Printed Voices: The Renaissance Culture of Dialogue (review)
anatomy of Folly; an essay about Dürer’s and Bruegel’s visual portrayals of vomiting, defecation, and urination in images of peasant festivals; and, finally, for England, articles on Marlowe’s Tamburlaine and English Cavalier verse. Many of the essays work on the intersections between literature and science, revealing a desire to address interdisciplinarily the cultural production and representation of discourses of human waste through the use of what was, arguably, one of the dominant discourses of the day — the literary and/or the visual — alongside one that was marginal, because as yet emergent — the medical/scientific. It would seem then that the modern-day hegemony of medico-scientific discourses of the human enables, in collections such as Fecal Matters, a renewed consideration in literature and the visual arts of those aspects of the body most effaced in academic humanist endeavor, among them the elimination of waste. Given that many contributors argue authorial and textual fascination with excremental matters as a result of developments in science and scientific discourses about the body, and that they also attribute symbolic and allegorical purposes to the scatological, what emerges for me is a sense of the similarities rather than the differences between then and now, both with regard to the complementarity between developments in the larger culture and textually specific discourses and with regard to the uses to which these discourses are put and the genres within which they appear. Thus the sense that the editors have of early modern difference from the present seems, at times, somewhat overstressed; similarities can be equally interesting and worthy of analysis, and there are many to be discerned in the scatological discourses and depictions under study. If such is the case, psychoanalysis — deemed too psychological and ahistorical to be of continued pertinence by the New Historicist, (neo) Bakhtinian, and Foucauldian perspectives championed here — may yet be able to provide us with insights into why seemingly nonsexual excreta (the collection does not deal with all physical elimination, though it does tackle both solid and liquid waste) constitute the “last taboo” (xiii). In breaching that taboo (so to speak), the essays gathered in this volume contribute importantly to the cultural materialist and Foucauldian project of constructing a genealogical history of the body’s discursively productive wastes. CARLA FRECCERO University of California, Santa Cruz