Structures of feeling in seventeenth-century cultural expression

Structures of feeling in seventeenth-century cultural expression, edited by Susan McClary, Toronto, University of Toronto Press in association with the UCLA Center for 17th- and 18th- Century Studies & the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 2013, xv + 382 pp., £80.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-4426-4062-7Structures of Feeling in Seventeenth-Century Cultural Expression emerged from a 2004 to 2005 lecture series, organized by the UCLA Center for 17th- and 18th- Century Studies, at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library in Los Angeles.Susan McClary's introduction presents the seventeenth century as a pivotal period for pre-Enlightenment "theories for understanding and manipulating the passions, construc- tions of gender and the erotic, expressions of religious devotion, ways of experiencing time and space, [and] conceptions of the self" torquing through historical change (3). At the book's core is Raymond Williams's "structures of feeling", in all of its difficulty and elusiveness. Each of the volume's essays understands this phrase differently; the subse- quently nebulous focus proves both a virtue and a liability, as it admits diverse approaches but threatens to reduce the whole to a muddle of cultural narratives and analyses. Yet, largely through McClary's efforts to structure and frame it, the book succeeds in showing a seventeenth century defined by mutating senses of motion and space, dynamic relations between "texts" and feelings (as intellectual and embodied) and cultural forms organizing shifting social relations.In both its title and introduction, Structures of Feeling presents a rather misleading front of disciplinary diversity. McClary underscores the need to move beyond textual studies per se towards a more varied view of expressive textures: "So long as we demand verbal confirmation as evidence for historical arguments, we will continue to neglect some of the most profound changes that have occurred within the development of European thought" (4). Richard Rambuss provides the book's only literary treatment with his provocative and paradigm-challenging, if somewhat inconclusive, analysis of Richard Crashaw's verse and its emphatically hostile reception. Unexpectedly, eight of the twelve essays focus on music and/or sound. While the aural may be an under- appreciated but crucial mode of access to seventeenth-century "structures of feeling", greater disciplinary diversity might have yielded a more representative and altogether more significant contribution.1The two music-oriented essays of the final section, audaciously titled "Toward a History of Time and Subjectivity", by McClary and Richard Leppert, respectively, move compel- lingly from sensitive close analyses to profound implications for the understanding of temporal consciousness, relationships between art and society and secularizing processes. Yet given the book's dominant focus on music, a middle section on "The Politics of Opera" surprisingly contributes least to the project. It includes two pieces; first, Wendy Heller 's essay on Ovidian metamorphosis in Venetian opera, which, though colourfully descriptive, offers the self-evident pay-off that "feelings give birth to music" (200) and that the opera privileged Ovid's myths of desire-induced, music-generating change. Louise K. Stein's work on Gaspar de Haro y Guzman and the financial, political, personal and aesthetic influences on late seventeenth-century Neapolitan opera follows. Though Stein brings abundant archival research and historical knowledge, the essay does not offer claims extensive enough to strengthen the book's core.Structures of Feeling excites with its kaleidoscope of passions, forms of repression, spectacle, grotesque and erotic bodies, tensions and conflicts, sensory richness and 32 illustrations. Several essays impress. Daniel Garber offers an effortlessly engaging study of the passions and post-Newtonian mathematics, with a lucid account of Spinoza: a fitting foundation, or stabilizing anchor, for such a potentially cumbersome volume. …