Abstract
The introduction defines humanism as an inherently stupid philosophy and offers stupid humanism as the more fitting term for a philosophy that takes seriously, and literally, the idea of living a full life. Spam, both the noun and the verb, is offered as a useful metaphor for copia as overacting, overdoing, overselling, overstuffing. To contemplate spam is to consider how and why we develop an appetite for what cannot sustain us, fails to satisfy us and even threatens to make us sick. Spam is, by definition, unsolicited and uncalled for material, and for modern internet-users, spam is also unavoidable. But even sixteenth-century audiences could not avoid encounters with spam—not if they practiced copious rhetoric. Copia teaches eloquence through exercises in over-abundance. It recognizes variety—and the controversy that stems from it—as the beating heart of humanism.
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Notes
- 1.
As the website Know Your Meme explains, the X all the Y (or X all the Things) meme originated in the web comic Hyperbole and a Half, created by Ally Brosh .
- 2.
“occupy, v.” OED Online. Oxford UP, September 2016. Accessed 31 October 2016.
- 3.
Terence Cave explores this process in wonderful detail in The Cornucopian Text. See especially pages 29–34.
- 4.
See, for example, web cartoonist Kris Straub’s three-panel comic depicting a figure smugly ignoring the house on fire to his right while hosing down the undamaged house to his left, because “all houses matter” (“all things considered,” chainsawsuit.com, 8 December 2014).
- 5.
See the “Draft additions June 2001” section of “Spam, n.” OED Online. Oxford UP, September 2016. Accessed 31 October 2016.
- 6.
Scholasticism and stoicism can serve as examples of the former philosophies, Augustinianism of the latter. See Sloane pages 92–94.
- 7.
Donald Wehrs, in Touching Words, emphasizes Erasmus’s insistence “that cultural discourse be responsive to embodied experience … in a manner that opens us to other people, which in turn opens us to a ‘good speech’ that contests totalizing thought—for Erasmus, self-enclosed scholastic discourse” (9).
- 8.
Montaigne goes on to declare: “The bees plunder the flowers here and there, but afterward they make of them honey, which is all theirs; it is no longer thyme or marjoram. Even so with the pieces borrowed from others; he will transform and blend them to make a work that is all his own, to wit, his judgment” (111).
- 9.
Ronald Knowles, for example, reads Hamlet as a critique of humanist rhetoric for its restrictive “cognitive structure” (1064). Rather than equip Hamlet with “ample resources” of exchange, humanist rhetoric encroaches upon him, driving him to desperation and dissolution through the “ahistorical assumption of the universality of human nature” that the commonplace tradition in particular enforced (1058). Ann Blair suggests “it is reasonable to speak of encyclopedic ambition as a central ingredient of the Renaissance obsession with accumulating information. Though this ambition was not new, it drives some Renaissance figures (like Theodor Zwinger) to new heights of megalomania” (12).
- 10.
O’Brien quotes from Greene’s “Vulnerabilities of the Humanist Text,” where the latter goes on to praise Renaissance humanism for “that philological protection” it provides “from the difficulty of understanding, without narcissism, texts whose origins are remote … It is the strength of so much Renaissance writing that it settles for less than the utopian. As we gauge the endeavor of the Renaissance to cope with its own separation from its imputed sources and masters, we can recognize its need and its courage in stringing up precarious lifelines, imitations of cultural sequence, defining each work, each essay, as a vulnerable extension out of the remote into a self-creating, self-vindicating present” (Greene 142).
- 11.
Remarking on the “redundancy” cultivated by writers who indulge in copious rhetoric, Christopher Johnson traces copia’s tendency “to heighten the reader’s sense that, despite the author’s mastery and ingenuity, language (verba) has failed to furnish that definitive, supplementary part, and that this failure is now itself the subject, the matter (res), at hand” (1098).
- 12.
Nicholson’s Uncommon Tongues elaborates the reasons this perspective is particularly relevant to English rhetoricians, for whom “[t]o speak English eloquently was, by definition, to speak it strangely” (10). See also Jenny Mann’s Outlaw Rhetoric.
- 13.
“I see you expect an epilogue,” Folly says, “but you’re out of your minds if you suppose I still remember what I said after spouting such a jumble of words. The old saying was, ‘I hate a drinking companion with a memory,’ and here’s a new one to go with it, ‘I hate an audience that won’t forget.’ And so I’ll say Goodbye. Clap your hands, live well, and drink deep, most illustrious disciples of Folly ” (Praise 87).
- 14.
The editors of Agnotology: The Making & Unmaking of Ignorance explore not knowing in this way—as “a primitive or native state” (Proctor 4)—and many others: ignorance as vacuum, resource, passive choice and strategic maneuver.
- 15.
See the countless articles written both before and after the election of Donald Trump from the perspective of “those who know better”. Some examples: Eric Sasson,“Blame Trump’s Victory on College-Educated Whites, Not the Working Class,” New Republic, 15 November 2016; David Wong, “How Half Of America Lost Its F**king Mind,” Cracked, 12 October 2016; Michelle Cottle, “Trump’s Fans Have More to Lose Than Trump Himself,” The Atlantic, 14 October 2016; Joan C. Williams, “What So Many People Don’t Get About the US Working Class,” Harvard Business Review, 10 November 2016.
- 16.
From the text: “And now, my boys, I shall praise Socrates in a figure which will appear to him to be a caricature, and yet I speak, not to make fun of him, but only for the truth’s sake. I say, that he is exactly like the busts of Silenus, which are set up in the statuaries’ shops, holding pipes and flutes in their mouths; and they are made to open in the middle, and have images of gods inside them.”
- 17.
Compare Sam Gilchrist Hall’s discussion of the Silenus as a “duplicitous icon” that “undermines its revelation[s]” about reality versus appearances, and thus “embodies the need to have a skeptical attitude towards determinate values, even of the determinate value of universal indeterminacy” (67).
- 18.
The anecdote appears in the first chapter of A Brief History of Time (1988) :
A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”.
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Hoffmann, C. (2017). Introduction: Spamming the Renaissance. In: Stupid Humanism. Early Modern Cultural Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63751-8_1
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