bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Pushkin's Saturnine Cupid: The Poetics of Parody in The Tales of Belkin
Authors: Bethea David M. , Davydov Sergei
Published: February 2007

The Tales of Belkin have suggested that they are not what they seem—a cycle of simple, diverting stories. Why Pushkin chooses to filter the telling of the Tales through several narrative voices, why he puts “poetic” epigraphs into ironic play with “prosaic” narratives, and why he develops the narratives around a web of allusions to major Western literatures and to Russian literature have led to a lively, expanding discourse among Pushkinists. But why Pushkin frustrates the Russian character who imitates a foreign model, why he takes the poetic models of the epigraphs as points from which to “step down” to prose, and how he sees the parodic debate between foreign and domestic models as a necessary step in the development of Russian prose are unanswered. Moving toward a new reading of “The Coflmmaker,” the asymmetrical story generally considered of only anecdotal interest, our essay addresses these questions.
The Antigone as Cultural Touchstone: Matthew Arnold, Hegel, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Margaret Drabble
Authors: Joseph Gerhard
Published: February 2007

Matthew Arnold asserts that because the motivation of the Antigone's heroine is obsolete the play's action no longer interests us. This dismissal contrasts sharply with Hegel's recurring celebration of the tragedy's ethical and dramatic perfection. Moving between these positions, George Eliot accepts the modernity of Antigone's character as moral pioneer but finds the play's action without much application to Victorian reality. For Virginia Woolf Antigone is a natural counter within the feminist polemic of Three Guineas and an image capable of complex novelistic development in The Years, while Margaret Drabble's The Ice Age makes the purported irrelevance of Antigone's motivation to the 1970s the very basis of the play's absurdist appeal. The Antigone thus serves, pace Arnold, as an Arnoldian touchstone to correct his merely “personal estimate,” that of a statist who might naturally object to the heroic treatment of an individual in defiance of the state's claim to primacy.
Empty Center and Open End: The Theme of Language in Michel Butor's L'Emploi du temps
Authors: Martens Lorna
Published: February 2007

L'Emploi du temps is a metapoetic roman á thése that demonstrates the views on language Butor expresses in his theoretical essays. Parodying Proust, Butor undermines the idea that memory or language can recover an authentic layer of experience. By creating a text on two levels, a level of unsuccessful referentiality and a level of language as an autonomous entity, he replaces the notion of a vertical relation between text and referent with the notion of the bookto- be-continued. As description cedes to metaphor, metaphors crystallize into myths, and the narrator's “original experience” comes to reflect previous works of art, Revel's retrospective diary blossoms into imaginative creation. The “empty center” of the referential narrative, the missing date February 29, becomes the open end of Revel's novel. Four double metaphors—the labyrinth, the map, weaving, and the mirror—which are crossover points in the novel's chiastic structure, engage both the referent (Revel's year in Bleston) and the process of recreating it in writing.
Milton, Paradise Regained, and Georgic
Authors: Low Anthony
Published: February 2007

Although the question of genre has puzzled critics of Paradise Regained, the poem's structure, style, and spirit, as well as much of its imagery, are georgic. Like Vergil, Milton emphasizes incessant labor, constructive as opposed to destructive heroism, and quiet effort to build a flourishing civilization. In the Georgics as in the Bible, the right response to the curse of labor transforms it into a blessing. While epic glorifies war, georgic celebrates the arts of peace. In Paradise Lost, Adam and Eve enjoy a pastoral paradise of ease until they fall; then they and their descendants must earn their bread in a hard georgic world. In Paradise Regained, Satan variously attempts to pervert the generic mode of the Son's heroism. After a laborious struggle, the Son confirms himself in the role anticipated by Milton's opening metaphor: he raises a georgic garden in the world's “wast Wilderness.”
At the Margin of Discourse: Footnotes in the Fictional Text
Authors: Benstock Shari
Published: February 2007

The referential and marginal features of footnotes serve different functions in criticism and literature: scholarly footnotes shore up the text by enclosing it and limiting its claims; in fiction, footnotes extend textual authority by enlarging the fictional context. Both inner- and outer-directed, these two kinds of notations display a self-conscious anxiety about the critical and creative acts they annotate. Scholarly notes mask this ambivalence by claiming extratextual authority; literary notes highlight the ambivalence by consciously dividing the text against itself. This essay examines the ways footnotes inTom Jones, TristramShandy, andFinnegansWake parody the notational convention and draw attention to the faulted authority of its discourse by flouting scholarly claims to objectivity and neutrality, by calling into question the relations of author and reader on textual grounds, and by using self-reflexive narrative methods to illustrate the rhetorical double bind that keepsalllanguage at the margin of discourse.
“Each Heav'nly Close”: Mythologies and Metrics in Spenser and the Early Poetry of Milton
Authors: Gross Kenneth
Published: February 2007

A poet cannot help borrowing images and verse shapes from earlier poems. But in adapting Spenser's final hexameter, a major writer like Milton makes an apparently simple formal imitation the locus for revisionary strategies of a highly figurative nature. Spenser's own prosodic choices are always shadowed by larger tropes of time, death, love, and voice, as is evident both in the rhetorical effects that characterize the closure of theFaerie Queenestanza and in the elusive river and echo mythologies that inhabit the refrains of the poet's two marriage odes. These works, in turn, strongly influence Milton's early strophic poetry, especially the Nativity Hymn and the song to Echo fromComas. Milton reinvents the hexameter close in ways that point to his larger poetic ambitions, finding in that metrical scheme a space in which to reflect on, oppose, and translate the deep structures of Spenserian mythmaking.
From Tempest to Epilogue: Augustine's Allegory in Shakespeare's Drama
Authors: Walter James
Published: February 2007

The Tempest is an allegory of the process of interpretation in a tradition that derives from Augustine's Confessions. Allegory calls attention to signs as signs and examines their adequacy to represent truth. Shakespeare's play begins in the realm of allegory's arbitrariness. Just as the imposition of Prospero's art on nature creates a storm to disorient characters in the play, Shakespeare's drama enthralls viewers in the theater, tempting them to an error like Prospero's retreat into his study in Milan. Gradually, however, by art attuned to a providential design working in events, Prospero resolves the conflicts among the characters. The symbolic unity of life finally suggested remains nevertheless an expression more of desire and promise than of realization. To remind his audience of this truth, Shakespeare makes Prospero in the Epilogue rupture the imagined world of art and insist on the audience's relating the play's ideal meanings to their historical lives.
Narrative Structure in Maupassant: Frames of Desire
Authors: Moger Angela S.
Published: February 2007

This essay explores the dynamics of framed narrative through readings of two Maupassant stories that illustrate the range of potential in the frame. Scrutiny of “La rempailleuse” and “En voyage” reveals, in particular, how a frame modifies the effect of, and reaction to, the narrative it surrounds. The more general principle that emerges is that the seemingly gratuitous border consisting of the “extra” narrator and his addressees operates, paradoxically, against closure, casting the reader into a metacommunicative realm where a second sign system springs from the first. Thus, in “En voyage,” romantic love, the thematic content, serves as the basis for a poetics of narrative and illuminates the larger implications of the interminability of the paratactic structure. Issues addressed are the strategies latent in the frame and the way the form itself calls into question the very nature and function of narrative.
Frankenstein: Creation as Catastrophe
Authors: Sherwin Paul
Published: February 2007

Much in Frankenstein suggests that the novel and classical psychoanalysis are meant for each other. The creation becomes a significant act, at once paradigmatic and intensely human, when viewed as a repetition of Frankenstein's primal-scene trauma, with the Creature emerging as a representation of the scene and the related oedipal complex. A psychoanalytic interpretation, however, requires a drastic secondary revision of Frankenstein, and not enough insight is purchased by so much blindness. The analyst repeats, yet fails to elucidate, the misreading of world, self, and Creature that renders Frankenstein a tiresome neurotic. But before this personal collapse Frankenstein achieved the sublime. His catastrophe of origination, engendering a creative self that anxiously pursues an impossible desire and an artifact that both represents and eclipses the creator, serves as a paradigm of the genesis of any sublime artwork, any uncanny reanimation project.
Marie de France's Poetics of Silence: The Implications for a Feminine Translatio
Authors: Freeman Michelle A.
Published: February 2007

The Prologue to the twelfth-century collection of French narrative poems called the Lais presents a woman poet, now known as Marie de France, who appears to be preoccupied with the significance of origins and who takes a bold initiative while remaining elusive about the exact nature of her enterprise. A close reading of two of these tales—Lastic and Chievrefoil-helps clarify the problematics of Marie's portrayal by showing that it rests on a deliberate poetics of silence. The poet-narrator stresses not what is heroic, public, and patriarchal; rather, she creates an alternative type of lineage rooted in silence, secrecy, and, above all, in a private exchange between two who love. The gradual revelation of the sign and its meaning, achieved by successive attempts to gloser 10 lettre, are intimately connected both to Marie's text and to her poetic persona: to gloss the one is to name the other.
Lafayette's Ellipses: The Privileges of Anonymity
Authors: DeJean Joan
Published: February 2007

The space of women's writing is too often described in negative terms. In Lafayette's La Princesse de Cleves, as well as in other works by seventeenth-century French women novelists, what have been read as signs of effacement can be viewed as attempts to assume control of the fiction-making process. Thus Lafayette devised a dual authorial signature for her masterpiece; an external signature-the anonymity she used to protect her person and increase her authority-and an internal signature-her heroine's gradual determination to supervise the plot of her life and the publication of her story. Both Lafayette's choice of anonymity and the princess' renunciation of marriage and life in the world can be seen not as acts of avoidance but as affirmations of the woman writer's authority.
The Illusion of Mastery: Wordsworth's Revisions of “The Drowned Man of Esthwaite,” 1799, 1805, 1850
Authors: Wolfson Susan J.
Published: February 2007

In the continuing controversies over the value of the 1805 Prelude versus the 1850 text-to which some voices have added a case for the 1799 version-the importance of Wordsworth's character as a revising poet has been neglected. One episode present in all three versions, his boyhood discovery of a man drowned in Esthwaite's Lake, offers a productive case study-both for the play of Wordsworth's revisions and for a view of The Prelude as a poem constituted by its many texts, rather than by anyone authoritative text. Wordsworth's most emphatic revision is the addition of a commentary that denies the boy's fear and converts the corpse into a figure of “ideal grace,” like something in a literary “romance.” Yetother revisions of both text and context reveal Wordsworth's ambivalence about the strategies of argumentative mastery with which he would govern the mysteries that inhabit his imagination.
The Power of Women's Hair in the Victorian Imagination
Authors: Gitter Elisabeth G.
Published: February 2007

Women's hair, particularly when it is golden, has always been a preoccupation of Western artists and writers. But for the Victorians, who discovered complex totemic and symbolic significance in the image of women's hair, it became an obsession. The powerful woman mythologized in Victorian literature and art achieved her vitality partly through her hair, which both contributed to and expressed her magic power. She used her hair to weave her discourse and to spin her plots, to strangle her lovers and to shelter them, to build deadly snares and webs and to proclaim her own divinity and glory.
Binding the Book: Hermeneutics and Manuscript Production inParadiso33
Authors: Ahern John
Published: February 2007

Twice in theComedy'slast canto Dante refers to the binding of texts. The Sibyl's “light leaves” (lines 64-66) point to the danger of not binding texts: when the order of pages is lost, the text s meaning (sentenza) also vanishes. Medieval thinkers distinguished between the sequential perception (sensus) and the simultaneous perception (sententia) of a poem s elements. Because Dante released the poem in fascicles over a period of ten or more years, he needed to remind the reader in the last fascicle to bind the pages into a single volume. The final book image (85-90) indirectly performs this task. Appearing at the moment when the reader is at last able to pass from the poem s sensus to itssententia, these lines employ book binding as a metaphor for the perception of the text in its entirety. Their unusually polysemous language implies a triple analogy. God, poet, and reader are all artificers of a heavenly volume.
The Alternative Reading of The Canterbury Tales: Chaucer's Text and the Early Manuscripts
Authors: Owen Charles A.
Published: February 2007

The evidence of the six earliest manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales does not support the consensus among Chaucerians that the Ellesmere a ordering represents Chaucer's intentions. Marginalia indicate that Hengwrt preceded Ellesmere and was most closely associated with it. Hengwrt and Ellesmere influenced Cambridge Dd. A somewhat looser association binds Corpus, Harley4, and Lansdowne. In each of the groups editors tried to improve the arrangement and to make the resulting book appear complete. Three conclusions emerge. (1) Only the text derives from Chaucer. (2) Throughout the manuscript period, single tales and groups of tales continued to circulate in great numbers and to provide exemplars for the collected tales that survive. (3) The Canterbury Tales never existed as a neat pile of manuscript, an almost complete text. What we have instead is a collection of fragments reflecting the different stages of a developing plan.
The Järsta Stone
Authors: Trygstad Anne
Published: February 2007

One of the most puzzling of eleventh-century runic inscriptions appears on the Järsta stone, a commemorative monument from Sweden. Its major features—the text band, zoomorphic ornamentation, and shape—unite to form a balanced and harmonious whole. Past interpretations of the Järsta inscription accord neither with the general grammatical, orthographic and formulaic conventions of Uppland commemorative stones nor with the particular variations typical of the carver, Asmund Karasun. A careful consideration of the artistic design suggests that Asmund intended this inscription to be read in a sequence quite different from that proposed by past scholars. This new reading conforms to Asmund's characteristic orthography and phraseology, as we know them from his many other stones, and follows the patterns of formulation traditional to runic carving.
The Petrarchan Context of Spenser's Amoretti
Authors: Dasenbrock Reed Way
Published: February 2007

Spenser's Amoretti have never been properly appreciated, because they have been judged by the norms they have sought to criticize, the norms of Renaissance Petrarchism. A critique of Petrarchan love, the Amoretti turn away from that system's restless egotism toward the world of marriage, which Spenser presents as a sacred harbor of rest. This is not an absolutely original turn, since Petrarch himself, founder of the conventions of Petrarchan love, also sought to escape his own love situation. He does so, in the Canzoniere, by turning toward Heaven and by turning Laura into an agent of transcendence, like Dante's Beatrice. The turn the Amoretti make is parallel to the turn made by the Canzoniere, though in Spenser marriage replaces death as the means of obtaining sacred rest. Spenser's exaltation of marriage is indebted to Protestant teaching, though the Amoretti is where this new conception of marriage first enters love poetry.
The Culture of Criticism
Authors: Hartman Geoffrey H.
Published: February 2007

For those who approach literary studies with literary sensitivity, an immediate problem arises. They cannot overlookstyle, their own or that of others. Through their concern with literature they have become aware that understanding is a mediated activity and that style is an index of how the writer deals with the consciousness of mediation. Style is not cognitive only; it is also recognitive, a signal betraying the writer's relation, or sometimes the relation of a type of discourse, to a historical and social world. To say thatof coursewords are a form of life is not enough: words at this level of style intend a statement about life itself in relation to words, and in particular to literature as a value-laden act. Thus, even without fully understanding it, one is alerted by a similarity in the opening of these two essays: The Right Reverend Father in God, Lancelot Bishop of Winchester, died on September 26th, 1626. During his lifetime he enjoyed a distinguished reputation for the excellence of his sermons, for the conduct of his diocese, for his ability in controversy displayed against Cardinal Bellarmine, and for the decorum and devotion of his private life. (Eliot,Lancelot13) One afternoon, Walter Benjamin was sitting inside the Café des Deux Magots in Saint Germain des Prés when he was struck with compelling force by the idea of drawing a diagram of his life, and knew at the same moment exactly how it was to be done. He drew the diagram, and with utterly typical ill-luck lost it again a year or two later. The diagram, not surprisingly, was a labyrinth. (Eagleton, Pref.)
The Father and the Bride in Shakespeare
Authors: Boose Lynda E.
Published: February 2007

Although sixteenth-century daughters were evidently an economic burden on their fathers, Shakespeare consistently depicts fathers whose love for their daughters is so possessive that it endangers the family unit. To delineate the tensions of this bond at its liminal moment, Shakespeare evokes the altar tableau of the marriage service. This paradigmatic substructure illuminates the central conflict in the father-daughter relationship: the father who resists the ritual's demands to give his daughter to a rival male destroys both his paternal authority and his family's generative future; yet the daughter who escapes without undergoing ritual severance violates the family structure and thus becomes both guiltlessly agentive in ruining her original family and tragically incapable of creating a new one. The marriage ceremony is designed to resolve this paradox. In Shakespeare's dramas, submission to this rite ensures the only possibility of freedom for the individual and of continuity for the family.
Margaret Fuller and the Transcendental Ethos: Woman in the Nineteenth Century
Authors: Robinson David M.
Published: February 2007

Margaret Fuller, despite her personal association with transcendentalism, has increasingly come to be seen apart from that movement, as a rebel whose rejection of Romantic Boston was essential to her development. Yet Fuller is best understood as an embodiment of the value most central to transcendentalism, “self-culture.” The doctrine of the cultivation of the self preached by Channing and others profoundly influenced all the transcendentalists, including Fuller. But her concentration on its implications for feminist concerns led to her important work on women's culture, Woman in the Nineteenth Century. This long essay—which evolved through an intense study of Goethean criticism and a series of discussions, or “Conversations,” that Fuller organized for women—is best seen as the application of transcendental philosophy to the concerns of women and as an instructive example of the connections between idealist philosophy and social reform.
The Genesis of Shakespeare's Sonnets: Spenser's Ruines of Rome: by Bellay
Authors: Hieatt A. Kent
Published: February 2007

Sonnets has appeared to draw on antique topoi of permanence and change and to escape other sonnet sequences' intertextuality and attachment to a set of narrative and lyric conventions. In fact, Shakespeare extensively followed Spenser's nearby nonamatory sequence, translated from Du Bellay's Les Antiquitez de Rome. Numerous verbal and thematic resemblances (some exclusive to Ruines and Sonnets) show Shakespeare transmuting Spenser's image–a preeminent city ruined by time and the conflicts of will and of appetite among its contentious sons but immortalized in the literature inspired by its greatness–into another image: a preeminent youth, vulnerable to time and moral decay, who endures in Sonnets. Also, Shakespeare's early histories borrow verbally and thematically from Ruines' weakening of an otherwise invincible nation by strife. The nature of Shakespeare's transaction with Ruines remains to be investigated.
On the Threshold of the Realist Novel: Gender and Genre inLa gaviota
Authors: Kirkpatrick Susan
Published: February 2007

Cecilia Böhl, who wrote under the pseudonym Fernán Caballero, manipulated the fictional forms available to her in an attempt to compensate for or conceal her transgression of the taboo against women writers. In the protagonist ofLa gaviotashe combined types drawn from three genres–the tale of morals, the Romantic novel of the ambitious provincial youth, and Spanishcostumbrismo– in an elaborate strategy designed to disavow her identification with her character. In so doing, she constructed a composite fictional discourse that opened the way for the realist novel in Spain. Her anxiety about male-female boundaries, however, extended to generic definitions as well: her static treatment of the fictional modes she brought together prevented her from achieving the fluid, dynamic narrative form that is characteristic of realism.
“Go”: Milton's Antinomianism and the Separation Scene inParadise Lost, Book 9
Authors: Bennett Joan S.
Published: February 2007

The quarrel between Adam and Eve in book 9 concerns not only relations between the sexes but also the nature of human government. Prelapsarian Adam and Eve, who, like the antinomian Christian, possess total spiritual liberty, deal with an epistemological dilemma that confronted antinomians like Milton during the English revolution: In the absence of intrinsically authoritative external laws, how can one know when one's decision to act is based on the direction of God's spirit dwelling in one's heart and when it is based on personal desire? In the light of Milton's historical answer to this question, we can see that Milton dramatizes in Eve the voluntarist antinomian's tendency to overconfidence and in Adam the humanist antinomian's struggle with right reason. While neither person sins in this scene, both lose their balance in particularly antinomian ways that grant us insight into the necessarily precarious nature of human freedom.
Improvising Rules in the Book of Ruth
Authors: Wojcik Jan
Published: February 2007

The biblical book of Ruth is a succinct, intricate love story powered by five intense dialogues. It is a story about language and literature as well as about love. The characters find all three as generously available as the grains of barley on which Boaz and Ruth pledge their troth. Boaz, Ruth, and Naomi draw on a rich common store of literary allusions and laws derived from Hebrew literary tradition to create a happy ending for the sterile stories of their individual pasts. The liberties they take with known biblical and Hebraic law have long puzzled scholars trying to place the story in its precise historical or cultural context. But I argue that the book was never intended to represent a time and place, that it celebrates the creative improvisations religious rules are meant to inspire in any time or place.
Sexual and Social Mobility inThe Duchess of Malfi
Authors: Whigham Frank
Published: February 2007

For some time Webster'sDuchess of Malfihas been interpreted by reference to brother-sister incest, but that explanation has not been well integrated with other concerns in the play, nor has its sheer presence been questioned. Anthropological kinship theory, however, which conceives incest as a social act, reveals relations among the brother-sister plot, the play's major thematic element of social mobility, and the Jacobean setting from which the theme arose. Seen in this anthropological light, social-structural relations come into view among Ferdinand's incestuous inclination, his sister's cross-class marriage, and Antonio's and Bosola's upward social mobility. These relations in turn show how the play is grounded in its particular historical setting, at a time of substantial changes in notions of social role, changes that helped make visible the social determination of personal identity.
“That Which Is Always Beginning”: Stevens's Poetry of Affirmation
Authors: Shaviro Steven
Published: February 2007

Wallace Steven's later poetry traces the multiple investments of desire that impel a world in perpetual metamorphosis. The works from “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction” onward constitute an unlimited and ceaselessly repeated affirmation of difference, heterogeneity, and change. The evanescent movements of this poetry can never be reduced to sameness or self-identity, but they produce partial and temporary fixities of subjectivity and signification as local effects. Steven's radical perspectivism and his rejection of concepts of identity and substance work to subvert traditional dualisms of subject and object, language and world, and assertion and denial. But this work of displacement is never merely negative and destructive. Stevens's later poetry celebrates what Nietzsche calls “the eternal joy of becoming,” and in so doing it exceeds the limits of Western humanist thought.
Defining the “Colonial Reader”:El Periquillo Sarniento
Authors: Vogeley Nancy
Published: February 2007

El Periquillo Sarniento, the first Spanish American novel, by José Joaquin Fernández de Lizardi, was published in Nueva España in 1816. The book's reception at that moment, when Mexico was fighting for independence, cries out for a reader-response interpretation sensitive to the social realities of production and consumption. In the title of this essay the “colonial reader” emphasizes the political nature of the reading process for this particular work, but the quotation marks suggest general applicability. Lizardi's sense of his readers' varying orientations to a book—from a rigidly European literary taste to an American desire for plain expression—dictated the design of this indigenous work. Lizardi, like the writers of the “new Spanish American novel” later, understood the need for a radically different literary language, one that would urge readers to question inherited forms and to revalue existing speech.
The Novelization of Voice in Early African American Narrative
Authors: Andrews William L.
Published: February 2007

During the African American literary renaissance of the 1850s, the act of narrating was novelized in many slave narratives. But Frederick Douglass'sHemic Slave(1853) and William Wells Brown'sClotel: Or, The President's Daughter(1853) are particularly noteworthy because they assert the importance of the fictive to the representation of facts in ways that empower these texts as novels, not as autobiographies. Brown and Douglass problematize the relative status of the factual and the fictive in their texts in order to raise questions about the nature and source of authority in narrative. These texts suggest that authority is not an inherent part of narrative discourse (whether factual or fictive) but rather a function of discourses as facilitated by the narrating voice.
An Ars Oblivionalis? Forget It!
Authors: Eco Umberto
Published: February 2007

ONCE, AS A JOKE, some friends and I invented advertisements for university positions in nonexistent disciplines. We divided these disciplines into four departments: adynata, or impossibilia, containing sciences that were historically impossible, such as history of the wheel in the pre-Columbian empires, history of painting on Easter Island, Aztec horse racing; oxymoronica, containing sciences that were self-contradictory and analytically impossible, such as nomadic urban studies, institutions of deviance, binary logic of the included middle; byzantinica, containing sciences of utter uselessness, such as potiosection, or the art of cutting broth; and tetrapiloctomia, or the art of quartering a hair, containing sciences of excessive subtlety, such as microscopy of indiscernibles.
“No Word without Mystery”: Allegories of Sacred Truth in the Autos Sacramentales of Calderón de la Barca
Authors: Kurtz Barbara E.
Published: February 2007

This essay closely examines several mythological autos sacramentales by the seventeenth-century Spanish dramatist Pedro Calderón de la Barca. These eucharistic dramas, allegorizations of famous tales from antiquity, raise provocative questions about the relation of myth to allegory and about the hermeneutical problems inherent in both. By explicitly thematizing the Word as source and guarantor of pagan myth and of language and illuminated interpretation themselves, the plays embody a powerful allegory of the assumed divine origin and sacral significance not only of myth but also of an essential and radical logocentrism. For Calderón divine ordination and revealed truth implicitly sacramentalize the auto and sanction the human author's hermeneutical and creative endeavors. This study shows that Calderón's metaphysics and allegorical theory constitute a timeless witness to Christian truth and a timely challenge to some widely accepted tenets of modern literary theory.
The World as Specter: Hawthorne's Historical Art
Authors: Budick E. Miller
Published: February 2007

This essay explores the significance of history in Hawthorne's fiction. Hawthornean romance, despite its extensive use of history, emphasizes its distance both from a real world and from ordinary historical discourse. The world, it seems to argue, is more like fantasy than fact, more like story than history. Nonetheless, Hawthorne's historical fictions remain carefully researched, meticulously detailed. The Hawthornean world, so highly subjective, so complexly encoded and symbolic, never dissipates into the fantasy that seems to narrate it. What prevents the evaporation of reality into dream, according to Hawthorne, what ensures the distance between the perceiving self and the world, and hence what restrains the imagination from engulfing a reality that is largely at the mercy of the individual's perceptual authority, is historical consciousness. Hawthorne's historical romances are about a historical imagination that is also a moral imagination.
Wordsworth's Images of Language: Voice and Letter inThe Prelude
Authors: Kneale J. Douglas
Published: February 2007

In Wordsworth's language a voice as enduring as epitaphic inscription interpenetrates a writing as immediate as the breath of speech. While voice might seem the appropriate linguistic ideal for a poet who saw himself as “a man speaking to men,” Wordsworth's desire for a more durable language produces a competing “insistence of the letter.” “Images of voice” in nature exist in a “strength / Of usurpation” with the written characters that nature imprints. The epitaphic text emerges as the intersection of voice and letter, in which the autobiographical subject attempts to constitute itself in textual form. Wordsworth's meeting with the blind Beggar strikingly illustrates the interpenetration of voice, self, and text. Writing, for Wordsworth, is not the death of voice but the consummation: it is the accomplishment of voice.
Modernist Maneuverings in the Marriage Plot: Breaking Ideologies of Gender and Genre in James'sThe Golden Bowl
Authors: Boone Joseph A.
Published: February 2007

The power of novelistic tradition to translate ideological structures of belief into narrative structures that encode and perpetuate those beliefs is ominously illustrated in the Anglo-American novel's “marriage tradition.” Novelists who have attempted to escape such strictures have had to contend not only with the socially conservative thematics of the traditional love plot but also with its highly codified, closed structural variants. The protomodernist experimentation and formal openness ofThe Golden Bowlprovides a case in point: here James methodically explodes the premises of traditional love fiction by making the novel's experiments in form mirror its unsettling critique of the sexual codes engendering marital strife. In the process, James's attempt to plot the contradictions inherent in the conventional ideal of wedlock underscores the degree to which a traditional novelistic pattern of happy endings has always been a self-subverting literary enterprise.
“Don't Tell”: Imposed Silences inThe Color PurpleandThe Woman Warrior
Authors: Cheung King-Kok
Published: February 2007

The Color PurpleandThe Woman Warriorexhibit parallel narrative strategies. The respectively black and Chinese American protagonists work their way from speechlessness to eloquence by breaking through the constraints of sex, race, and language. The heroines turn to masculine figures for guidance, to female models for inspiration, and to native idioms for stylistic innovation. Initially unable to speak, they develop distinctive voices by registering their own unspoken grief on paper and, more important, by recording and emulating the voices of women from their respective ethnic communities. Through these testimonies, each written in a bicultural language, Walker and Kingston reveal the obstacles and resources peculiar to minority women. Subverting patriarchal literary traditions by reclaiming a mother tongue that carries a rich oral tradition (of which women are guardians) the authors artfully coordinate the tasks of breaking silence, acknowledging female influence, and redefining while preserving ethnic characteristics.
Recipes for Reading: Summer Pasta, Lobster à la Riseholme, and Key Lime Pie
Authors: Leonardi Susan J.
Published: February 2007

Recipes, whether in cookbooks or in other texts, exemplify embedded and gendered discourse. In the 1951 edition of Irma Rombauer's The Joy of Cooking, Marion Becker's editorial altering of the proportions between “bed”—the narrative that frames the recipes—and recipe erodes the bed and erodes as well the usefulness of the recipes. More cognizant than Becker's text of the importance of this bed, E. F. Benson's comic novel Mapp and Lucia both embeds the recipe for those masculine—whether male or female—readers unaware of the recipe's social significance and establishes a connection between recipe with-holding and narrative. Nora Ephron's Heartburn uses the recipe and its social meanings to play with notions of reproducibility both literary and culinary and thereby elaborates a connection, implied in the early versions of Joy, between recipe sharing and narrative production and consumption, a connection that “Recipes for Reading” itself attempts to reproduce.
Chaucer and the Silence of History: Situating the Canon's Yeoman's Tale
Authors: Harwood Britton J.
Published: February 2007

Dissonances within texts may result from contradictions within ideology or the contradiction between ideology and history. The disjunctions between the two parts of the Canon's Yeoman's Tale, between both parts and the ending, and the gaps within each of the parts can be explained as arising with the contradiction between Chaucer's ideological project in the tale—an attack on the emergence of productive capital—and the literary means for the attack. The result is a confession told without moral content and then a fabliau made to serve Christian morality. Productive capital, which is virtually unrepresented elsewhere in the Chaucerian canon, is both invisible and glaring in the tale; and it competed in Chaucer's London with commercial capital, which reinforced the feudal aristocracy as well as depended on it.
Intelligibility and Meaningfulness in Multicultural Literature in English
Authors: Dasenbrock Reed Way
Published: February 2007

As new literatures in English emerge all over the world, literature in English is increasingly multicultural, but the criticism of these literatures has not fully come to terms with this multiculturalism. Specifically, a work read across cultures is likely to be at least partially unintelligible to some of its readers, and critics have seen this as a factor necessarily limiting the readership of these works. But intelligibility and meaningfulness are not synonymous. This essay analyzes moments of difficulty in four such multicultural texts, by Narayan, Kingston, Anaya, and Ihimaera, showing on Gricean lines that meaning can be created precisely by the struggle to make sense of the unintelligible. The work done in that process can lead to a deeper understanding of the text, and the reader who must do that work is therefore not excluded from a full understanding.
“When You Call Me That …”: Tall Talk and Male Hegemony inThe Virginian
Authors: Mitchell Lee Clark
Published: February 2007

Owen Wister'sThe Virginian, considered the prototypical cowboy western, only vaguely satisfies formula expectations. Encounters consist more of wordplay than gunplay, and physical conflicts rarely occur. Far from depicting a conventional male violence tamed at last by a feminized East, the novel celebrates the Virginian's rhetorical triumph over the schoolmarm and the silencing of her feminism in favor of a “logic” of patriarchy. Why should this best-seller have established a formula it does not fulfill? One explanation may involve its setting in Wyoming—known as the “Equality State” for first having enfranchised women. By opposing a thesis of sexual inequality to that setting's implications, the novel could be read as two things at once: a paean to an older, masculine West and yet a brief for modern male hegemony. Readers troubled by a resurgent feminism could delight unawares in the novel's contradictions and read into it the formula western.
The Pain of Sorrow in the Modern World: The Works of Marguerite Duras
Authors: Kristeva Julia
Published: February 2007

Pain is one of the most important things in my life.

La douleur

I tell him that when I was a child, my mother's unhappiness took the place of dreams.

The Lover

We, the so-called civilized worlds, know that we are mortal, as Valéry declared after World War i, but now, even more, we know that we can cause our own death. Auschwitz and Hiroshima revealed that the “malady of death,” to use Marguerite Duras's term, constitutes our most hidden inner recesses. If the passion for death governs the military and economic domains as well as social and political bonds, this passion now even appears to govern the once noble realm of the mind. Indeed, a monumental crisis in thought and word, a crisis in representation, has occurred. Its analogues can be found in previous centuries (the decline of the Roman Empire and the rise of Christianity, the devastating periods of plague or war during the Middle Ages), and its causes can be sought in the collapse of economic, political, and legal structures. Moreover, the power of destructive forces, both outside and within the individual and society, has never appeared as incontestable and irrevocable as it does today. The destruction of nature, of life and economic resources, is coupled with an outbreak, or simply a more patent manifestation, of the disorders that psychiatry has subtly diagnosed: psychosis, depression, mania, borderline disorders, false personalities, and so on.
Joyce's “Delicate Siamese” Equation: The Dialectic of Home in Ulysses
Authors: Law Jules David
Published: February 2007

For Joyce's Stephen Dedalus, the word home is itself both “familiar” and “foreign,” a paradox that confronts him with questions of both political and linguistic identity. Stephen's solution is to idealize the notions of exile and exteriority, but Joyce recognizes that this attempt to domesticate the experience of cultural alienation is a project wed to figurative language and one that may well end up reinscribing the very oppositions it intends to bring under its control. Nowhere is this dilemma more clear or more urgent than in the “Nestor” episode of Ulysses, Joyce's most fully articulated confrontation between interiority and exteriority, patriotism and exile. What makes the confrontation truly dialectical is not simply the figurative reconciliation or balancing of Manichean oppositions but rather the referral of the conflict to a historically occluded political subtext, whose very enigma points forward to tensions as yet untranscended in our own contemporary culture.
The Chiasmus: Unamuno's Master Trope
Authors: Mermall Thomas
Published: February 2007

To become all things, thereby resolving all contradictions, was a supreme aspiration of Renaissance humanists from Pico della Mirandola to Fray Luis de Leon. Prompted by the existential aporias of a search for truth and characterized by recourse to the chiastic paradox, Unamuno takes up this challenge and transforms it into an essential element of his modernist poetics. As an incipient but unconsummated form of dialectical argumentation, the chiasmus arrests progressive movement toward the resolution of the contradictions it generates. This master trope enables Unamuno to become all things yet rest in none, simultaneously to affirm and to deny momentous philosophical and moral positions, to offer multiple choices of being, and to avoid closure.
Anticipating Alienation:Beowulfand the Intrusion of Literacy
Authors: Near Michael R.
Published: February 2007

Implicit inBeowulf'sthematic involvement with language is a marked and persistent hostility toward the epistemological foundation underpinning the practice of literacy. While the poem seems to acknowledge the psychological posture conditioned by, or at least compatible with, literate practices, the acknowledgment characterizes that posture as a clear, direct threat to the ordering structures—and thus to the basic survival—of the poem's central system of personal interdependencies.Beowulfconfronts the psychological demands of the reading experience by persistently reaffirming those idioms of speech and patterns of interaction that require the open immediacy of spoken exchange. The confrontations set in conflict not simply the characters of the poem but the psychological structures that the characters epitomize and thus the linguistic practices most compatible with those structures. (MRN)
Music, Delivery, and the Rhetoric of Memory in Guillaume de Machaut'sRemède de Fortune
Authors: Enders Jody
Published: February 2007

Recent work on the momentous implications ofmouvanceand on the fluidity of genres in medieval literature has only begun to excavate the wealth of extant commentaries on the interplay during performance of rhetoric, poetry, music, dance, and drama in early cultures. Even today, Guillaume de Machaut's fourteenth-centuryRemède de Fortuneoffers compelling testimony about the generative and regenerative harmony between images and speech—themselves engendered and preserved by that most egregiously neglected rhetorical canonmemoria.Long cited by poets, musicians, rhetoricians, and dramatists as crucial to their arts, mnemonics constitutes a complex epistemological framework by which to restore the lost dynamism to a literary corpus—lyric poetry—that enacted each of those arts. As the conceptual precursor to literary invention, memory collapses our current distinctions between seeing, saying, and singing, between visual, virtual, and actual performances, thus assisting us in revising our conceptions not only of performance but of genre as well.
Kemps Nine Dates Wonder: Dancing Carnival into Market
Authors: Thomas Max W.
Published: February 2007

In 1600, Will Kemp danced a morris from London to Norwich and published an account of his feat, Kemps Nine Daies Wonder. His propensity for histrionics had won him widespread fame in England (as the Clown for the Chamberlain's Men, the acting company he had left in 1599). Attempting to capitalize on that propensity with his morris, he sought immediate monetary gain and also a lasting personal recognition; consequently, his pamphlet emphasizes the affinities between his project and a mercantile venture. In doing so, moreover, it presents Kemp's dance as a reworking of the medieval morris traditions, a version distanced from their carnivalesque associations and communal origins and offered for sale, so to speak, in the marketplace of theatrical representation.
Playing the Moor: Parody and Performance in Lope de Vega's El primer Fajardo
Authors: Burshatin Israel
Published: February 2007

Lope de Vega's El primer Fajardo (c. 1610–12) chronicles the rise of a hero of the Christian Reconquest who triumphs over a Moorish opponent, Abenalfajar, and thereby earns the Moor's Castilianized name and a place in history. A gambler, he “plays [or ”wagers“] a Moor” and, in the process, subdues the images of Spanish orientalism. His parodies “transcontextualize” Moorish motifs and challenge the Reconquest's codes. During a key re-creation of a traditional ballad, “Jugando estaba el rey moro” ‘The Moorish king was playing,‘ Fajardo attacks the metaphorical depiction of Muslim-Christian tolerance. His transgressive moves colonize the domain of balladry, while his Morisco servant's malapropisms mock conventions that are elsewhere an enabling legacy. Lope's official writing as secretary to the duque de Sessa parallels some of these motifs: the aptness of a name is borne out in performance, and playing the Moor involves impersonating cultural differences, even when the aim is to eliminate the communities of represented “others.”
Text: Origins and Reference
Authors: Babuts Nicolae
Published: February 2007

The conflict between formalist thinking and theories that view texts in their historical contexts serves as a starting point for the introduction of a cognitive view of literature. From this perspective language has full referential powers. The “referent” splits into two entities, however: things-in-themselves (in their material identity), which we cannot know, and things in their coded form, which are perceptually accessible. Readers' mnemonic potentials, a consequence of the bonding of perception and language, are adduced to show that texts originate in past interpretations of other texts and in personal experience and that consequently social forces and historical events are subsumed in the individual memory. In the cognitive light, memory becomes the ultimate metaphor, and the epistemological claim of realism regains its compelling force.