"Literal": The Wandering Wood and Lowly Hermitage of Spenser’s Fairie Queene

• In Event: Figurative, Allegorical, Literal: Rethinking Fundamentals

Abstract

“I literally died,” says the mortified (but still ambulatory) middle-schooler. Current colloquial usage of “literal” to indicate its opposite strikes wordsmiths as uncogent. The duplicity of the “literal” is, however, no trendy novelty. As a contrast to the figurative, “literal” marks bald referentiality, indicating meaning that is bounded by the “letter” as alphabetic character. Within the economy of the “literary,” by contrast, “literal” in the sense of “lettery” is precisely unbounded, operating with all the supple dynamism of complex semiotic aesthetics.
Spenser’s Redcrosse Knight would recognize kinship with the “literally” dying seventh grader, “mortification” etymologically encapsulating death. I suggests that what intitially might seem sui generis in The Faerie Queene’s explorations of the “literal” in fact limn the literal’s characteristic duality, as Redcrosse discovers how the superficial letter interpenetrates semantic possibilities that extend both laterally (into other texts) and vertically (into the history of single words in his own text).

Author

• Lauren Shohet, Villanova University