bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
L. Boom as Dreamer in Finnegans Wake
Authors: Benstock Bernard
Published: February 2007

It has taken a relatively short time for critics to become convinced of the basic continuity of James Joyce's entire body of work, despite Joyce's own protestations while in the process of creation that he had forgotten each previous effort in favor of the one in progress. While concerned with Leopold Bloom, Joyce impatiently asserted that “Stephen no longer interests me. He has a shape that can't be changed,” and when writing Finnegans Wake, he contemptuously shrugged off Ulysses: “Ulysses! Who wrote it? I've forgotten it.” It was imperative for him as an artist to concentrate on his new effort, and since he acted as his own publicity agent, it was necessary for him to call attention to it; but a retrospective appraisal should take note of the manner in which each work overlaps with one another: the child in the first three stories of Dubliners is very much the child Stephen in the first chapter of A Portrait of the Artist, Richard Rowan in Exiles is a projected image of the mature Stephen, and Shem the Penman is a caricature of both. Finnegans Wake in fact is a summation of all that Joyce had previously written: it recapitulates themes and motifs, reworks many of the same characters, and puns every previous Joyce title into its fabric. The Dreamer in the Wake is more than just a single individual, even if one assumes that on the literal level we are viewing the dream of publican H. C. Earwicker.
Algunos aspectos de la elaboración literaria de La familia de León Roch
Authors: Rodriguez Alfred
Published: February 2007

A unque la temática religiosa constituya una de las facetas más ricas de toda la creación galdosiana, no cabe duda que ésta alcanza su apogeo en el autor, como cantera de materia novelable, entre 1876 y 1878. En cuatro Novelas de primera época, publicadas entre los años citados, concentró Galdós toda su extraordinaria capacidad de concreción literaria sobre esa problemática de actualidad insoslayable: Boña Perfecta (abril, 1876), Gloria (diciembre, 1876; mayo, 1877), Marianela (enero, 1878) y La familia de León Roch (junio, octubre y diciembre, 1878).
The Structure of Villon's Testament
Authors: Terdiman Richard
Published: February 2007

Leo Spitzer's well-known article on Villon's “Ballade des dames du temps jadis,” published in 1940, had an evident double purpose. His sensitive and sensible explication of the ballade was at the same time the occasion for a statement of the need to revitalize medieval studies. Spitzer put it bluntly: “L'interprétation de la littérature médiévale me semble souffrir, dans tous les pays, d'une grande tare: de la carence du sens esthétique.” The treatment of Villon's ballade was then explicitly meant as a model of the new critical approach, and obviously the choice of poet was made with the polemic purpose clearly in mind. Villon is an ideal subject for resolutely “esthetic” explication, and his works on every level demonstrate a poetic craftsmanship which detailed reading can bring out to best advantage.
“The Sweetness of the Twisted Apples”: Unity of Vision in Winesburg, Ohio
Authors: Ciancio Ralph
Published: February 2007

The prologue to Winesburg, Ohio, in which an old writer attributes their gro-tesqueness to fanaticism, oversimplifies the characters' twisted lives, but it is hardly irrelevant or at variance with the substance of the novel. The grotesques' fanatical quest for the ideal, their unwillingness to relinquish their dreams in face of the facts of experience, is at the core of all the novel's issues—its social, sexual, and mythic content—which form a philosophical whole. Yet Anderson sympathizes with his characters, for their fanaticism derives from the depths of their being and from a valid, human desire for spiritual fulfillment. The prologue also bears vitally upon the resolution of the novel's major theme— George Willard's growth into a writer; it can be said, in fact, that the prologue brings the theme to a close. For, by the end, George has undergone a transformation of character similar to that of Dr. Reefy, whom Anderson identifies with the old writer of the prologue, and thereby comes to share the old writer's vision, which is born of the grotesque but ultimately transcends it. Indeed, symbolically at least, George is the old writer. Winesburg is his story.
Prufrock and After: The Theme of Change
Authors: Schneider Elisabeth
Published: February 2007

T. S. Eliot not only changed his beliefs radically during the course of his life; he also set himself, as a continuing theme in certain of his major poems, to explore the painful and difficult process of subjective change itself in its relation to the will. Prufrock and The Waste Land ask whether change is possible, with differing answers; most of the 1927–31 poems explore change as it is being subjectively experienced; the later poems and plays remain concerned with the theme but more perfunctorily. Though scarcely touched upon in his prose writings, this process of inner change, individual not social, is a major unifying theme in Eliot's poetry.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu as Letter-Writer
Authors: Halsband Robert
Published: February 2007

To the uninitiated the name of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu may arouse amusement or disbelief. Why so long and mouth-filling a name? Before her marriage she was Lady Mary Pierrepont; she owed her title to her father, who was a peer with the successive ranks of Earl, Marquess, and Duke. Her husband was Edward Wortley Montagu, Esquire; and while she remained Lady, he remained untitled. In her own day there were other peers' daughters named Lady Mary, but her intellectual brilliance and her connection with Alexander Pope and his circle gave her the dubious honor of being recognized in print as the Lady Mary.
Eve and the Doctrine of Responsibility in Paradise Lost
Authors: Revard Stella P.
Published: February 2007

Critics have argued that Adam in Book ix of Paradise Lost is responsible for Eve's fall in that he permitted her to go forth alone on the fatal morning. This view of indirect responsibility may not be consonant, however, with Milton's doctrine of individual responsibility enunciated elsewhere in the poem. Neither God in Book iii, Raphael in Books v-viii, nor the Son in Book ximplies that Adam's headship over Eve requires that he control absolutely his wife's actions. If his function as husband was not to restrain Eve, then he can hardly be found delinquent for not having done so. Eve, though inferior to Adam, should not be thought incomplete without him and thereby unable to bear the responsibility of resisting Satan alone. Eve's intellectual inferiority does not make her more susceptible to sin, for Milton has shown repeatedly in Paradise Lost that nothing in a creature's innate being predisposes him to sin and that, moreover, it is not intellectual prowess which enables a creature to repulse sin, but love and allegiance to God. Thus, each creature is responsible individually for his own obedience. It is incompatible with the meaning of the entire poem to suppose that Eve was only conditionally responsible to God and therefore, when separated from Adam, unable to succeed against Satan.
Cloaking the Self: The Literary Space of Gogol's “Overcoat”
Authors: Bernheimer Charles C.
Published: February 2007

Literary structure provided Gogol with a means to free himself from the restrictive definitions of life. As copying clerk, Akaky inhabits a nearly autonomous world of literal repetition, a world close to the timeless silence out of which fiction is born. He is happy, having next to no individualized desiring self. The acquisition of the overcoat causes Akaky's fall into the diachronic world of difference, a hostile world that overwhelms his recently objectified identity. As his letters demonstrate, Gogol himself feared just such an annihilation by the other. Hence his enigmatic, elusive character and his narrative strategy of hiding behind a multiplicity of constantly shifting masks. The “fantastic ending” of the story fulfills Gogol's most cherished fantasy: to exercise power against the world while remaining unconditioned within the play of literary metamorphoses. In psychological terms, this desire is symptomatic of the schizoid, ontologically insecure individual.
The Rape of Gulliver: Case Study of a Source
Authors: Shaw Sheila
Published: February 2007

The first translator of the Arabian Nights (Paris, 1704-17) was Antoine Galland. Almost immediately translated into English, Galland's popular collection remained the only version of the Nights known in Europe throughout the century. Convinced that Swift had read it, twentieth-century scholars Pietro Toldo and William A. Eddy show that the tale “Hassân-al-Bassri” was a source for Brobdingnag; the passages they quote come from the modern French translation of J. C. Mardrus, and bear a great similarity to Gulliver's second voyage. Swift, however, could not have known “Hassân” for it is omitted by Galland. Because of the differences between Galland's Nights and later versions, studies in eighteenth-century source criticism must work with early texts. Curiously, of all versions of “Hassan” only Mardrus relates the episode in question, which may explain why his translation is anathematized by Arabists as distorting the erotic content of the original. Recent inquiry also discloses that the episode is missing in known Arabic sources. It is almost certain that Mardrus fabricated the passages cited by Toldo and Eddy; it may even be argued that he plagiarized Swift.
The Mystery of Eros: Sexual Initiation in Coleridge's “Christabel”
Authors: Spatz Jonas
Published: February 2007

Most interpretations of “Christabel” ignore the creative context from which it emerged. In his notebooks and letters, Coleridge developed a theory of the nature of human sexuality and its importance as the foundation of love and marriage. In a series of poems written from 1797 to 1801, Coleridge dramatized the problem of sexual maturation by focusing on the betrothal of a girl threatened by her own sexuality. “Christabel,” the culmination of this period, traces the heroine's attempt to come to terms with her erotic impulses, to recognize their essential role in her love for her absent knight, and to progress from adolescence to womanhood. Geraldine, the projection of those impulses, is the woman she yearns and fears to become. Although the poem is unfinished, its fairy-tale structure, psychology, and symbolism, along with its relation to Coleridge's other poems and his ideas about sex, love, and marriage, indicate that the continuation summarized by James Gillman accurately describes Coleridge's intentions.
Pensée rationnelle et responsabilité morale: Le Traité de sagesse dans La Logique de Port-Royal
Authors: Carré Marie-Rose
Published: February 2007

La Logique de Port-Royal is regarded by historians of this science as a treatise that does not fit into any of their categories; indeed, the art of Logic as an independent exercise of the mind seemed unacceptable to its authors. Writing at the end of the Aristotelian era and under the influence of Cartesian theories, but having their own convictions about man's nature and obligations, Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole saw logical reasoning as justifiable only if it trains the mind to distinguish between Good and Bad. They believed in the existence of an immutable, eternal truth; man's reason is intended to make this Truth a perceivable reality. Logic, most importantly, therefore, trains our word-using and concept-making faculty to acknowledge that the needs of man's soul belong to a much higher order of values than the science of “things”: it should thus give reason the strength to be “true” to its own nature. (In French)
He Could Go No Farther: A Modest Proposal about Lovelace and Clarissa
Authors: Wilt Judith
Published: February 2007

Critics have averted their eyes from the specifics of Lovelace’s rape of Clarissa almost as hurriedly as did the principals in Richardson’s novel. Modern studies of the phenomenon of rape suggest that a closer look might be rewarding. Of the three people certainly present at the episode, there is good reason to suppose Lovelace impotent, Clarissa blankly rigid, and Sinclair, the presiding androgynous harlot, the purposeful actor in the scene. If Sinclair and the “women of the house” are at the heart of the book’s action and are not simply Lovelace’s “implements,” then a prime issue of Clarissa is not only whether Clarissa “lives” but also whether Sinclair “dies.” In fact, despite her famous Gothic death scene, Sinclair too lives, and rules Richardson’s imagination of woman, perhaps even of Being, to the end of the novel.
Mrs. Dalloway and the Social System
Authors: Zwerdling Alex
Published: February 2007

In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf wanted, as she says, “to criticise the social system, and to show it at work, at its most intense.” Her critical attention is focused not on individuals but on the values of a particular class at a particular historical moment. Her novel examines the governing class’s control over English society in the period immediately following the First World War, showing how coercive the ideal of stoical fortitude nurtured during the War had become by the time it was over. The dominant faith in the value of self-control creates an atmosphere of emotional austerity that in one way or another affects the behavior of all the characters in the novel. It inhibits the natural expression of feeling in those who live by the governing-class code and turns the more rebellious members of the society into unstable emotional exhibitionists.
The Nature of Picaresque Narrative: A Modal Approach
Authors: Wicks Ulrich
Published: February 2007

Contemporary usage of the term “picaresque” has blunted its usefulness as a literary concept. What once referred to the historically identifiable genre of la novela picaresca in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature is now applied whenever something “episodic” tied together by an “antihero” needs a label. One way to reconcile these extremes is to approach the problem from the wider perspective of narrative types in general: a modal approach, which can account both for a specific kind of narrative whose exclusive preoccupation is an exploration of the fictional world of the picaresque and for a primitive fictional possibility which may be part of much fiction outside that genre. The modal perspective leads next to generic awareness, which yields the strict attributes of the genre—the “total picaresque fictional situation”—some of which are: (1) dominance of the picaresque mode, (2) panoramic structure, (3) first-person point of view, (4) the picaro figure, (5) the picaro-landscape relationship, (6) a gallery of human types, (7) parody, and (8) certain basic themes and motifs.
The Form of Coleridge's Dejection Ode
Authors: Fairbanks A. Harris
Published: February 2007

Coleridge’s “Dejection” is an ode rather than a conversation poem. It differs from the eighteenth-century ode and establishes a distinctively Romantic ode in adapting the personal voice, meditative structure, and private subject that Coleridge had developed in the conversation poems, but because Coleridge observed odic decorum it lacks the conversation poem’s controlling characteristic, an initial illusion of artlessness manifested in the pattern of thought, rhythm, syntax, and transitions. The inability of critics to agree whether the speaker of “Dejection” masters his crisis is a consequence of Coleridge’s innovation in employing the device of “simultaneous composition” in a poem of greater seriousness than any of the conversation poems. The speaker cannot plausibly resolve a crisis that affects his life at the root within the span of a single meditation, and because he is enmeshed in the experience as he articulates it, he has no perspective from which to evaluate it.
Poe and Tennyson
Authors: Joseph Gerhard J.
Published: February 2007

Considering the way Poe and Tennyson admired each other's work, it is strange that the tonal and thematic convergence of two such major nineteenth-century writers has scarcely been sensed in Anglo-American (as contrasted to French) literary criticism. The quality that most obviously tempts the reader to link them, their extraordinary delight in sound for its own sake, became a comparable strategy in the service of an undogmatic philosophical idealism, the attempt of the spirit to escape the gross materiality and cloying passions of the world's body. The symbolic situations in Tennyson's early poetry and in Poe's stories and poems suggest the dream-shrouded entrapment of the poetic soul within the world's “deserted” (Tennyson) or “haunted” (Poe) houses. Even when Tennyson rejects, ambiguously enough, the self-entombments of Poe-like hyperesthetic souls, he hardly suppresses what Poe called his unequaled “etherisity” and “ideality.” Tennyson's resultant treatment of angelism (to apply to his protagonists Allen Tate's term for the hypertrophied state of Poe's heroes) and the concomitant evolution of a Poe-like Fatal Woman are most clearly evident in such Classical monologues as “Lucretius” and in the conception of Lancelot and Guinevere in the Idylls of the King.
Esther Summerson Rehabilitated
Authors: Zwerdling Alex
Published: February 2007

Esther Summerson is not the sentimental, insipid character she is usually taken to be. Dickens uses her as the unconscious spokesman of the many characters in Bleak House who have never known parental love and makes her tale the most important illustration of one of the novel's major concerns—the breakdown of the parent-child relationship. His attitude is essentially clinical: he is interested in recording a complex pattern of psychological development in detail. Esther's story demonstrates both the immediate and the long-range effects of her godmother's pious cruelty and neglect. The novel shows that her inhibited intelligence and self-effacement are products of this upbringing and traces her attempt to become a more assured and self-possessed woman. Esther's dawning confidence, however, is shaken first by her illness and disfigurement and then by Mr. Jarndyce's proposal. The two incidents are best understood as crucial symbolic events in her attempt to transcend the determining influences of her childhood. Although Dickens finally resorts to fantasy to resolve Esther's conflicts, his detailed study of the stages of her life is that of a psychological realist interested in revealing the connections between childhood experience and adult personality.
Imbongi Nezibongo; The Xhosa Tribal Poet and the Contemporary Poetic Tradition
Authors: Opland Jeff
Published: February 2007

A tradition of oral poetry (izibongo) still exists among the Xhosa-speaking tribes of South Africa, but as yet few analytical studies based on fieldwork have been published. The Xhosa tradition differs in some respects from the Serbo-Croatian tradition as defined by Milman Parry and Albert Lord, though there are elements common to both traditions. Parry and Lord concentrated attention on the guslar, an improvising epic poet, but the Xhosa tribal poet (imbongi) should be seen in the context of all poetic activities in his community. The tradition of Xhosa izibongo is complex, consisting of at least four distinct activities: many Xhosa tribesmen have the ability to compose poetry on the inspiration of the moment; most Xhosas commit to memory traditional poems or poems of their own composition; the imbongi, a figure of considerable importance and influence in traditional society, generally composes his refined poetry in performance; and some literate Xhosas commit their poetry to writing. Each of these four kinds of poetic production is significantly different from the others, but each also influences the others.
Passage to Less than India: Structure and Meaning in Whitman's “Passage to India”
Authors: Golden Arthur
Published: February 2007

THE GREAT APPEAL of “Passage to India” is understandable. Following the Civil War and the publication of the 1867 (fourth) edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman, close to fifty, had become increasingly preoccupied in his poetry with “thoughts on the deep themes of Death & Immortality.” While he had, of course, explored these themes in his earlier poetry, this strong emphasis on the “universal” was something new and it was to continue to the end of his career. He answered a request from the English Broadway Magazine for a poem by sending five separate lyrics, under the group title “Whispers of Heavenly Death.” Published in 1868, these were, in addition to the title poem, “Darest Thou Now ? Soul,” “The Last Invocation,” “Pensive and Faltering,” and “A Noiseless Patient Spider,” which was actually composed in 1862–63 and reworked at this time with emphasis on the soul rather than on its earlier “Calamus” motif. Quite self-conscious about the spiritual direction his poetry was taking now, he indicated that he would make “no more attempts at smart sayings, or scornful criticisms, or harsh comments on persons or actions, or private and public affairs . . . never attempt puns or plays upon words, or utter sarcastic comments.” And around this time he also indicated that in the next edition of Leaves he would give special emphasis to “religious themes.”1 Whitman was entering the final phase of his career. He had come the full way around. In some dozen years, the poet of the body had given way to the poet of the soul, the poet of intense nationalism to the poet of internationalism and the cosmic.
Epoch-Eclipse and Apocalypse: Special “Effects” in A Connecticut Yankee
Authors: Ketterer David
Published: February 2007

HANK MORGAN'S USE of a solar eclipse to impress upon King Arthur and his court that a magician superior to Merlin stands before them is, undoubtedly, the most impressive episode in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Twain's time-travel version of the international novel. Arthur is at least as affected as the reader and, as a consequence, Hank istransformed from being a prisoner into being the Boss. But perhaps the reader does not appreciate that on a symbolic level, this blotting out and temporary displacement of one heavenly body by another parallels the “transposition of epochs—and bodies [human and stellar]” (p. 18) which is the donnée of the novel—the displacement of nineteenth-century America by sixth-century Britain and, subsequently, the displacement, first tentative then total, of sixth-century Britain by nineteenth-century America.1 By equating this “epoch-eclipse” with the apparent extinction of the sun, Twain is implying that the posited world transformation is an event of apocalyptic proportions. In the Revelation of John the Divine, as in traditional symbology, fire is the instrument of apocalypse and, thus, Twain's use of the sun in this context is most appropriate.2
The Growth of the Soul: Coleridge's Dialectical Method and the Strategy of Emerson's Nature
Authors: Wood Barry
Published: February 2007

Extensive studies of the sources for Nature (1836) have so far failed to note Emerson’s discovery of a dramatic dialectical method in Coleridge’s writings. Emerson’s major ideas—self-reliance, the assimilative Soul, and compensation as balanced wholeness—had been worked out well before 1836; but the publication of these ideas was delayed until Emerson found and appropriated Coleridge’s method. Emerson is found exploring Coleridge’s precise formulations in 1835 while Nature was being planned. Nature itself is rigorously dialectical in content and form. Beginning with the dichotomy between soul and nature, the work proceeds through six major dialectical steps to a final synthesis, spirit. Individual chapters, too, proceed through as many as five distinct dialectical steps toward the major synthesis of the chapter. This method duplicates the central argument of the work; moreover, it carries through Coleridge’s important linkage between dialectical logic and organic growth.
The Soul's Imaginings: Daniel Defoe, William Cowper
Authors: Spacks Patricia Meyer
Published: February 2007

The authors of eighteenth-century spiritual autobiographies and of their fictional imitations demonstrate the complex functions of imagination as a component of the spiritual life and of its records. Robinson Crusoe and William Cowper’s Memoir (1816) both delineate detailed sequences of emotional and imaginative development as the foundation of religious experience. Crusoe progresses to self-understanding by recognizing and mastering his own fear and anger and developing his capacity for love and by enlarging the resources of his imagination. Cowper asserts that his conversion and the Christian fellowship that followed it dominate his experience, but his account, with dark imagistic undertones, may also be read as revealing the persistence of despair. The unconscious shaping which produces this counter-pattern enriches the memoir’s implication. In novel and autobiography alike, the divergence between what the author asserts and what he suggests, reflecting varying possibilities of the imagination, can generate fruitful literary effects.
The Paradox of Power and Mystery: Carlos Fuentes' Terra nostra
Authors: Kerr Lucille
Published: February 2007

Mystery and mystery texts dominate Terra nostra, Fuentes’ novel about absolute authority. Both El Señor, the protagonist who covets eternal power, and Fuentes, the author who appears to assert his privilege through the fiction, are betrayed by their own strategies. Failing to recognize his inability to exert absolute control over history, El Señor, trying to master a set of mysterious texts he believes hold the key to his power, attempts to mold reality to his own desires. Although Fuentes understands the impossibility of creating a truly simultaneous text, he nevertheless tries to realize his plan through the novel’s complex narrative network. That network, however, needs the support of a linear mystery fiction, which thwarts the reader’s desire for solutions but fails to triumph over the bounds of literature itself. Thus the assertions of absolute authority by El Señor and Fuentes reveal the very powerlessness they would disprove.
Miracle and Vine Leaves: An Ibsen Play Rewrought
Authors: Ganz Arthur
Published: February 2007

A striking similarity in the choice of characters (a beautiful young wife; a former schoolmate; a rather commonplace husband; a husband's friend, the wife's secret admirer) and in the handling of plot (a threat of blackmail, a struggle for power, a plan for suicide) suggests that Hedda Gabler is to a remarkable degree a more complex manifestation of A Doll's House. Even more intriguing is the heroines' shared aspiration to achieve vicarious fulfillment through an admired man's heroic act. And most significant of all is the identity of their reactions when the man fails. Though Nora finally no longer believes in miracles nor Hedda in vine leaves, each is still pursuing—whether with determination or destructiveness— her ideal (and Ibsen's) of the realized self. Examining the equivalences of character in these works reveals how Ibsen's vision became richer, darker, more ambiguous even as his concerns remained essentially the same.
The Royal Stanza in Early English Literature
Authors: Stevens Martin
Published: February 2007

The traditional history of the rhyme royal stanza in early English literature, including its earliest attribution to James I of Scotland, needs reexamination. The name was apparently first recorded by Gascoigne in 1575, and, while no evidence exists to connect it with James I, the stanza itself was used in fourteenth-century poetic contests to address real or imaginary royalty. It appears in royal entry ceremonies, as illustrated by a text surviving from York in 1486. Chaucer employed the stanza first for royal address, as in the Parlement and the Troilus, but later, in the Canterbury Tales, as a characterizing device. The word “prose,” which he uses to describe the verse of the Man of Law's Tale, has been universally misread. It actually refers here to formal stanzas of equal length, and it must be read as the first attempt to create a poetic high style in English literature.
Literature and Law in Medieval England
Authors: Alford John A.
Published: February 2007

The use of law in Middle English literature is not extraneous but grows naturally out of a profound faith in law as the tie that binds all things, in heaven and in earth: all law—divine, natural, and human—is, in essence, one law. Hence, Christ's victory over Satan is dramatized in the language of Westminster, the promise of salvation is seen in terms of the emerging law of contracts, and our place in heaven is treated as real estate. The process is seen most clearly in the Château d'Amour, Piers Plowman, Pearl, and “Quia Amore Langueo.” With the disintegration of the belief in a single, coherent law, however, the legal metaphor lost most of its force and economy. As heirs of that disintegration, we must be careful not to impose it unwittingly on Medieval literature and thus fragment a vision that was whole.
Virginia Woolf and Leslie Stephen: History and Literary Revolution
Authors: Hill Katherine C.
Published: February 2007

Leslie Stephen chose his daughter Virginia Woolf as his literary heir and trained her extensively in history and biography to prepare her for a writing career. Traces of Stephen's training can be found throughout Woolf's work but especially in her literary criticism. Woolf and Stephen share the same assumptions about the nature and aims of literary criticism, assumptions that place them in the tradition of Sainte-Beuve. Further, Stephen and Woolf focus on the same set of forces to describe the birth and evolution of literary genres: both father and daughter say that shifting class structures produce a dominant historical consciousness and that this historical consciousness in turn expresses itself in an appropriate technical form. In the light of this literary historical process, both writers insist, the critic of self-conscious historical vision must be a sympathetic reader of experiments in new literary forms.
Presidential Address 1978: The Human Nature of Professionalism
Authors: Ong Walter J.
Published: February 2007

Some years ago a man then unknown to me and still unknown to me called to see me at Saint Louis University. I was not in. The note he left said that he would come back, but he never did, so that all I know of him to this day is what the note contained. Besides his name, it provided only one brief bit of information to let me know exactly who he was: it stated that he was a fellow member of the Modern Language Association of America. Now, as I am privileged to address all our nearly thirty thousand members, including him if he has remembered to pay his dues, I can only hope to share his single-minded identification with the MLA.
Achterberg's “Ballade van de gasfitter”: The Mystery of I and You
Authors: Coetzee John M.
Published: February 2007

The pronouns I and you, together with several other “shifters,” do not have a referential function in language. Many of the questions we ask (and fail to answer) about lyric poetry arise out of inadmissable translations of I and you into referential forms. Buber’s myth of a primal I-Thou relation gives us a guide to a reading of I and you in Achterberg’s “Ballade” in such a preferential way, I seeking to recover the lost relation by calling You into being through poetic-magical activity. Here the quest of I, however, culminates in confrontation with “the hole,” the void from which comes the Logos. While the nominal theme of the poem is the failure of the poetic-creative self to bring back the Logos, its secret theme is that poesis-as-activity can cause the continual coming-into-being of the Logos and the lost You. (The essay includes a translation of Achterberg’s poem.)
Hendiadys and Hamlet
Authors: Wright George T.
Published: February 2007

In all his plays Shakespeare uses the Vergilian figure hendiadys some three hundred times, most frequently in his middle plays and most of all in Hamlet. Rare in English speech or other English poetry, hendiadys joins nouns, or sometimes adjectives, in a false or specious union (e.g., “sound and fury” for “furious sound”). Its effect in Hamlet, where it appears perhaps sixty-six times, is often to elevate, estrange, and baffle; and this stylistic use of conjoined terms that are neither parallel nor complementary mirrors the play's deepest themes—especially the suspect character of personal unions and metaphysical connections. Once aware that Shakespeare frequently combines terms this way, we can understand better many puzzling phrases, including some celebrated ones. Three appendixes list instances of hendiadys in Hamlet, tabulate its incidence in all the plays, and discuss some misleading definitions in the OED.
The Presence of the Sign in Goethe'sFaust
Authors: Flax Neil M.
Published: February 2007

Recent studies in the early history of semiotics allow us to trace an open concern with the problem of language in Goethe'sFaust. The protagonist appears as a quest hero in search of a revelatory sign, whether verbal or pictorial, that will release him from the world of mediating representations. The folly of the quest is consistently satirized from the viewpoint of Romantic aesthetics and its theory of the symbol. For the Romantics, the aesthetic symbol is a sign that paradoxically effects a revelation by affirming its own semiotic nature. But in elevating semiotic phenomena to the status of epiphanies, Goethean symbolism inFaustconfronts the same impasses that beset the hero as he seeks to escape the rule of signs. The recurring quandaries arise when the Romantic text responds to the initial challenge of semiotics by attempting to reconcile semiotics and theology.
Tennyson and the Measure of Doom
Authors: Tucker Herbert F.
Published: February 2007

Tennyson's habits as a writer–composing longer works backward from a foreordained conclusion, stationing lyric speakers in a terminal situation– justify approaching his oeuvre as a poetry of aftermath. An obsession with the inevitable, which underlies his weaknesses in presenting character and in advancing narrative or dramatic action, also supports his compensatory strengths: evocation of atmospheric mood and sheer rhetorical splendor. Tennyson's rhetorical inevitability corresponds to intuitive convictions about the inevitability of the self's place in the world. His incapacity wholly to accept or resist the doom of the self engenders his typical melancholy; it also may explain the success he enjoyed as a Victorian spokesman. Never acquiring more than a fitful conceptual grasp of the fatality that was his subject, Tennyson conceived it instead in musical, often rhythmic, terms. He thus devised in “measured language” unsurpassed means of embodying and sharing the sense of a humanly definitive doom.
“Because a Fire Was in My Head”: Eudora Welty and the Dialogic Imagination
Authors: Yaeger Patricia S.
Published: February 2007

Feminist theory has argued that in a literary tradition overburdened by patriarchal legends and signs, women writers who wish to develop authentic, autonomous voices must devote themselves to their feminine precursors and abandon a masculine canon. In The Golden Apples, however, Eudora Welty appropriates images and themes of several poems by Yeats to dramatize the concerns of her heroines. Mikhail Bakhtin's theories of dialogism and of heteroglossia suggest a critical framework for exploring Welty's expropriations, but Bakhtin's method fails to consider the category of gender as a potent source for the dialogic tension characteristic of the novel as genre. Viewed from this perspective Welty's writing is more subversive than many of her critics have perceived, while Bakhtin's insights into the nature of novelistic discourse are useful in describing the restructuring of traditions that occurs in women's texts. Bakhtin's ideas must be understood and amplified, however, in the light of recent feminist theory.
Jonsonian Comedy and the Discovery of the Social Self
Authors: Danson Lawrence
Published: February 2007

The self in Jonson's comedies, like the self described by modern sociologists, is a reflection of other reflections, created by the society it creates. As Milgram's experiment on obedience to authority seems to show, the social self is radically contingent. Therefore the anagnorisis in Jonson's comedies is a catastrophe in more than the technical sense; it is the discovery of a self that cannot bear its own exposure. By contrast, the heroes and heroines of Shakespeare's romantic comedies discover themselves in relation to a nurturing family and a mature sexual family. Theirs is a psychological self. In the “comical satires,” Jonson encounters the problem of finding appropriate endings for plays whose characters can achieve no satisfying self-discovery. InVolponethe protagonist acts like an experimental social psychologist, exposing the pliability of the social self. The catastrophe shows that Volpone's own “substance” is only a reflection of his world's insubstantiality.
Matriarchal Mirror: Women and Capital in Moll Flanders
Authors: Chaber Lois A.
Published: February 2007

Ironic readings of Moll Flanders have illuminated the novel's psychological comedy at the expense of its social criticism and have elevated Defoe's art by lowering the moral status of its heroine. This essay defends and celebrates Moll as a character who co-opts the essentially criminal practices of a burgeoning capitalist patriarchy, thereby escaping the eternal feminine cycle of reproduction and entering the historical social cycle of production. Moll's anomie and anonymity reflect back on a disintegrating social order. Marriage, rendered newly insecure by the contradictions of waning patriarchal authority and of a market economy, proves a false haven for Moll; the novel's real quest is matriarchal—a search among three maternal figures for a viable economic model. Defoe eschews the myth of female purity, although Moll's finally successful but realistically compromised woman's estate is, by the standards of the myth, unacceptable to patriarchal critics.
Hermeneutics versus Erotics: Shakespeare'sSonnetsand Interpretive History
Authors: Rosmarin Adena
Published: February 2007

Shakespeare's sonnets are designed to seem written by a poet and spoken by a lover. This conspicuous ambidexterity, compounded by our declining tolerance for such deftness, has made them infamously problematic. They simultaneously flaunt and flout the correspondence between the lover's pen and his heart, between the artifice of his “rhetoric,” characteristic of much Tudor literature, and the rhetoric of his sincerity, characteristic of the Romantic poetics that has proven their sternest judge. The sonnets thus pose internally the very problem that informs their extensive interpretive history. But they also propose its solution: their sustained balance ofverbaandres, of verbally erotic and hermeneutically chaste designs, exalts the conflict of these designs, displaying its poetic power. And this paradoxical resolution of the poet's dilemma solves the critic's as well: it suggests a way of making a richly correspondent and yet reasoned sense of the sonnets and, indeed, of any literary text.
The Benda Illustrations to My Ántonia: Cather's “Silent” Supplement to Jim Burden's Narrative
Authors: Schwind Jean
Published: February 2007

The publishing history of My Ántonia emphasizes what is implicit in the novel's numerous references to pictorial art: the pictures in the first edition of My Ántonia are not dispensable decorations but an essential part of Cather's text. The Benda illustrations (which Cather independently commissioned against the strong opposition of her publishers at Houghton Mifflin) reinforce the central fiction of the novel, in which “editor” Cather introduces My Ántonia as the work of “author” Jim Burden. Presenting My Ántonia as a critically edited or “supplemented” text, Cather hints that W. T. Benda's series of drawings is her most important addition to the “substance” of Jim's text. In her introduction to Jim's narrative, Cather suggests that Jim Burden's literary vision is faulty and in need of correction. Cather offers this corrective by providing a pictorial subtext that offsets the romantic bias of My Ántonia and exposes Jim Burden's limitations as an author.
Whitman's “Lilacs” and the Grammars of Time
Authors: Blasing Mutlu Konuk
Published: February 2007

Whitman's experimental poetic, a part of larger personal and national experiments, was severely tried by the assassination of President Lincoln. “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd,” the poem occasioned by Lincoln's death, is not a traditional elegy but a crisis poem: in it, Whitman tests the efficacy of various poetic and linguistic forms and conventions in confronting the terrorism of history and the acute consciousness of time that the assassination triggered in him. While he acknowledges in “Lilacs” the attractions of elegiac conventions, narrative orders, symbolism, and transcendent lyricism, he learns in the course of the poem to do without them and the consolations they offer. “Lilacs” not only reaffirms Whitman's commitment to experimentalism but moves beyond his earlier major poems in its full consciousness and complete acceptance of the dangers and the necessity of forgoing the protection of conventions and traditional forms and orders.
Dialogic Midwifery in Kleist's Marquise von O and the Hermeneutics of Telling the Untold in Kant and Plato
Authors: Smith John H.
Published: February 2007

We often speak of a text “pregnant” with meaning. But how does it give birth? Certainly not through the intervention of monologic doctoring but, rather, with the aid of “dialogic midwifery.” In Kleist's Marquise von O, the tale of an unexplained conception and pregnancy, the art of ironic dialogism, though never directly giving expression to the peculiar state of affairs, helps give birth to interpretation and to the genre of the realistic novella. The circuitous narrative technique of telling and untelling, which supplements consciousness as a midwife assists a woman in childbirth, links Kleist's text to a hermeneutic tradition stretching from Plato through Kant (and well beyond).
Writing Gone Wilde: Homoerotic Desire in the Closet of Representation
Authors: Cohen Ed
Published: February 2007

The name Oscar Wilde has become one of the best-known indexes of late nineteenth-century male homoerotic desire. To situate Wilde's emergence as “a homosexual” in late nineteenth-century literary contexts and thereby explore the ways that sex-gender ideologies shape specific literary works, I focus first on Teleny, a novel widely attributed to Wilde and one of the earliest examples of male homoerotic pornography. Then, by analyzing the more celebrated and yet manifestly “straight” text The Picture of Dorian Gray, I illustrate that, even in the absence of explicit homosexual terminology or activity, a text can subvert the normative standards for male same-sex behavior. In considering how these works challenge the hegemonic representations of male homoerotic experience in late Victorian Britain, I suggest that textual depictions of male same-sex experience both reproduce and resist the dominant (hetero)sexual ideologies and practices.
Home in Harlem, New York: Lessons from the Harlem Renaissance Writers
Authors: Bremer Sidney H.
Published: February 2007

While other New York writers despaired of finding home in America's wasteland after World War i as War I, African American writers like Langston Hughes, Claude MacKay, Nella Larsen, and Rudolph Fisher created a powerful urban image of home in Harlem. Their Harlem home was at once place, community, and aspiration. As collectively articulated in their various writings, its vitality was most palpable, least constricted, in Harlem's well-peopled streets. It was evoked wherever—albeit only where—African Americans could come together. It was expressed by their art's profound yet deceptive masquerades. The Harlem Renaissance thus challenged America's established association of home with rural permanency. We ignore a fitting image of home for mobile, urban America when we fail to recognize these civic dimensions of Harlem Renaissance art—as Greater New York also failed to accept a public statue of James Weldon Johnson, memorialized by a literary archive at Yale instead.
Composing Martin Luther King, Jr.
Authors: Miller Keith D.
Published: February 2007

In “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” Martin Luther King, Jr., attributes his intellectual development to his reading of Marx, Gandhi, Rauschenbusch, Niebuhr, and other prestigious authors whose works he encountered during his graduate studies at seminary and at Boston University. To explain his responses to notable philosophers and theologians, King incorporates passages from seven writers whose names do not appear in the essay. While the network represented by these writers stimulated King's thought more profoundly than did the more respectable tradition that “Pilgrimage” invokes, the black church supplied him with the foundation of virtually all the ideas appearing in the essay. In addition, the black folk pulpit furnished the epistemology of voice merging that enabled King to compose an autobiographical essay and a self. Yoking black orality and print, King adapted the folk procedure of blending identities to create a magisterial public persona that could help reshape a nation.
“Conveniency to Nature”: Literary Art and Arbitrariness
Authors: Reeves Charles Eric
Published: February 2007

Despite its prominence in many critical lexicons, the term “literary convention” rarely receives sustained theoretical scrutiny. Rather, it has served interpreters, and even theorists, as a kind of general-purpose catchall, loosely synonymous with “custom,” “habit,” “assumption,” “myth,” “cliché,” “fiction,” or the French convenance. I argue that a philosophically rigorous definition of social convention may work heuristically to clarify what literary convention means and how it functions within a larger poetics. In particular, an intelligible notion of literary convention will help clarify the dialectical relation of mimesis and semiosis—what derives from the “natural” world and what results from an internal economy of parts and whole.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Una Hawthorne, andThe Scarlet Letter: Interactive Selfhoods and the Cultural Construction of Gender
Authors: Herbert T. Walter
Published: February 2007

Gender conflicts troubled Hawthorne's personal life and afflicted his daughter Una badly enough to bring on episodes of disabling psychic isturbance. They are likewise inherent inThe Scarlet Letter, where Hawthorne subverts the norms of womanhood and manhood that were asserted by the domestic ideal, a middle-class version of male dominance then coming to the fore. Yet the work also affirms that those norms provide a measure against which his daughter's aberrations should be corrected. Hawthorne's solution to Una's problem is depicted in Pearl's redemption, so that Una's unhappy later life—as well as Hawthorne's—provides a biographical countertext. By treating Nathaniel Hawthorne, Una Hawthorne, andThe Scarlet Letteras interdefining arenas of conflict, this essay provides a glimpse into the processes by which gender is constructed in persons and works of art.
“The Dead” and the Generosity of the Word
Authors: Pecora Vincent P.
Published: February 2007

Readers of Dubliners are usually well prepared for a leap out of the suffocating world Joyce displays there, for a promise, however ambiguous or mundane, of escape. But in a story like “The Dead” the production of a desire for escape at all costs may be the crucial interpretive problem, for it inevitably stimulates our mystified identification at the end with a character whose apparent awakening is itself socially conditioned. Unless interpretation radically reevaluates the cultural codification of reflective consciousness, we remain locked within a Christian paradigm of self-knowledge as truth that transcends material oppositions through selflessness—through the insistent generosity that punctuates this story. Gabriel's concluding “insight” and humility may then only reproduce an ideology that Joyce cruelly traces throughout bourgeois Dublin life: to escape his constant humiliation by others, Gabriel must finally humiliate himself.