Franco moretti signs taken for wonders6/24/2023 Having deconsecrated the king, tragedy made it possible to decapitate him.’ Wow. I remember with particular clarity the essay ‘The Great Eclipse’, in which Moretti shows that ‘Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy was in fact one of the decisive influences in the creation of a “public” that for the first time in history assumed the right to bring a king to justice … Tragedy disentitled the absolute monarch to all ethical and rational legitimation. Moretti’s discussions of the rhetoric, import and impact of such wondrous signs as Shakespeare’s theatre, description in nineteenth-century novels, and the Romantic revivification of the figures of the vampire and the zombie, moved with unparalleled ease from microscopic details of imagery out into the grand complexities of literature’s social milieus. Like that preposterous wanderer, dazzled by appearances, I immediately snuck my head into Moretti’s sparkling intellectual skies, and was apprised of the real mechanics behind things. I picked up his suggestively titled collection of critical essays Signs Taken for Wonders (1983) at a second-hand store, mainly because I liked the cover image – a nineteenth-century faux-mediaeval fantasia of a robed wanderer sticking his head through the sphere of sun and stars to see the secret universal machinery clanking away beneath. My first encounter with the work of Franco Moretti was as an undergraduate literature student.
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