The Invention of Privacy in Early Modern Literature - Detailseite

At the end of the 16^th and in the first half of the 17^th century, the meaning and importance of privacy changes drastically. While earlier, privacy referred almost exclusively to an absence of social status, it is now being related to three further and very different dimensions: personal property and ownership; notions of secrecy; and interiority. As such, privacy entangles social, spatial and economic differentiations with social practices and the way these practices actively and performatively establish boundaries, hierarchies and meaning. Literature plays an important part in these developments. It not only represents, for example, a new interiority, but crucially becomes itself a medium through which privacy can be constructed and reflected upon in its various social, political and epistemological implications. By concentrating on early-modern poetry and the new genre of the essay in particular, the seminar will look at how privacy is textually encoded, but also how early-modern texts construct, e.g., gendered spaces, how these relate to evolving notions of interiority, individuality or domesticity, which role literature and the practice of exchanging texts plays for the establishment of social bonds, exclusivity and friendship and how that, in turn, contributes to the emergence of a new understanding of ‘literature’ itself.