Open Subjects

This is revelatory work that pries open challenging literary texts to reveal human vulnerability as a central thematic and political element. Kuzner will change our thinking about the early modern subject.'Barbara Correll, Cornell University'Sensitive to ambient changes in social life, Kuzner's heroes of vulnerability, adrift in an unguarded existence where immune defenses have been turned off, hatch scripts for "worlds elsewhere," alternative modernities founded on pleasure, enjoyment, and the forms of openness they incite and sustain.'Julia Reinhard Lupton, author of Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life -- Barbara Correll and Julia Reinhard Lupton
Where studies of early modern subject formation have causally linked republican political thought and the evolution of a bounded subject, Kuzner's Open Subjects argues for rethinking social formations of both past and present and reopens questions of the subject as represented in Spenser, Shakespeare, Marvell, and Milton. In finely nuanced readings, Kuzner argues convincingly that these major figures foreground the vulnerability of key characters: open subjects. In his thoughtful engagements with major literary and political criticism, he connects the open subject to a rarely acknowledged radical republicanism that speaks eloquently in drama, poetry, and epic. He pries open perennially challenging texts to reveal his authors' investments in human vulnerability as a central thematic element and as a political resource, even as a constitutive social requirement. Kuzner's theoretically informed readings reach back to Cicero, converse closely with early modern writers, and connect to the contemporary theory of Bataille, Butler and Agamben. This is revelatory and illuminating work that will change the way that we think about the early modern subject and social-political formations in a past that speaks in the present. -- Barbara Correll, Cornell University
In this brave and powerful book, James Kuzner looks to the republican experiments of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England for experimental forms of social organization and subjective experience. The vulnus in "vulnerability" is an opening, a mouth, a sore, a rim: both an entry and an exit point for words and fluids alike, and hence a place where history passes. Kuzner's open subjects find themselves adrift in an unguarded existence where immune defenses and security systems have been turned off. Sensitive to ambient changes in social life, these heroes of vulnerability hatch scripts for "world elsewhere," alternative modernities founded on pleasure, enjoyment, and the forms of openness they incite and sustain. -- Julia Reinhard Lupton, author of Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life