“Small Officiousnesses”: Minorness and Intimacy in Early Modern English Literature

Arya Sureshbabu
English
UC Berkeley

My dissertation establishes minor poetics as a valuable and purposefully porous category for analysis. My fine-grained readings of Dorothy Osborne, Aemilia Lanyer, John Donne, Katherine Philips, William Shakespeare, and John Milton challenge critical tendencies to conflate minorness with the one-dimensionality of privation. Rather than indexing alienation—as modes of social minority do—these authors’ craftsmanlike attention to minor effects models an intimate proximity through textual minutiae ranging from parentheses to stichomythia. Working across genres from prose correspondence and lyric verse to commercial drama and patronage poems, I argue that the practice of close reading, far from being a merely normative technique that emerges in twentieth-century literary criticism, is woven into early modern writers’ simultaneously needling and contingent bids for connection. By recovering the rich affective possibilities attending early modernity’s nuanced vocabulary of minorness, this project sheds new light on the works of so-called minor authors of the Renaissance, especially women writers who have long been relegated to the margins of the literary canon. I make a strong case for reading minor authors minutely, unearthing surprising resonances between canonical and extracanonical works in their shared preoccupation with the small-scale ethics of interpersonal relation.