Chronology of the Events of the Murder of Francesco Cenci and The Cenci Family Trial

Cenci Proof

Critic's Thesis (Me)

– The Cenci, and to some extent all of Shelley's work, can be read through a very definite, yet slippery aesthetic and epistemological theory outlined in "A Defense of Poetry" after all of his major works but Adonais and Hellas had been completed. This theory, of the immortality of poetry and its function of anti-cipher or shibboleth of unstable, hegemonic sign-systems, dictates Shelley's deconstruction of genre, law, and the law of genres.

Artist's Thesis (Shelley)

– It is in the restless and atomizing casuistry with which men seek the justification of Beatrice, yet feel that she has done what needs justification; it is in the superstitious horror with which they contemplate alike her wrongs and their revenge; that the dramatic character of what she did and suffered, consists

Methodological Thesis

– Within my discussion of The Cenci I am attempting to be consciousness of method in a way that allows space for the critic as artist while instituting a qualifiable critical paradigm that, if need be, can be illustrated as notation rather than rhetoric. The narrative and counter-narrative of my method, hyper-textually applied to The Cenci is as follows:

"Literary value" is subjective but the value of literature should be able to be theorized. For example, I can't stand Pamela but at this stage in our understanding of the history of the book Pamela assumes a prominent place because of how it figured in the development of the mass-market for novels. However, influence is in part determined by the critic as he or she is apprehending and narrating the apprehension of a text so a simple quantitative analysis of a text's reach elides the present in its account of the truth of value of any literature. My own method in mediating the scientific/historical impetus towards statistical analysis and the subjective pronouncement of value grants an author, a primary text, and a critic but seeks to understand that relationship in a system of equations involving the material surrounding two, chronologically separate moments of production.

So: when reading certain telling passages from The Cenci we should, first, "divide" them by other primary materials surrounding Shelley's creation of his tragedy. This should give the base value of the text which should be then re-divided by its larger historical moment (see Literary Context and Historical Context) to get a base historical value minus the critical moment. So: This value plus a critic'stheoretical apparatus should give the value of the literary work (x)