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Pushing off from Samuel Johnson’s allegation that in Donne’s poetry “heterogenous ideas are yoked by violence together”, this seminar will reconsider the status of metaphor and the nature of authorial agency. Can metaphors themselves enact violence? Or is such a question a category mistake? This seminar will build out from the intuition that figurative assemblage and social hierarchy are necessarily related, but it does not presume in advance that we all agree about how this relationship works. We will read an array of divergent accounts of how metaphors operate across literary criticism, rhetoric, and the philosophy of language (Aristotle, early modern rhetorical manuals, as well as Lakoff, Black, Davidson, Donoghue), and we will consider key metaphoric relationships (body as landscape, orgasm as death, kingdom as family, love as slavery, sexual violence as hunting) as they surface in early modern literature. Literary texts will include poetry by Wyatt, Sidney, Spenser, Donne, Milton, Marvell and Pope.