THE WEB ESSAY: EXPLORING ARGUMENTS

TROPES

From "Renaissance/Early Modern Studies" by Leah S. Marcus:

I hope to suggest through this discussion that the scholarly tropes we use as favorite tools in interpreting the Renaissance and/or early modern era are themselves signs of the change encapsulated in the nomenclature: we need to examine the functions of the intellectual and rhetorical baggage we bring to our enterprise, by whatever name we call it. To single out for a moment only terms I have used in composing these introductory paragraphs, we need to ask why we think of our subject in terms of such pervasively geographic metaphors: as a "terrain," an "area," a "field" that is being "remapped" or "explored," or as an "enterprise" that, like travel across a space that is not our accustomed terrain, requires us to take along "baggage." (41)

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