The End of Conduct

Grobianus et Grobiana, a little-known but key Renaissance text, is the starting point for this examination of indecency, conduct, and subject formation in the early modern period. First published in 1549, Friedrich Dedekind's ironic poem, Grobianus et Grobiana, recommends the most disgusting behavior--indecency--as a means of instilling decency. The poem, Barbara Correll maintains, not only supplements prior conduct literature but offers a reading of it as well. According to Correll, the effect of Dedekind's ironic poem is to establish normative masculine identity through the labor of aversion. Correll shows how the virtual subject of civil conduct emerges in dominant yet necessarily beleaguered relation to colonized Others, whether in feminine, animal, or peasant guise.

Barbara Correll is Assistant Professor of English at Cornell University.