Jane Grogan. Exemplary Spenser: Visual and Poetic Pedagogy in “The Faerie Queene.” Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2009. 217 pp. index. illus. bibl. $99.95.. ISBN: 978–0–7546–6698–1.

Abstract

Jane Grogan presents a refreshingly innovative examination of Spenser's didactic poetics in The Faerie Queene, founding her approach on a reading of Spenser's Letter to Ralegh that finds in the Letter a satisfactorily thorough model of the poet's pedagogic project in his epic. Although Grogan recognizes the complexities and ambiguities that inhabit the Letter, she displays utter confidence in the Letter's accessibility to readers as an authoritative source of Spenser's intentions in The Faerie Queene, dismissing accounts of the Letter that emphasize its apparent inaccuracies and, in particular, qualifying my own moderately skeptical approach to the Letter's apparent professions of didactic efficacy (37, 53-54; cf. Erickson, ''Spenser's Letter to Ralegh and the Literary Politics of The Faerie Queene's 1590 Publication,''Spenser Studies 10 [1989]: 139-74). Similarly, at several key moments in her argument, Grogan qualifies Jeff Dolven's suggestions that readers, not Spenser's knights, learn from the narrative (59) and ''that [Spenser's] 'pedagogical misgivings' ultimately diminish the poem's self-styled didactic authority'' (110; cf. Dolven, Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance [2007], 171). In answer to both of us, Grogan insists repeatedly that Spenser's pedagogic method works, on readers and protagonists alike. This is not to suggest that Grogan finds a prescriptive pedagogic program in the Letter or in the poem; on the contrary, she contrasts Spenser's ''radical pedagogy'' (45), produced by a flexible and exploratory didacticism, with what she considers the more prescriptive platform set forth by Philip Sidney in his Defence of Poesy, and she advertises Spenser's ''preference for the conspicuous fictionalizing of Xenophon ahead of the prescriptiveness of Plato.'' Transformed into narrative, ''Spenser's Xenophonic values'' produce ''a winning combination of demonstration and exhortation'' that Spenser's readers experience as ''a mixture of critical distance and pleasurable absorption'' from which, by degrees, they learn ways of thinking about moral principles that motivate them to ''action beyond the text'' (108). Grogan opens chapter 2 by noting, insightfully, that Spenser uses predominantly visual language to describe his epic project in the Letter, thereby foregrounding the visual dimension of his pedagogic project, which, as Grogan shows, hinges on the complex and conflicted relationship between seeing and knowing. Grogan proceeds to introduce and analyze classical, Renaissance, and Spenserian ideas of visual learning, which, in chapter 3, she focuses on several key pedagogic moments of ekphrastic description. Analyzing interactions among protagonists, readers, and the narrator in the subtly didactic lessons embedded in these ekphrases, Grogan convincingly demonstrates how the ''synthesis of immediate sensual experience interrupted by a sudden critical distance at the height of that visual absorption is the characteristic movement of Spenserian