At Zero Point: Discourse, Culture, and Satire in Restoration England

At Zero Point presents an entirely new way of looking at Restoration culture, discourse, and satire. The book locates a rupture in English culture and epistemology not at the end of the eighteenth century (when it occurred in France) but at the end of the seventeenth century. Rose Zimbardo’s hypothesis is based on Hans Blumenberg’s concept of “zero point”—the moment when an epistemology collapses under the weight of questions it has itself raised and simultaneously a new epistemology begins to construct itself. Zimbardo demonstrates that the Restoration marked both the collapse of the Renaissance order and the birth of modernism (with its new conceptions of self, nation, gender, language, logic, subjectivity, and reality). Using satire as the site for her investigation, Zimbardo examines works by Rochester, Oldham, Wycherley, and the early Swift for examples of Restoration deconstructive satire that, she argues, measure the collapse of Renaissance epistemology. Constructive satire, as exemplified in works by Dryden, has at its discursive center the “I” from which all order arises to be projected to the external world. No other book treats Restoration culture or satire in this way. Rose A. Zimbardo is SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor Emerita whose previous books include A Mirror to Nature: Transformations in Drama and Aesthetics, 1660-1732. Zimbardo invites readers to examine concepts of gender, nation, self, and language in the literature of the Restoration period and be persuaded that its satire is both deconstructive and constructive. —Choice Stimulating and persuasive. —In-Between Effectively challenges easy assumptions of the referentiality of Restoration satire and drama and stresses the literary context. —Journal of English and Germanic Philology Only rarely does such a radical reexamination of culture occur, and Zimbardo\u27s At Zero Point brings new insights into both Renaissance and Restoration scholarship. —Rocky Mountain Review Zimbardo\u27s point is that we, like Wycherley\u27s generation, are at zero point, caught between a \u27deconstructive\u27 period—the 1960s, with their attack on \u27the strangling social fictions of the establishment\u27—and a reactionary one—the 1990s, era of \u27the new holy nationalism, conservatism, and racism.\u27 —Seventeenth-Century News An important and provocative book, with rewarding turns to authorship, gender, and nationalism. —Studies in English Literature One of the most ambitious books this year. . . . Stimulating and innovative, bringing an interesting mix of neglected and canonical texts to our attention. —Year’s Work in English Studieshttps://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_british_isles/1078/thumbnail.jp

Full Statistical Mediation of the Relationship Between Trauma and Depressive Symptoms

Owing to the potentially devastating effects of trauma‐induced depression, explaining the relationship between trauma and depressive symptoms is important. In this study, we measured lifelong exposure to potentially traumatic events and depressive symptoms in 370‐female undergraduates. We also measured anxiety, past negative time perspective and dissociation as potential mediators. Trauma exposure and depressive symptoms were related with a small but significant effect size (r = .16). Trauma was not associated with dissociation. We found that past negative time perspective and anxiety were full statistical mediators of this trauma‐depressive symptoms relationship. These two mediators combined accounted for all of the variance in that association. Anxiety accounted for more of the variance than past negative time perspective. A proposed explanation is that trauma both affectively elevates anxiety and cognitively creates an enduring focus on the events. Chronic anxiety and a past negative time perspective may lead to depression over time. The clinical implications are possible explanations as to why some treatments work

A Mirror to Nature: Transformations in Drama and Aesthetics 1660–1732

In this provocative study, Rose Zimbardo examines a crucial revolution in aesthetics that took place in the late seventeenth century and that to this day dominates our response to literature. Although artists of that time continued to follow the precept imitate nature, that nature no longer corresponds to the earlier understanding of the term. What had been in essence an allegorical mode came to be a literal one. Focusing on the drama of the period as an exemplary form, Zimbardo shows how it moved from depicting a metaphysical reality of idea to portraying an inner reality of individual experience. But drama is constrained in expressing the inner experience since its medium is limited to human action. The novel arose to replace drama as the popular literary form, Zimbardo argues, because it could better and more freely convey man\u27s inner world and thereby imitate the new nature. The study concluded that the changes which took place in drama during this period and which led to the invention of the novel resulted not from any change of heart or sensibility but from a fundamental change in the understanding of the nature which art was thought to imitate. Neither the drama of the 1690s nor the early novel, Zimbardo finds, was in the least sentimental. A Mirror to Nature brings a new critical perspective to bear on literary developments at the end of the seventeenth century-one that must be considered by critics and historians of the period.https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_dramatic_literature/1004/thumbnail.jp