing his prioritization of Torah commandment and laws. By engaging with the text at hand in a similar manner to the real Seder-goers instead of seeking to “destroy” it, the Wise Son demonstrates the behavior of a free individual while the Wicked Son is akin to a defiant Israelite who does not accept God’s word, one who is not yet free from Egyptian rule and has not received the Torah at Mount Sinai.¹²

While his relationship to textual interpretation highlights the theme of biblical enslavement, the figure’s potential Muslim identity relates strongly to medieval Iberian slavery practices, in which most unfree individuals were Muslim. Julie Harris understands the “othering” of the Wicked Son to rest mainly in a Muslim or North African identity, shown by the style of his armor and stereotyped physiological features including an upturned nose and sharp teeth, laying important groundwork for understanding slavery’s connection to the figure on a social-religious dimension.³ Harris posits that a Muslim warrior serves as a response to Jewish assimilation in Christian society, as the Wicked Child was once illustrated as a Christian soldier in medieval haggadot, a depiction ceasing to bestow negative character onto the Wicked Son as Jews began to bear arms like their Christian counterparts.⁴ Therefore, using a Muslim figure would allow Seder participants to more clearly portray the antagonistic Wicked Son through the use of a widely-used set of stereotyping imagery in Iberian material culture meant to imbue figures with an intimidating or strange foreignness. 

However, the use of a Muslim figure would also likely have led Jewish viewers to associate the Wicked Son with enslaved individuals in their immediate environment, combining notions of biblical slavery implicit in the figure with a medieval perspective on slavery.⁵ Jewish families of means in medieval Iberia, while also under Christian rule, could and did own slaves. As such, their understanding of slavery at the time likely combined with traditional interpretations of the Wicked Son. Jane Barlow, approaching the figure with a postcolonial lens, notes how Jewish ownership of Muslim slaves put wealthy Jewish individuals and Muslims in close contact.⁶ This further supports the proposal that, if the Wicked Son was perceived as specifically Muslim, Jewish viewers or users of the Rylands Haggadah would associate the figure with slavery on an intimate level. 

The effect of the above associations with slavery—color symbolism, posture, relationship to text, and possible Muslim identity—revolve around casting the Wicked Son as foreign, which was a condition for medieval enslavement. The Wicked Son’s aggression, armor, and sense of active invasion is deeply tied to his foreignness. Therefore, a Seder-goer who “chooses” the Wicked Son by behaving apathetically towards ritual accepts also his perceived foreignness, opening a door to a fear looming large over the Passover seder: the possibility of becoming unfree. The moral choice presented by the Four Sons suddenly becomes more real as viewers are reminded of current systems of slavery and their proximity to unfree individuals. It is not out of the question for the Rylands Haggadah to emphasize its users’ freedom by calling attention to those close by who are unfree. Doing so within the structure of the Wicked Son turns this message, implicit in dark-skinned servants across several haggadot, into a purposeful educational tool. 

Footnotes

1. Additionally, Harris contends that if the figure is meant to be Muslim, he may be meant to “embody his peoples’ lack of written language and history—a condition diametrically opposed to that of the Jews.” While this interpretation may require additional support, this hypothesis supports the layered meaning of Wicked Child in relation to the freedom to read and interpret traditional texts. ↩︎
2. Julie Harris. 2005. “Good Jews, Bad Jews, and No Jews at All – Ritual Imagery and Social Standards in the Catalan Haggadot.” In Church, State, Vellum, and Stone: Essays on Medieval Spain in Honor of John Williams, 26:275—96. The Medieval and Early Modern Iberian World. Brill. ↩︎
3. Pamela Patton. “What Did Medieval Slavery Look Like? Color, Race, and Unfreedom in Later Medieval Iberia.” Speculum 97, no. 3 (July 2022). ↩︎
4. Harris, “Good Jews, Bad Jews,” 286. ↩︎
5. In the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, as Christians gained more control of the Iberian Peninsula, most enslaved individuals were Muslims captured in battle. Color symbolism associating black or dark colors with barbarity, depravity, and sin emerged as a method to visually and symbolically separate enslaved Muslims from free Muslims.As this visual lexicon proliferated, it became more effective at portraying Muslims as immoral, therefore constructing a rationale for their enslavement. Patton, “What Did Medieval Slavery Look Like?,” 660, 695-697. ↩︎
6. Jane Barlow. “The Muslim Warrior at the Seder Meal.” In Postcolonising the Medieval Image, 218—40. Routledge, 2019. 232. ↩︎

Bibliography

Aristotle. “Aristotle, Poetics (C.350-330 BCE).” In Reader in Tragedy: An Anthology of Classical Criticism to Contemporary Theory, edited by Marcus Nevitt and Tanya Pollard. Methuen Drama, 2019.

Brown, Carolyn E. “Juliet’s Taming of Romeo.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 36, no. 2 (1996): 333—55. https://doi.org/10.2307/450952.

Petrarch, Francesco. Sonnets and Shorter Poems. Translated by David R. Slavitt. Harvard University Press, 2012.

Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet. Edited by Peter Holland. Penguin Books, 2016.

Shklovsky, Victor. “Art as Device.” In Theory of Prose, translated by Benjamin Sher, 1—14. Dalkey Archive Press, 1990.

Whittier, Gayle. “The Sonnet’s Body and the Body Sonnetized in ‘Romeo and Juliet.’” Shakespeare Quarterly 40, no. 1 (1989): 27—41. https://doi.org/10.2307/2870752. 

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Author Commentary / Tali Goldman

I wrote this paper for Professor Pamela Patton’s course ART 431, Art, Culture, and Identity in Medieval Spain. When Professor Patton suggested that I work on the Wicked Son in the Rylands Haggadah, I dove into existing literature on the figure. In class, we had discussed how the figure relates to the medieval Iberian practice of color symbolism, which reflected not the actual skin tone of certain individuals but used dark pigment to communicate negative traits and status, creating a visual lexicon around ideas of freedom/unfreedom. Provided that a biblical redemption from slavery is a key theme of Passover, it was surprising that scholars had not discussed this depiction of the Wicked Son through the lens of slavery, focusing instead primarily on the figure’s aggressive tone. 

Slowly but surely, I used visual and comparative analysis as well as secondary sources to reinterpret the pedagogical function of the Wicked Son. Ultimately, a multi-layered thesis emerged. I argue how the depiction and placement of the Wicked Son on the folio—a tense, unfamiliar warrior confronting the very words of the manuscript— not only reflects the Wicked Son as a heretical threat, but casts him as foreign, a characterization which would have been associated with slavery at the time. I was then able to connect a dual understanding of the Wicked Son as both a warrior and unfree person to the significance of freedom as a theme of the Passover seder.By adding to and complicating prior interpretations, I contributed a more nuanced understanding of this figure. While scholars had looked at the image through cultural or religious lenses, I sought to combine multiple approaches, allowing me to understand the social and religious significance of the figure in the very specific context of race and slavery in medieval Iberia, which manifested visually in a wide variety of manuscripts from several religions/cultures during the medieval period. Writing this paper allowed me to approach nuanced and difficult topics of religion, race, and othering—which were understood differently in medieval times than in the modern period—with an art historical lens. In decoding a confusing image, I thought through ways in which the cultural and social reality in medieval Iberia influenced the private lives and traditions of people of several different religious/social practices.

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Editor Commentary / Katherine Jiho Lee

One important way in which scholars intervene in academic writing is by examining non-textual, creative sources. In her analysis of the Rylands Haggadah, a 14th-century manuscript, Tali uses illustrations rather than quotes as her evidence to explore how specific visual details were chosen to communicate specific themes and pedagogical messages to a medieval Jewish audience. Focusing on the depictions of the Wicked Son, rather than simply describing what the illustrations show, she intervenes by treating them as a form of argument. This makes it possible to “close read” how that argument is supported and communicated through visual details and cultural connotations, including the Wicked Son’s skin tone, interaction with the text, and stereotypical physical features. By situating this imagery within broader artistic and historical contexts, the author connects the visual representation of the Wicked Son to deeper tensions between historical themes including freedom versus enslavement and belonging versus otherness. 

Through this art historical lens, Tali also complicates prior interpretations of the Wicked Son and introduces a compelling motive that runs throughout her paper, merging cultural, religious, and social perspectives to offer a deeper understanding of the figure and its significance. She is able to make an original contribution to the literature by identifying a more nuanced role played by the Wicked Son than that interpreted by previous scholarship. In particular, although scholars have traditionally portrayed this character as a representation of the danger of rejecting Jewish tradition, Tali argues that the Wicked Son also plays the role of soldier and enslaved individual to represent both biblical and contemporary (i.e., medieval) slavery, ultimately demonstrating how depictions of foreignness impacted the pedagogical purpose of the haggadah. Thus, analyzing art as real discourse rather than decoration constitutes one way that writers can make original contributions to ongoing conversations, identify what is new or not obvious, and innovate inventive interventions. 

In a Tortoiseshell

This excerpt is from the beginning of a close reading I wrote for HUM 216-HUM 217: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Western Culture I: Literature and the Arts, History, Philosophy, and Religion. This paper was one of five close readings we wrote throughout the fall semester of 2022 and was the only one I wrote on a work of art opposed to literary texts. After visiting the The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met) in New York through the class, I decided to write my close reading on a Roman wellhead figural relief sculpture from 150-200 A.D. that depicted the myths of Narcissus and Hylas, titled the Gosford Wellhead. The wellhead connects the two myths on either side through water carved along its circumference, but in analyzing the sculpture’s carving technique and depiction of both myths, I contend that the Gosford Wellhead moreover speaks to a shared loss of control in both myths.

Excerpt

In both the myths of Narcissus and Hylas, the characters seal their demises through water—Narcissus falls in love with his own reflection and Hylas is abducted by water nymphs. This is represented in a second century A.D. wellhead where water flows in carved marble lines along the bottom of portrayals of the two myths. Yet, more than drawing us to recognize the connection of water, the Gosford Wellhead speaks to a loss of control. The Gosford Wellhead centers the viewer’s attention to both characters’ individual losses of bodily autonomy, while also illuminating this point of comparison between the stories.  

The Gosford Wellhead is a cylindrical wellhead, carved out of a single block of marble (Hemingway). The middle of the wellhead is concave with ridges on the bottom and top. Mid relief trees decorate the background, while the scene’s figures are depicted in mostly high relief. The wellhead weaves in scenes of Narcissus and Echo—on one side it portrays Nemesis pouring water into Narcissus’ reflection. Echo is laid on the ground behind him, separated by a tree and gazing towards Narcissus. Directly on the other side of the wellhead, Hylas is gripped by two water nymphs. Another nymph lays to their right, looking at the three figures with her body and feet pointing towards Nemesis. The rest of the background is negative space.

While the cylindrical form of the wellhead factors in chance in what scene the viewer approaches, it indicates two focal points on either side of the wellhead—Narcissus’ reflection and Hylas’ face. Approaching the wellhead on the side with Narcissus, both his and Nemesis’ side profiles are both tilted downwards, gazing at Narcissus’ reflection. This angular focus is also supported by Nemesis’ diagonal form and both characters’ feet pointing towards Narcissus’ reflection, altogether compelling us to focus on what traps Narcissus—his reflection in the water.

The sculpture clarifies Narcissus’ lack of control through the fluidity of the water, specifically poured by Nemesis, the goddess of retribution. Instead of capturing Narcissus stumbling upon his reflection in a desolate area of the forest, the wellhead portrays Nemesis pouring the water, indicating that there is another figure catalyzing his demise. The pool of water that Nemesis creates by pouring additionally has no other carvings around it to indicate that it is a pond or lake. Instead, the wellhead emphasizes that Nemesis is not just the one pouring a spring into an already existing body of water but creating the source of his reflection. While his reaction to the water that leads him to fall in love with himself is already in the hands of fate and his curse as according to myth, the wellhead takes it even more so out of his hands, by portraying someone else causing his trapping. The water Nemesis pours is also extremely fluid—the smaller repetitive streams flowing out of the water are carved with wavy lines. The sculpture juxtaposes the moving and infinite volume of water pouring to the comparatively smaller jug that it flows out of, evoking a sense of seeming permanence—Nemesis is somehow able to infinitely pour water into his reflection, infinitely trapping him. 

The varying levels of movement expressed by both figures’ body language emphasize that Narcissus’ fate is not just in the hands of someone else, but so is his bodily autonomy. Nemesis is reclined—her diagonal form may indicate instability, but upon closer examination one can see that she is resting on a tree supporting her body and arm. In contrast, Narcissus is frozen mid-movement. His arm is turned upwards, with his palm facing outwards, creating a sense of surprise and that he just stumbled upon this reflection. Likewise, the implied texture of Nemesis’ clothing connotes a sense of movement like the water—the repetition of the fluid folds of her clothing are more emphasized than Narcissus’ clothing, accentuating his stasis. His hair in the reflection of the image does blend into the water, and yet, the one element of Narcissus that has movement is the reflection that traps him. Thus, the sculpture depicts the twofold causes of his trapping—Nemesis and his reflection—as comfortable and mobile, in contrast to his paralysis. This amplifies his lack of control over his movement and bodily autonomy. 

In addition to portraying Narcissus’ paralysis, the sculpture enables the viewer to experience it. Narcissus’ reflection is especially high relief, to the extent that the reflection becomes almost horizontally protruding from the wellhead. As such, especially as the wellhead is naturally below the viewer due to its proportions, the viewer can peer into Narcissus’ reflection and experience his point of view, but then move away while he is trapped staring at his reflection. This interactive element of the piece also amplifies the inescapability of his fate—the viewer can look at his reflection from an authoritative position and escape, but he cannot.

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Author Commentary / Olivia Roslansky

Prior to writing this paper, I had never written a close reading of a sculpture nor a wellhead. This paper was the fourth close reading that I wrote for the Humanities Sequence during the fall of 2022, my first year. After taking a trip to the Met and observing different sculptures and paintings, I was intrigued to engage with sculpture by applying what I had learned about close reading for literary texts thus far. I was particularly drawn to the wellhead due to its interactive form—to ‘read’ it, I had to traverse it in a circle, observing the different carvings and the stories they told. As I observed the wellhead, I wondered—what does it mean to perform a close reading of sculpture? For our previous close readings of text, I interpreted the meanings of short passages through literary mechanisms such as imagery or alliteration. Moving to art, we received guidance in terms of different elements to pay attention to, like scale, material, composition, and context. We were advised to spend at least 20-30 minutes observing the art, interacting with its features and context. In the time that I traversed the wellhead, I made note of different focal points through the composition of sections of the wellhead and began to notice its depictions of losses of control, and how I was drawn to observe them. While writing my essay, I struggled most with writing a cohesive analysis and structuring my argument. While performing a close reading of a literary text I could analyze a passage in chronological order, but the interactivity of the wellhead implied that a viewer could approach the sculpture from any point, so I felt that I could begin my paper at any point. Yet, upon analyzing the sculpture, I noticed the two portrayals of the two myths on opposing sides of the wellhead, as well as where my eyes were drawn and how I moved along the wellhead, connecting the myths, regardless of where I began. Thus, I wrote the paper in that form—observing both myths and how the wellhead emphasizes and connects them. Ultimately, it was both engaging and challenging to perform a close reading of a wellhead, and it drew my attention to the importance of interdisciplinary writing. While a different form, I was able to apply similar skills I had since developed while analyzing literary work to the sculpture, like in terms of synthesizing the effects of different artistic elements. The sculpture, too, told a story through the two myths, illuminating a comparison between them through its carvings.

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Editor Commentary / Nadja Markov

Writing a compelling close reading can be a daunting task for first-year students—especially if the close reading is not that of a text, but of a sculpture. The pictures of the sculpture on the first page of Olivia’s paper were what initially sparked my interest in it. Olivia starts off the essay by discussing the parallels between the myths of Narcissus and Hylas and using this vivid imagery to introduce her thesis. As such, she managed to set the tone for the rest of her paper and spark my interest as a reader very early on in her work, which in turn elevated my reading experience and the amount of information I got out of the text.

From here we can see Olivia clearly defining the object that she is focusing on—describing the sculpture while focusing on the details that will be important for the rest of her analysis. The relevant information about the piece is made explicit to the reader—there is no second guessing about where to look. This also sets the stage for the beginning of her analysis. With the readers familiarized with the piece itself, she can now delve into the details and explore how they relate to her thesis.

Within the analysis itself, we can see that the approaches might be different than what we are used to when doing a close reading of a text—rather than analyzing specific sentences, Olivia is analyzing angles and focal points. Although the medium is different, the methods used are rather similar—we start from a question, and look for answers within the piece.

By looking at the structure of the analysis paragraphs, we can see that Olivia starts them with a sentence that summarizes the most important points of the paragraph itself. As a reader, this helped me understand what to focus on and also provided me with a foundation with which I could follow Olivia’s line of reasoning. Choosing to emphasize certain words in the essay by italicizing them also made her points clearer to me as a reader, as it once again told me what to focus my attention on.

In a Tortoiseshell

The following excerpt is from my midterm paper for my freshman seminar, FRS117: Tragedy and the Meaning of Life. There was no prompt for this assignment—the only restriction was that we had to write about a text we had read in class so far—so I opted to write about Romeo and Juliet. In this paper, I chose to interrogate why the language of Romeo and Juliet shifts between what I coined to be “conventional” (filled with familiar literary forms and tropes) and “authentic” rhetorical styles. I ultimately contend that a rhetoric of authenticity necessarily reflects the tragic complexities of reality, a reality that cannot be neatly categorized by convention, borrowing Victor Shklovsky’s concept of “defamiliarization” to help me argue that moments of syntactical authenticity heighten the play’s tragic gravitas.

Excerpt

Conventional rhetoric is not just unable to represent reality, but it fails to represent tragedy, which for Shakespeare is an integral part of reality. This idea crystallizes in the latter half of the play, when the play’s truly tragic moments occur. In particular, Lord Capulet’s reaction to Juliet’s ‘death’ is stiff and forced: he says “Death lies on her like an untimely frost / Upon the sweetest flower of all the field,”¹ and a few lines down, continues “Flower as she was, deflowerèd by him. / Death is my son-in-law, Death is my heir.”² Here, the consecutive accumulation of conventional floral imagery and filial metaphors makes Capulet’s expression of grief appear contrived. In fact, imagery associating dead brides with flowers can even be found within numerous epitaphs in the Greek Anthology, a Renaissance record of Hellenic poetry.³ Capulet’s mourning, modeled on the Classics, is therefore derivative. When read in the context of the rest of the scene, the detachment and automaticity of Capulet’s dialogue becomes even more apparent. Just before Capulet delivers his lines, the Nurse exclaims “She’s dead, deceased, she’s dead, alack the day!”⁴ which is mirrored by Lady Capulet’s exclamation, “Alack the day, she’s dead, she’s dead, she’s dead!”⁵ Unlike Capulet, the reactions of the Nurse and Lady Capulet more authentically convey the grief of losing a child. While Capulet uses descriptive imagery, neither the Nurse nor Lady Capulet do so: for them, their sorrow and shock are unable to be adequately captured but for repeating the words “she’s dead”, an utterance that seems out of place in a play filled with poetic language, but an utterance that nonetheless feels like a natural expression of grief for the audience. In this context, Capulet’s turn to literary convention appears detached from the actual emotional consequences of the tragedy. 

Accordingly, an authentic rhetoric, which is divested of convention, is better able to understand a world that is itself unconventional; authenticity indeed heightens the audience’s ability to feel the tragic emotions of fear and pity because it enables the process of defamiliarization. In his essay ‘Art as Device,’ Russian Formalist critic Victor Shklovsky defines defamiliarization as the act of describing objects and experiences in novel, unfamiliar ways so that the audience can view these objects and experiences in a different light. Shklovsky refers to the Aristotelian notion that poetic language must have “something foreign, something outlandish about it.”⁶ To put it simply, conventional rhetoric produces an automatic effect on the audience; that is, when the audience hears a sonnet, they know the characters are deeply in love. When rhetoric is then authentic—meaning it lacks familiar literary conventions—the audience is confronted with tragedy in ways they have not experienced before in previous literature, and thus fear and pity are produced in new ways. 

The defamiliarizing power of authentic rhetoric is epitomized by Juliet’s Act IV Scene 3  soliloquy. Juliet’s soliloquy can be read in contrast to Aristotle’s concept of dianoia (‘tragic language’), which Aristotle believed should include references and allusions, typically to Classical mythology.⁷ Devoid of these conventions, Juliet’s soliloquy instead uses defamiliarizing vivid imagery to express her troubled interiority. Unlike her father who uses borrowed Classical imagery in his mourning, Juliet portrays death brutally and viscerally. She fears being “stifled”⁸ in a place “where the bones / Of all my buried ancestors are packed,”⁹ presenting death as suffocating and asphyxiating. She then imagines waking up to “madly play with my forefathers’ joints, / And pluck the mangled Tybalt from his shroud, / And, in this rage, with some great kinsman’s bone / As with a club dash out my desp’rate brains?”,¹⁰ a series of grotesque images strung together by verbs so tactile that the audience can almost physically feel the violence. This soliloquy, moreover, is formally defamiliarizing, as Juliet frequently breaks the usually stable flow of iambic pentameter. For example, the three-syllable long line “Come, vial,”¹¹ beginning with the forceful imperative, reflects Juliet’s unwavering and resolute mindset. More importantly, it is the lack of the other seven syllables that makes this line effective: by giving the audience time to pause, Shakespeare heightens the tragic solemnity of this scene. Breaks in form continue throughout the soliloquy to reflect Juliet’s conflicted line of thought, such as the line “No, no! This shall forbid it. Lie thou there.”¹² Here, the caesuras disrupt the rhythm of the soliloquy, underscoring Juliet’s inner turmoil as she alternates between her fear of death and commitment to the Friar’s plan. The soliloquy concludes with the line “Romeo, Romeo, Romeo! Here’s drink. I drink to thee,”¹³ in which the rapid stream of syllables in this fifteen-syllable line amplifies the intensity of the tragic moment. 

Footnotes

1. William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, ed. Peter Holland (Penguin Books, 2016), 4.5.28-29. ↩︎
2. Shakespeare, 4.5.38-39. ↩︎
3. Gayle Whittier, “The Sonnet’s Body and the Body Sonnetized in Romeo and Juliet,” Shakespeare Quarterly 40, no. 1 (1989): 27—41, https://doi.org/10.2307/2870752. ↩︎
4. Shakespeare, 4.5.107.  ↩︎
5. Shakespeare, 4.5.108. ↩︎
6. Victor Shklovsky, “Art as Device,” in Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher (Dalkey Archive Press, 1990), 1—14. In this essay, Shklovsky coins the idea of “defamiliarization,” the idea that poetry should describe familiar things in unfamiliar ways such that the reader can gain a newfound appreciation or perspective. This will be expanded on further in the essay. ↩︎
7. Aristotle, “Aristotle, Poetics (C.350-330 BCE),” in Reader in Tragedy: An Anthology of Classical Criticism to Contemporary Theory, ed. Marcus Nevitt and Tanya Pollard (Methuen Drama, 2019), 23. Aristotle argues that the purpose of tragedy is to arouse “pity and fear” in the audience through the process of imitation. ↩︎
8. Shakespeare, 4.3.33. ↩︎
9. Shakespeare, 4.3.40-41. ↩︎
10. Shakespeare, 4.3.51-54. ↩︎
11. Shakespeare, 4.3.20. ↩︎
12. Shakespeare, 4.3.23. ↩︎
13. Shakespeare, 4.3.58.  ↩︎

Bibliography

Aristotle. “Aristotle, Poetics (C.350-330 BCE).” In Reader in Tragedy: An Anthology of Classical Criticism to Contemporary Theory, edited by Marcus Nevitt and Tanya Pollard. Methuen Drama, 2019.

Brown, Carolyn E. “Juliet’s Taming of Romeo.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 36, no. 2 (1996): 333—55. https://doi.org/10.2307/450952.

Petrarch, Francesco. Sonnets and Shorter Poems. Translated by David R. Slavitt. Harvard University Press, 2012.

Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet. Edited by Peter Holland. Penguin Books, 2016.

Shklovsky, Victor. “Art as Device.” In Theory of Prose, translated by Benjamin Sher, 1—14. Dalkey Archive Press, 1990.

Whittier, Gayle. “The Sonnet’s Body and the Body Sonnetized in ‘Romeo and Juliet.’” Shakespeare Quarterly 40, no. 1 (1989): 27—41. https://doi.org/10.2307/2870752. 

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Author Commentary / Nikki Han 

Attempting to write a paper about a play that has centuries worth of scholarly discourse was an incredibly daunting task. I had no idea where to begin, so I began by going back through the notes I had typed in class. There were two key ideas that stuck out to me in my notes: the first was a brief mention of Petrarch’s influence on Romeo’s language; the second was an observation that Juliet’s soliloquy was devoid of references and allusions. These two ideas, I realized, seemed to be in tension with each other. Consequently, I went back through the play and realized I could use a framework of “convention” and “authenticity” (though I had not yet come up with these specific words to frame my thoughts) to understand the language of the entire play. Arriving at the thesis, however, was still a difficult process. I brainstormed and mind-mapped, drafted and redrafted thesis statements, until I finally arrived at a thesis that actually convinced me. Along the way, I decided to use Victor Schlovsky’s theory of “defamiliarization,” which I had encountered back in high school, as I found that “defamiliarization” could help explain the effect of “authentic” rhetoric: convention is familiar, and authenticity is (sometimes) unfamiliar. 

My thesis hinges on careful textual analysis, so doing an effective close reading of Shakespeare’s language was integral to my piece. In order to argue my thesis, I had to prove multiple things: firstly, that the play’s language does actually fluctuate between conventional and authentic; secondly, that Shakespeare’s contrasting use of conventional and authentic rhetoric reflects his specific, tragic vision of the world; and thirdly, that moments of authenticity heighten the play’s tragic gravitas. To do so, I moved between analyzing individual words, assessing meter, and examining the very structure of the tragedy. I also completed additional research to help me understand when Shakespeare invoked other literary traditions and authors. Doing this close reading helped uncover an entire world of meaning that lay beneath the highly wrought text. Juliet famously says “That which we call a rose / By any other word would smell as sweet”—an adage that illuminates the gap between language and lived experiences—but when analyzing literature, a “rose” is always called a “rose” for a reason.

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Editor Commentary / Annie Kim

College-level writing can seem daunting, especially when your chosen topic is a text that has been studied and commented upon for hundreds of years. Nikki’s impressive paper, which is even more so because it was written for an FRS course, trusts in her own reading of a text instead of excessively historicizing Early Modern English. She critically examines the use of classical allusions and literary tropes in the expression of love and grief and incorporates a concept from high school to form her motive, just like the Gaipa moves we often discuss in Writing Seminar. With her paper, Nikki proves that college-level writing is not an unreachable goal but simply a small step up from what we can all achieve with practice.

We worked on maintaining the close focus of her argument by avoiding defaulting to the general argument that hyperbole creates a sense of contrivance. This excerpt, taken from the end of Nikki’s paper, demonstrates her eloquent and concise orienting which is done throughout her paper, as when she introduces “defamiliarization” and “dianoia,” which she uses to support her analysis of textual evidence. Nikki’s thesis is clearly stated at various appropriate points — “…an authentic form of rhetoric, defined by its lack of literary influences and occasional breaking of meter, is more effectively able to represent the complex tragedies of reality…” and “through the process of defamiliarization, a rhetoric of authenticity is able to generate the greatest tragic effect…” — shows the amount of thought she put into its formulation. 

We could have simply titled this section “Close Reading”—but we carefully chose each word to offer a more detailed insight into what we mean by close reading. 

“Reinterpreting”: interpreting as the work of making observations and weaving them together to tell a particular story; interpret-ing to emphasize this kind of storytelling as an ongoing process; re-interpreting to signal that, on a larger scale, different thinkers can offer different interpretations from all kinds of angles for the same work of art. “Art”: in this section of the Tortoise, the language of a play (Romeo and Juliet in Nikki’s paper), the carvings of a marble sculpture (The Gosford Wellhead in Olivia’s paper), the illustrative details of a figure depicted in a manuscript (The Rylands Haggadah in Tali’s paper), as three of countless possibilities. “Through close analysis”: a slow, careful approach to reinterpreting the work of art, zooming in to the details, being specific about the specific, drawing out meaningful implications, making connections across these details to show how they all come together in the work as a whole. 

Each of the three writers walks us through a close analysis of their chosen work of art, often chosen out of personal fascination, and offers new ways of thinking about these pieces that have already been thought about before—just not in a way Nikki, Olivia, and Tali are uniquely perceiving. Their innovative interventions begin with their sharp eyes for noticing what interests them, which they then take the time to pause over, sit with, think through, and excitedly guide their readers to better understand—reinterpret, reimagine—the work of art alongside them.

— Grace Kim ‘25