|aTHE STORY OF O: PROSTITUTES AND OTHER GOOD-FOR-NOTHINGS IN THE RENAISSANCE (MATHEMATICS, PETRARCH, PRINT, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, CRYPTOGRAPHY).
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|a239 p.
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|aSource: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 59-01, Section: A, page: 0161.
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|aAdviser: MARC SHELL.
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|aThesis (PH.D.)--HARVARD UNIVERSITY, 1998.
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|a"The Story of O" examines the evolution of 'nothing' in the Renaissance. Using the introduction of the zero or O during the sixteenth century as my starting place, I chart the incredible impact of being able for the first time to represent the idea, "this space is empty." Investigating nothing inevitably reveals changes in the status and nature of something; new modes of representing nothing and making it apprehensible, throw into question old modes of representing, knowing, and being any thing. The early chapters of my dissertation use mathematical primers, metallurgy texts, and account books to demonstrate that by challenging the conventional connection between being and substance, the cipher zero led to the development of paper money and an entirely nothing-based economy. In this economy of paper, value comes to reside in words which assume the ring of cold hard cash. Their metallic nature is underscored by print, the device which turns manuscript words into leaden figures. The massive effects of this transformation are explored in the central chapters of my dissertation using language designed to say nothing, cipher or code, to unmask how language says anything. I demonstrate that writing under the sign or scudo of the print shop, and writing obscurely or in code, are actually the same thing, both playing on seams of meaning through changes in reproduction. I conclude by offering a new reading of the posthumous popularity of the petrarchan lyric as a means of authorial self-definition, revealing strong conceptual parallels between this form and the new emptiness at the heart of Renaissance culture and subjectivity. Petrarchism exploits and amplifies the devices of the press, emulating the machine's mechanics in its poetics. Through this lyric, the blazon or scudo which served as a printer's device is transformed into the ultimate device of the author. The potency of petrarchism as a mode of self-definition, I demonstrate, is precisely due O, which is not simply a familiar shape but also the first person subject ending on Italian verbs, both number and letter at once.