Hawkes, David 1964-

views updated

HAWKES, David 1964-

PERSONAL: Born 1964. Education: Columbia University, Ph.D., 1992.

ADDRESSES: Offıce—Department of English, College of Arts and Sciences, Lehigh University, 35 Drown Hall, 9 West Packer Ave., Bethlehem, PA 18015. E-mail—dh05@lehigh.edu.

CAREER: Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA, associate professor.

WRITINGS:

Ideology ("New Critical Idiom" series), Routledge (New York, NY), 1996, revised edition, 2003.

Idols of the Marketplace: Idolatry and CommodityFetishism in English Literature, 1580-1680, Palgrave (New York, NY), 2001.

Contributor of book reviews and articles to periodicals, including Nation, Eighteenth Century, and Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900.

SIDELIGHTS: David Hawkes has taught courses on Milton, the Renaissance, and critical theory, and is the author of books that include Ideology, called "provocative" by Choice critic J. J. Wydeven. The volume provides a history of the term and the debates that have sprung up over it, from Machiavelli to present time, and studies ideology within the frameworks of empiricism, idealism, Marxism, post-Marxism, and postmodernism. It also addresses why ideology matters, with Hawkes providing a number of arguments. A revised edition of the book was published to reconsider ideology in the wake of the incidents of September 11, 2001.

Idols of the Marketplace: Idolatry and Commodity Fetishism in English Literature, 1580-1680 is Hawkes's study of how Baconian empiricism replaced Aristotelian teleology, an evolution that had implications for every aspect of life, including economics and ethics, politics and theology, and aesthetics and sexuality.

Times Literary Supplement reviewer Andrew Hadfield wrote that Hawkes emphasizes that Aristotelian teleology, which he says was accepted by most educated people, "decreed that everything had a proper use, expressing its real value, and a secondary, or improper use, which obscured its proper use. The former represented the order of nature, the latter the values of the emergent market economy."

Hawkes focuses on early modern debates over such subjects as idolatry and financial value. He feels that religious idolatry, carnal sensuality, and carnal fetishism resulted from these changes in philosophy and believes that postmodern society could benefit from the early modern critique of the market economy.

Laura Lunger Knoppers wrote in Albion that the first two chapters "set out to establish the philosophical and theological bases for the early modern homology between idolatry and commodity fetishism." The third and fourth chapters point out the links between idolatry and commodity fetishism in relation to the early modern English Theater. Hawkes then studies two seventeenth-century religious poets, George Herbert and John Donne, followed by a discussion of the 1640s and John Milton's prose as it reflects a broadening of the meaning of idolatry. He notes that during the post-Restoration period, and reflected by the writings of Thomas Traherne and John Bunyan, references to idolatry become increasingly scarce in the debate on capitalism and economics.

Knoppers observed that the book "makes a number of compelling associations and fresh, original statements. The range of the book is impressive, and its linking of economic and religious language is bold and provocative." Knoppers praised Hawkes's arguments and the new readings, which she called "an impressive achievement in themselves. Particularly clear and insightful are the chapters on usury and sodomy in Shakespeare's sonnets, on financial imagery in Herbert, on Traherne's representation of a fall into mercantilism and exchange value, and on Bunyan's representation of reprobate man as embodiment of a market economy."

Hadfield called Idols of the Marketplace "an excellent book: provocative, coherent, and full of insight. It is hard to see how Renaissance culture can ever be read in quite the same way from now on."