bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Abraham, Adam, and The Theme of Exile in Paradise Lost
Authors: Pecheux Mary Christopher
Published: February 2007

Among the Biblical types which Milton used to enrich his theme in Paradise Lost was that of Abraham, father of the faithful. James Sims has shown the parallel between the visit of the angels to Abraham at Mamre and Raphael's descent to Eden in Book v; John Parish has elaborated the resemblance between Abraham's plea for the Sodomites and Adam's dialogue with God in Book viii; and Barbara Lewalski has emphasized the spiritual vision of the man of faith in Books xi and xii: Abraham and his heirs view the promises “afar off,” just as Adam at this point sees far off the great symbolic Old Testament places. It is the purpose of this article to explore further the Abraham-Adam parallel in the last two books, showing in particular the relationship between Abraham's departure from Ur and Adam's from Paradise. From this relationship flow certain effects: the tone of the concluding episodes of Paradise Lost becomes clearer, their universal significance is emphasized, and the exile motif is harmonized with the concept of the journey of the epic hero. The virtues of Abraham are precisely those which Adam as Christian hero is called upon to practice, while both Abraham's setting forth to the land of Canaan and Adam's exile from Paradise are types of man's setting forth on his earthly pilgrimage.
The Liturgy of the Epiphany Season and the Epiphanies of Joyce
Authors: Walzl Florence L.
Published: February 2007

It has long been recognized that Joyce's writing is a texture of epiphanies and that the basic pattern in most of his major works is a chronological cycle tracing man's life from childhood and youth to maturity and sometimes age. The combination of these devices largely explains the structure of Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and both are used in conjunction with other techniques in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Although Joyce's use of them has been much discussed, the influences that led him to combine them have been less fully explored. The purpose of this paper is to assess the effect of the liturgy of the Epiphany season on Joyce's concept of epiphany and his use of the cycle pattern at the period he was writing Dubliners. Related liturgical influences on Dubliners will be discussed.
Paul Celan and Martin Buber: Poetry as Dialogue
Authors: Lyon James K.
Published: February 2007

From similar titles (Gespräch im Gebirg by Celan, “Gespräch in den Bergen” by Buber) to the common concern with engaging in dialogue with a “Thou,” the poetry of Paul Celan reveals strong affinities with the writings of Martin Buber. This originates in part with the common tradition of Hasidic Judaism from which both drew. But beyond this, Celan also owes a debt to Buber. His quest for a Thou, the underlying dialogical impulse, and the tone of the language of his poetry echo much that is found in Buber's work. Structurally, seventy-five percent of his poems address themselves to a Thou and try to effect an encounter with this object of address. But whereas Buber finds his Thou in God, for Celan there is often no respondent. He seeks through poetic language to establish or create an ultimate poetic reality of words, though in contrast to Buber his desperate attempt often fails. The large number of objects addressed as “Thou” in the internal landscape of Celan's poems confirms that essential reality can be perceived only through creative poetic dialogue, however anguished and inadequate. In this sense, Celan defies a dogma that proclaims modern poetry to be essentially monological, since a dialogical impulse underlies his entire work.
Allegory and Literary Form
Authors: Silverstein Theodore
Published: February 2007

The trouble with allegory is that it has become a fashionable current preoccupation and people like to be for it or against it. Polemics always tend to vulgarize issues, critical problems get lost among the involvements with “positions,” scholarship becomes a device for finding proofs in history for tightly held hypotheses, and argument becomes a form of rhetoric. But an even worse consequence of such controversial constriction is that it puts literary studies in a straightjacket. There is an important truth in that account of Western literary criticism in the Middle Ages which sees it primarily as a working out and extension of Augustinian doctrine, with the problems of Christian allegory at its center, and there is sufficient evidence in history to support and enlighten that view. Those, on the other hand, who are uncomfortable with allegory and find this view somehow less than satisfactory for the reading of certain texts may accept the allegorists' description of the tradition generally but at the same time justify their dissidence by pointing out (1) that there were other forms of allegory in the Middle Ages, which such a statement of tradition does not adequately consider, (2) that not all literary pieces were formed by their authors under the influence of that tradition, whatever interpreters afterwards may have done in reading them, and (3) that, in any case, even the Christian doctors most learned in the allegorical art did not claim that it could operate uniformly in all its variety everywhere or in every piece. On the contrary, they were the first to warn against such an assumption. Yes, say the proponents of allegory in response, but we don't make so rigid a claim as you imply; we are aware that not every medieval poem can be read by all the kinds of interpretation at once; some pieces obviously intend no more than the simplest sort of old-fashioned moralizing. And so it goes, pro and con, in secula seculorum.
‘Line’ and ‘Round’ in Emerson's “Uriel”
Authors: Witemeyer Hugh H.
Published: February 2007

“Uriel” is a poetic summary of many strains of thought in Emerson's early philosophy. Most interpretations of the poem have, however, emphasized its biographical significance. Stephen E. Whicher, for instance, has used the poem to illustrate the shock felt by the sanguine transcendentalist at the unfavorable reception of his Divinity School Address. But “Uriel” is important not simply because the “stern old war-gods” who “shook their heads” may be Andrews Norton and the Harvard Divinity School faculty, or because the “seraphs” who “frowned from their myrtle-beds” were the budding young powers of New England theology, assembled in 1838 at their “holy festival.” To be sure, one of the poem's highlights is its trenchant and witty satire of what Emerson called, in his Address, “historical Christianity.” That false faith, however, was but one manifestation of a pernicious mode of perception and discourse which the author found throughout history and contemporary thought. The poem was inspired not by a local animus but by a comprehensive, “meter-making” philosophical argument. It was probably composed early in 1845, well after the immediate animosities of the controversy over the Address had fallen into perspective. From that distance, Emerson generalized the biographical incident into a clash of opposing philosophies.
The MLA Bibliographical System: Past, Present, and Future
Authors: Meserole Harrison T.
Published: February 2007

As my colleagues and I who constitute the MLA Committee on Bibliography complete our work on the Bibliography for 1970, we approach a significant milestone in the history and development of the MLA bibliographical system. The appearance in print in the summer of 1971 of the bibliography we have just compiled will mark the 50th year of publication of this annual service to scholarship in the modern languages and literatures.
Tristram Shandy and the Reader's Imagination
Authors: Anderson Howard
Published: February 2007

In Tristram Shandy, Sterne forces us to recognize the limiting and distorting effects of the preconceptions which we may habitually impose upon new experience. This instructive confrontation with our own limits is accomplished by three central methods. Most frequently, we cannot resist judging situations that are under consideration by characters in the novel; then the processes that uncover their deluded prejudices lay bare ours as well. Through what amounts to a technique of parable, we are shown our own limitations as we discover those of Sterne's characters. Second, we are made to participate in the double meanings of words, with the effect that we recognize the tendency of our minds to make reductive assumptions on the basis of unreliable evidence. Finally, the narrator repeatedly manipulates us by deliberately disappointing expectations of narrative form developed through earlier reading. By arbitrarily departing from narrative convention, Sterne shows that arbitrariness lies in the conventions themselves and that our allegiance to them is a sign of a preference for convenient artifice over inconvenient reality. Such reevaluations of ourselves and our habitual responses persuade us of our need for the more complex perceptions of experience that Tristram Shandy demonstrates.
Dreams and Sexual Repression in The Blithedale Romance
Authors: Ross Donald
Published: February 2007

Coverdale's reaction to Zenobia's sensuality, and the suppression of his sexual desire form the central plot of The Blithedale Romance. He describes her in rather explicit fleshly terms, especially in the early chapters of the novel. Despite Zenobia's frequent efforts to fend him off, he cannot stop pursuing her and trying to meddle in her life. The bulk of evidence supports the notion that his confession of love for Priscilla is a dodge. Parallel to these activities, Coverdale discusses at length the nature and source of his emotions and thoughts. He concludes that his dreams and his feeling that the world is unreal and insubstantial come spontaneously and mysteriously from his “secret mind”—a mental faculty beyond his conscious control.
ON PETERSON ON SWIFT
Authors: Van Meter Jan R. , Peterson Leland D.
Published: February 2007

THE recent exchange between Phillip Harth and Leland D. Peterson (PMLA, 84, March 1969, 336–43) over Peterson's reading of Swift's Project for the Advancement of Religion and the Reformation of Manners (1709) has left the issue precisely where it began. In his original article (PMLA, 82, March 1967, 54–63), Peterson presented a new interpretation of Swift's essay which would read as satire what has been long accepted as a direct proposal for political and moral reform. Basically, Peterson's thesis is that the traditional reading of the Project poses a problem for students of Swift since the article
… seems to advocate hypocrisy, a vice consistently satirized and anathematized in such works as A Tale of a Tub, An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity, and Gulliver's Travels.
Herman Melville's Clarel: An Existential Gospel
Authors: Brodwin Stanley
Published: February 2007

Herman Melville's Clarel (1876) has been ignored by criticism largely on the ground that it fails structurally. But the poem has an architectonic pattern that provides insight into Melville's lifelong philosophical problems. The work is developed tropologically, drawing its basic pattern from the gospels of Luke and Matthew. The poem is, however, an anti-gospel in which the questor-hero, Clarel, acts out his own “passion” in and around Jerusalem. Employing the motif of the three Magi with Christological and Zoroastrian star imagery, Melville carries his hero into a search for an existentially authentic faith. But Melville fails to find this faith, discovering instead through Clarel the ontological ground of existence itself. This discovery is brought about by a genuine awareness of the condition of death, a condition which destroys belief in absolutes. Death is the central theme of the poem and shapes the narrative and the characters' actions. The Epilogue presents, therefore, a forced and unconvincing affirmation of immortality, an affirmation belied by the poem s overwhelming thrust of existential despair.
The Hidden Persuader: The Complex Speaking Voice of Sidney's Defence of Poetry
Authors: Barnes Catherine
Published: February 2007

Despite the well-established critical opinion that the Defence is a polite, straightforward manifesto of a literary theory with little apparent value as literature, Sidney's treatise is a complexly imaginative work, informed with the same dramatic conflicts between author, persona, and subject matter that characterize Astrophil and Stella. The persona exonerates poetry and energizes his oration by creating two “dramas” : he persuades his listeners to live up to certain expectations by playing the carefully defined role of his confidantes, and, at the same time, speaker-as-energetic-defender distances himself from the process of persuasion through irony and self-mockery. Thus, the speaker “beguiles” his listeners through audience psychology, rich imagery, and rhythmic prose while simultaneously warning sensitive auditors to beware of his fervor and seeming guilelessness.
Research and Reward
Authors: Bishop Morris
Published: February 2007

According to ancient custom the President of the MLA on this occasion stands as Teacher before the largest class he has ever seen or ever will see. He addresses his learned scholars on some matter of common concern, common purpose, common danger. He is likely to preach a crusade to snatch the Holy Sepulchre of scholarship from the hands of the infidel. He then retires from the presidency and washes his hands of the whole business.
The Debut of André Malraux, Editor (KRA, 1920–22)
Authors: Langlois Walter G.
Published: February 2007

Little is known of Malraux's life before his Indochina adventure in 1924. Most scholars dismiss his activities during this early period with the brief statement that he worked “in the art department of the publisher Kra,” or that he was “editor of their literary series called ‘Editions du Sagittaire’.” This lack of interest is partly due to the absence of much concrete information, Malraux being particularly reluctant to discuss what he calls his “vie privée.” Even more important, however, is the fact that most critics have never considered a knowledge of his publishing career to be very important for an understanding of his literary formation. This position hardly seems justified when one considers that publishing has always been a major interest of Malraux, particularly during the period preceding La Condition humaine. Since his work at Kra was in the nature of an initiation into this field, it is of considerable significance and deserves more attention than it has previously received.
Shakespeare In The United States
Authors: McManaway James G.
Published: February 2007

If Shakespeare belonged to the United States by birth instead of by inheritance, the four-hundredth anniversary of his birth could not have been celebrated more widely or enthusiastically. It is not irrelevant to consider what his works have contributed to American culture, and what Americans have contributed to Shakespeare in the library and on the stage. To dispose first of some of the fringe benefits, it may be suggested that much innocent pleasure has accrued from the cultivation of Shakespeare gardens containing all the herbs, flowers, and trees named by the poet. An attempt to naturalize all the birds he mentions has had less happy results, though it must be acknowledged that the starlings imported by Eugene Schieffelin in 1880 have taken literally the injunction to be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth.
The Matter of Conscience in Conrad's The Secret Sharer
Authors: Williams Porter
Published: February 2007

In spite of the critical attention that it has received, Conrad's The Secret Sharer continues to present mysteries that usually affect our understanding of the story's climax in which Leggatt, the murderer and fugitive, is given his chance to escape while the ship hovers on the edge of disaster. Clearly enough, in its broadest aspects, the story is framed by a question and its answer. The narrative opens by presenting an uninitiated captain, a stranger to his ship and to himself, wondering how far he “should turn out faithful to that ideal conception of one's own personality every man sets up for himself secretly.” It closes with the answer that through self-knowledge and self-mastery the captain has achieved “the perfect communion of a seaman with his first command” (p. 143). But between these two points, knowledge and self-mastery are won only after the disconcerting ordeal of protecting Leggatt and the strange exposure of the ship to near destruction, for the dangers from which the captain is allowed to extricate himself seem unnecessary ones of his own making. In turning towards the rocks of Koh-ring, he has done what he “certainly should not have done ... if it had been only a question of getting out of that sleepy gulf as quickly as possible” (pp. 132–133). Moreover, in shaving the land “as close as possible,” he has approached disaster far closer than necessary if it had been only a question of testing his authority or granting Leggatt a reasonable chance to escape.
Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe: The Novel as Polemic
Authors: Richetti John J.
Published: February 2007

Theophilus cibber's Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) includes a substantial account of Mrs. Elizabeth Singer Rowe and points out the relevance of this lady and her works to contemporary affairs: “The conduct and behaviour of Mrs. Rowe might put some of the present race of females to the blush, who rake the town for infamous adventures to amuse the public. Their works will soon be forgotten, and their memories when dead, will not be deemed exceeding precious; but the work of Mrs. Rowe can never perish, while exalted piety and genuine goodness have any existence in the world. Her memory will be ever honoured, and her name dear to latest posterity.”
The Discipline and Significance of Form in Vanity Fair
Authors: Harden Edgar F.
Published: February 2007

Almost all critics of Vanity Fair have assumed that Thackeray's novel had no very carefully worked out structure and have been content to make rather general comments on the form of the novel: it was loosely improvised along the line of a contrast between Becky and Amelia. J. Y. T. Greig, for example, believes that Thackeray not only lacked Fielding's ability to work out a highly detailed plot but also suffered from the additional handicap of being forced to compose hurriedly for monthly serialization. To Greig, “Vanity Fair is unified and shapely up to and including the episodes of Brussels and the Battle of Waterloo: for although it contains two heroines, the adventures and sufferings of the one are causally related to the adventures and sufferings of the other. It becomes unified and shapely again after Chapter xliii (Pumpernickel), and for the same reason. But in between—roughly 300 pages—the plot of the first and last sections of the book is suspended, and the unity of the novel disappears.”
The Discovery of Reality in Iris Murdoch's The Bell
Authors: Kaehele Sharon , German Howard
Published: February 2007

Although literature and philosophy are concerned with many of the same problems, attempts to combine them have seldom been successful; too often the union of fiction and philosophy has produced the hybrid novel of ideas or, more recently, the highly complex symbolic novel, a metaphysical kaleidoscope which creates a Weltanschauung however one twists it. However, at least one modern philosopher-novelist, Iris Murdoch, has succeeded in creating genuine fictional worlds which are enriched but not dominated by her philosophical interests. One of Miss Murdoch's central theses, propounded in her essays and her book on Sartre, is that both contemporary fiction and philosophy fail to set forth an adequate idea of human personality. Across the spectrum of modern thought—in philosophical works like Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind and in novels like Sartre's Nausea—Miss Murdoch finds the same shallow image of man, an image derived from Hume's materialistic behaviorism and Kant's idea of the isolated will. What is needed, she feels, is a better grasp of man's nature and his situation: “we have suffered a general loss of concepts, the loss of a moral and political vocabulary. We no longer use a spread-out substantial picture of the manifold virtues of man and society. We no longer see man against a background of values, of realities, which transcend him. We picture man as a brave, naked will surrounded by an easily comprehended empirical world. For the hard idea of truth we substituted a facile idea of sincerity. What we have never had, of course, is a satisfactory Liberal theory of personality, a theory of man as free and separate and related to a rich and complicated world from which, as a moral being, he has much to learn.” In her novels Miss Murdoch tries to correct the current oversimplified concept of man by delineating with great persuasiveness both the complexity and diversity of human beings and the complicated relationship between the individual and the society; in The Bell the ideas which emerge from a very credible fictional world are concerned with the inadequacy of absolute moral codes, the nature of love, reality, the irrational, and freedom.
Visual and Spatial Imagery in Verlaine's Fêtes galantes
Authors: Walker Hallam
Published: February 2007

The poems of Fêtes galantes by Paul Verlaine have marked visual and musical aspects with which criticism often deals by comparing the subject matter and style of the poems with those of paintings by Watteau and music by Debussy. It is more rewarding to study similarities of basic artistic form in these works about the Rococo dream world; in particular, the visual and spatial imagery shared by Verlaine and Watteau helps elucidate Fêtes galantes.The vague, ambiguous, and shifting impressions sought by Verlaine are created visually by Watteau as the latter varies sharp delineation with hazy blending. The paintings tend to have either detached foreground figures or a merging of figures into a misty background. Verlaine uses these effects of detachment and merging in virtual space, verbally rendered, and coordinates them with the recurrent themes of his suite of poems. A visualized pattern along a time line results as he shifts from one effect to the other in individual works and in the total composition. Much of the musicality of the work is thus produced through visual and spatial imagery in sequence. Increased understanding of Ver-laine's creation of artistic form suggests the need for study of the relationships between this form and the contents of the poems.
Büchner und Trakl: Zum Problem der Anspielungen im Werk Trakls
Authors: Schier Rudolf Dirk
Published: February 2007

The fact that Georg Trakl's poetry frequently contains allusions to Hölderlin, Rimbaud, the Bible, and to various additional authors is well known. The presence of Büchner's Lenz and of some other texts in Traum und Umnachtung has, however, not yet been recognized. Some twenty-two specific passages from Lenz, adapted and modified in various ways, occur in the second section of Traum und Umnachtung. In addition, Trakl paraphrases texts by Nietzsche in the first section and cites Hölderlin in the third; the last section comprises most of the major themes from Trakl's own work. The concentration of allusions to a specific author in single sections of Traum und Umnachtung suggests that Trakl's use of citations is conscious. Such a recognition does not involve an “intentional fallacy”: the author's intention, in incorporating allusions and quotations into his work, is comparable to his intention in choosing a certain kind of form. Both citations and forms can be identified with the proper training: a work of literature containing conscious allusions (Zitatendichtung)must be treated as a literary form in its own right, in which even simple, apparently descriptive phrases no longer refer to objects or experiences, but to the tradition of poetic language. (In German)
“Count Guido Franceschini”: The Villain as Artist in The Ring and the Book
Authors: Yetman Michael G.
Published: February 2007

Book v of The Ring and the Book affords us a view of Guido Franceschini very different from that provided by his second monologue. This difference is accountable to the Active rhetorical method that Guido employs in confronting the judges at his murder trial. In Book XI, having failed in his attempt to prolong life through fiction, Guido resorts to what he calls a more “voluble rhetoric” of the soul, thus becoming accessible to us for the first time in the same way that we see the other speakers in the poem. An analysis of Guido's fiction in Book V, especially his rendering of Caponsacchi, Pompilia, and himself, as the hero, heroine, and wronged husband, respectively, of popular medieval and renaissance literature reveals a conception of art as deception, contrary to Browning's informing belief in art as a means of arriving at truth by heightening rather than distorting reality. A comparison of Book XI with the earlier monologue indicates that, in addition to making plain the enormity of his villain's evil nature, Browning uses Guido's second monologue as an implicit repudiation of what he considers to be the specious theory of art that Guido relies upon in Book v.
Chaucer's Artistic Use of Pope Innocent III's De Miseria Humane Conditionis in the Man of Law's Prologue and Tale
Authors: Lewis Robert Enzer
Published: February 2007

It has long been known that Chaucer translated portions of Pope Innocent III's De Miseria Humane Conditionis for use in the Man of Law's Prologue and Tale, but his artistic reasons for doing so have never been determined. If the translated passages from the De Miseria were short and all in one place, there might be no compelling reason to search for an artistic purpose: Chaucer may simply have wanted to insert a passage from a work that he was translating at the time out of his love for authorities—a love shared by almost all medieval writers. But the facts are that Chaucer made more extensive use of the De Miseria in the Man of Law's Prologue and Tale (nearly fifty lines) than anywhere else in his works, that the translated passages are from five different chapters and two different books in the De Miseria, and that they are scattered in five places throughout the Man of Law's Prologue and Tale. It is therefore highly likely that Chaucer added the passages from the De Miseria for particular artistic reasons, and it is the purpose of this paper to determine what those reasons were.
The Costumbrismo and Ideas of Juan de Zabaleta
Authors: Stevens James R.
Published: February 2007

In many respects Juan de Zabaleta seems close to the costumbrismo of the nineteenth century: the lack of narrative elements, the detailed description, the use of conversation in the presentation of types and as part of scenes rather than for narrative purposes, the urbanity of his style, the directness of his vision. The mental atmosphere of Zabaleta, on the other hand, is completely different: the curious time-lessness of his description, contrasted with the notion of transition; his choice of subjects for their moral value, contrasted with the search for the typical and picturesque; the sense of belonging to an ordered universe where laws may be broken but never repealed, contrasted with the irony of the later period where sometimes virtue is its own punishment. The list could be endless, for we are as much contrasting different ages as individual writers.
Hazlitt and the Functions of the Imagination
Authors: O'Hara J. D.
Published: February 2007

William Hazlitt's ideas about the imagination have received widespread critical attention, but that attention has been confined almost entirely to his comments on the sympathetic imagination. There can be no question of the importance of sympathy in Hazlitt's understanding of the imagination; it is a central idea with moral, philosophical, political, and aesthetic ramifications in Hazlitt's thought. But it does not by any means sum up Hazlitt's ideas about the imagination as an aesthetic or creative faculty; and since sympathy alone is clearly incapable of creating a work of art, emphasis on that quality obscures Hazlitt's more nearly complete understanding of artistic creation and appreciation. Furthermore, his application of sympathetic doctrine is rather more limited than is generally understood. I propose here to suggest some of these limits and to investigate the major supplements to sympathy in Hazlitt's criticism—associational aesthetics and the formative imagination.
Sainte-Beuve critique du théâtre de son temps
Authors: Bach Max
Published: February 2007

Sainte-Beuve au travail. On se l'imagine assis, soit à, son bureau chargé de livres, soit dans une bibliothèque, se documentant avec soin. Gros travailleur, il n'a que sa plume pour gagnepain. Meurtri dans sa vie sentimentale, il se cloître dans l‘étude, il se fait l'esclave de son labeur. Son existence n'a rien en commun avec celle de ses collègues comme Jules Janin ou Loève-Veimars qui, mondains, boulevardiers, familiers des coulisses, tiennent la rubrique théâtrale d'un journal. Sainte-Beuve n'a pas leur verve fantaisiste ni leur talent pour prendre le pouls au public. Quoique n'exerçant la profession de critique qu'à contre-cceur, il prend son métier en particulier et les lettres en général trop au sérieux pour bâcler chaque soir un nombre requis de lignes sur le premier vaudeville venu.
Browning and the Question of Myth
Authors: Langbaum Robert
Published: February 2007

The history of criticism is largely the history of the changing questions we ask about works of art. The pre-eminence in our time of Yeats, Eliot, and Joyce, and the connection of these writers with an artistic method and a mode of thought that Eliot, in reviewing Joyce's Ulysses, has himself called mythical—all this leads me to ask about Browning's use of myth. The question seems particularly relevant since Yeats and Browning had in common an intense admiration for Shelley. Now Yeats, we know, admired not Shelley the Godwinian radical, but Shelley the Platonist and mythmaker—the Shelley who, in the manner of Blake, used archetypal symbols. The question is whether Browning—who did for a time admire Shelley the Godwinian radical—had affinities also with Shelley the mythmaker and (the two terms are inextricably connected) symbolist.
Los llamados diminutivos y aumentativos en el español de México
Authors: Gaarder A. Bruce
Published: February 2007

Este estudio pretende ser un examen minucioso de los numerosos afijos de que se sirve el pueblo mexicano para ponderar, apreciar, calificar, y en cierta medida poner su sello personal a una buena parte de lo que dice. Estos afijos, especialmente los llamados diminutivos y aumentativos, le brindan al mexicano—así como a toda persona de habla española—un medio de exteriorizarse, un vaso sumiso en donde descargar su subjetivismo. En la formación y aplicación de los “apreciativos” es donde el idioma cede más, y más libertad le concede al que lo habla.
Adam's Hell
Authors: Pace George B.
Published: February 2007

Although as a whole Chaucer's Monk's Tale is justly criticized for dullness, its opening two tragedies, the Lucifer and the Adam, form an effective and related pair:

Lucifer

At Lucifer, though he an angel were,

And nat a man, at hym wol I bigynne.

For though Fortune may noon angel dere,

From heigh degree yet fel he for his synne

Doun into helle, where he yet is inne.

O Lucifer, brightest of angels allé,

Now artow Sathanas, that mayst nat twynne

Out of miserie, in which that thou art falle.

Adam

Loo Adam, in the feeld of Damyssene,

With Goddes owene fynger wroght was he,

And nat bigeten of mannes sperme unclene,

And welte al paradys savynge o tree.

Hadde nevere worldly man so heigh degree

As Adam, til he for mysgovernaunce

Was dryven out of hys hye prosperitee

To labour, and to helle, and to meschaunce.
Whitman's Debt to Animal Magnetism
Authors: Reiss Edmund
Published: February 2007

Scholars have for many years been showing how responsive Walt Whitman was to the world around him and how his writings reflect his interest in the affairs and ideas of mid-nineteenth-century America. Not only are the rhythms and tones of contemporary opera and oratory incorporated in his poetic style, but so also are contemporary scientific, social, and cultural interests scattered throughout the content of his prose and the imagery of his verse. My purpose here is to show Whitman's indebtedness to the contemporary fad of animal magnetism, especially concerning its appearance in the phraseology and nature of many of his poetic images and in his conceptions of the poet and the leader.
Oral Techniques in the Composition of Expanded Anglo-Saxon Verses
Authors: Nicholson Lewis E.
Published: February 2007

Among the various features of Anglo-Saxon verse technique, none has so successfully eluded explanation as the use of expanded verses. Impetus for a further investigation of the expanded verses is provided by certain conjectural remarks made by Magoun in his highly provocative initial article on Anglo-Saxon oral verse-making: “There is perhaps much that will never be known about the origin and special function, if any, of the expanded or hypermetric verses, but a casual survey suggests that, whereas the second measure of each verse seems to be formulaic and out of its context would form a complete verse, the organization of the first measure would appear to be somewhat different, perhaps somewhat less rigid in structure, thus perhaps allowing the singer certain freedoms not available in a normal verse.” This essay will follow up the suggestions made by Magoun and will re-examine the expanded verses from the point of view, not of their metrics, but rather of their formulaic structure. The evidence will show, I think, that the superior singers allow themselves far less freedom in the opening measure than may appear to be the case from a cursory analysis.
The Nun's Priest's Fable
Authors: Lenaghan R. T.
Published: February 2007

Critical comment on the Nun's Priest's Tale often seems to be of two sorts. One is a straightforward response to the plain fact that the tale is funny. The other is a response to the somewhat less obvious fact that the tale is also serious, or at least that it makes a statement worthy of serious consideration. The second sort of comment may find the seriousness of the poem in an allegorical reading and it often seems a trifle defensive, as if written with an anxious or reproving eye on Matthew Arnold. However, even if one feels, as I do, that this defensiveness is a critical disadvantage, reluctance to read the poem as more than a simple joke would be equally disadvantageous. To identify Chauntecleer with Adam seems as mistaken as to take what looks like a fabular Moralitas for the final statement of the poem's import.
Chiaroscuro as an Artistic Device in Cooper's Fiction
Authors: Ringe Donald A.
Published: February 2007

Although the pictorial element has long been recognized as an important factor in James Fenimore Cooper's descriptive style, detailed analyses of specific techniques that Cooper shared with contemporary landscape painters can still add much to our understanding of his fundamental artistry. A number of such studies have already appeared. Howard Mumford Jones has shown how Cooper's moral view of the world found a means of expression—the expansive depiction of a panoramic scene—that is strikingly similar to the typical landscape of the Hudson River School of painting, and James Franklin Beard has written of the basic artistic technique that Cooper shared with the painter Thomas Cole—the harmonization of precise details to present an ideal truth. Other studies, moreover, have pointed out a number of specific devices that Cooper and his artistic friends employed to express their related themes. One important painterly technique used by the novelist, however, has yet to be treated in detail: the chiaroscuro, or arrangement of light and shadow, that he, like the painters, included in his delineation of the natural scene. Many readers of Cooper, no doubt, have perceived the effectiveness of Cooper's carefully lighted descriptions, and comment upon them has, indeed, appeared in print. The technique, however, is so important in Cooper's art that it merits a much more extended treatment than it has yet received.
Arthur Schnitzler's Typology: An Excursion into Philosophy
Authors: Lederer Herbert
Published: February 2007

Arthur Schnitzler's non-fictional works have been sorely neglected in critical literature, even by those writers who have attempted to evaluate his “Weltanschauung.” His essays and aphorisms have thus on the whole remained almost completely unknown, although a few are readily accessible. One of these works, Über Krieg und Frieden, was published posthumously in 1939 and contains excerpts from Schnitzler's diaries during the years 1915–19. Another is the Buck der Sprücke und Bedenken, a collection of aphorisms published in 1927. Individual sections are not dated and, from the evidence of unpublished material in Schnitzler's “NachlaC,” may be assumed to span his entire creative life. Some of the ideas are fragmentary, often the result of momentary moods, and there are internal contradictions. Schnitzler himself was aware of this, and in the foreword he expressly warned that “dieses Buch will keine Système, keine Weltanschauungen, keine Erledi-gungen bringen,” and added: “Keineswegs hat dieses Buch den Ehrgeiz, für sich allein zu bestehen.” Nonetheless, certain thoughts occur with astonishing regularity—certain “ideas and questions” about “fate and free will,” about “responsibility and conscience,” about “relationships and loneliness,” to quote some of the chapter headings.
El Acoso: Alejo Carpentier's War on Time
Authors: Weber Frances Wyers
Published: February 2007

The Protagonist of Alejo Carpentier's short novel El acoso is an informer fleeing from men who would avenge the deaths he has caused. The pursuit and punishment of an informer, not a new plot, is usually developed with rapid pacing and suspense. But Carpentier modifies this traditional story of the chase by breaking it into a mosaic of fragmentary incidents and remembrances arranged without chronological sequence. Adopting certain techniques of the stream-of-consciousness writers, he reduces external action to a minimum and uses interior monologues and confused shreds of memory to show the inner life of his characters. Yet his work is not primarily a psychological study: the combination of two apparently disparate approaches to the novel (one a story line based on a closelyknit, causal-temporal progression and the other a narrative structure determined in part by the flux and shift of consciousness) creates a static and almost allegorical depiction of Betrayal in its various modes and incarnations. This duality of presentation is also evident in the subject matter: definite historical happenings, tied to actual sites in the city of Havana, are the factual ingredients in a drama that seems to be just one possible version of a constant theme. Uniting the particular and the abstract, intertwining the external chain of events (shattered and rearranged according to noncausal principles) with pictures of internal chaos, Carpentier presents both the vision of a traitorous, degenerate world in which man plays out certain prescribed roles and the artistic or literary organization of this drama of the fall. Underlying these elements and binding them together is one of Carpentier's repeated themes—the representation, domination, or denial of time.
Sprung Rhythm: A Chapter in the Evolution of Nineteenth-Century Verse
Authors: Schneider Elisabeth W.
Published: February 2007

Almost everything would seem to have been said that can be said about sprung rhythm—not that authorities agree. On the contrary, there is every sort of disparity in the accounts of its nature and origin. That Gerard Manley Hopkins invented its name is certain and that he himself first used it in The Wreck of the Deutschland, but agreement ends there. His rhythm has been traced to, and sometimes identified with, the old strong-stress Anglo-Saxon alliterative measure or, alternatively, to the choruses in Samson Agonistes. It has been called rigidly isochronous; it has also been described as free verse, next door to prose, and quite lawless in spite of his insistence that it was written by strict laws. It has been said to be entirely new and entirely old. When pushed to defend it, Hopkins himself found numerous precedents: brief instances or hints in Shakespeare, Milton, and Campbell, in nursery rhymes and weather saws, in Anglo-Saxon verse and its “degraded and doggrel” survival in Piers Plowman (though he did not know the last two, except at second hand and in the briefest of extracts, till some years after he had developed his own system). These predecessors, however, he named merely as precedents; he never called them sources. The only specific statement he made concerning the actual origin of the measure reveals nothing: “I had long had haunting my ear the echo of a new rhythm which now I realised on paper.” He hastened to add, as he did also in discussing the meter with Robert Bridges, that he did not claim it as “altogether new”; he did profess to be the first who had avowedly “used it and made it the principle throughout” a poem, to the best of his knowledge.
Proust and “Le Joli Langage”
Authors: O'Brien Justin
Published: February 2007

More than most novelists, Proust uses speech as a means of characterization. To his readers Bloch, whatever else he is, means a sophomoric use of pseudo-Homeric epithets, Mme Verdurin a series of recurring tics, and the Duc de Guermantes a pompous indulgence in genealogical ramblings. Even such a major figure as Odette is recognized by her sprinkling of fashionable Anglicisms; and Françoise, by her linguistic deformations. In some cases—so sensitive was Proust to the human voice—the manner of speaking is the character. We have only to listen to a Brichot, a Norpois, or a Cottard to know his class, his profession, his attitude toward life, even his virtues and vices. As life does, Proust frequently tells us all we need to know about an individual by letting us hear him discourse.
E. A. Robinson's System of Opposites
Authors: Hepburn James G.
Published: February 2007

In a letter to Harry de Forest Smith of 3 June 1894, E. A. Robinson says of his poem “The Night Before”:

The story is unpleasant, founded upon my system of “opposites” that is, creating a fictitious life in direct opposition to a real life which I know. My recent mental disturbances have rendered some kind of more or less literary expression an absolute necessity; and this story, which by the way, comes dangerously near to being what the world calls “hot stuff” is doing me a good service in working off my general discontent. It reflects, in a measure, my present mood in the narration of things of which I know nothing except by instinctive fancy.
Will and Society in Bleak House
Authors: Fradin Joseph I.
Published: February 2007

Lionel Trilling has observed that Little Dorrit is “about the will and society” and that “the whole energy of the imagination in the novel is directed toward finding the non-personal will in which shall be our peace.” Little Dorrit is “not only the Child of the Marshalsea ... but also the Child of the Parable, the negation of the social will.” Professor Trilling's comment, enlightening over a large area of Dickens' work, seems to me especially applicable to the first and most germinal of Dickens' “dark novels,” Bleak House; and I want here to approach Bleak House through Dickens' analysis of will and society.
Hemingway's Extended Vision: The Old Man and The Sea
Authors: Sylvester Bickford
Published: February 2007

Cleanth Brooks wrote recently that the early story, “Fifty Grand,” “presents Hemingway's basic theme quite as well as The Old Man and the Sea.” “Nor do I think,” he continued, “that Hemingway in his most recent story now finds the world any more meaningful than he once found it.” For once Mr. Brooks was following rather than initiating opinion. Ever since The Old Man and the Sea was published, critics have admitted that in its effect upon the reader the book is somehow different from Hemingway's earlier work. Those who like the difference and those who do not have tried to account for it in many ways, most of them familiar to readers of the early reviews and of the surprisingly few later readings of the story. But to a man commentators have assumed that whatever the story's new impact—whatever the nature of that affirmative power most readers have felt—it reflects no essential change in Hemingway's view of an inscrutable natural order in which, ultimately, man can play no part. I want to suggest, on the contrary, that The Old Man and the Sea reveals Hemingway's successful achievement at last of a coherent metaphysical scheme—of a philosophical naturalism which, although largely mechanistic in principle, embraces the realm of human affairs and gives transcendent meaning to the harsh inevitabilities Hemingway has always insisted upon recording.
Analyse D'une Définition Du Surréalisme
Authors: Champigny Par Robert
Published: February 2007

Surréalisme, n.m. Automatisme psychique pur par lequel on se propose d'exprimer, soit verbalement, soit par écrit, soit de tout autre manière, le fonctionnement réel de la pensée. Dictée de la pensée, en l'absence de tout contrôle exercé par la raison, en dehors de toute préoccupation esthétique ou morale. ENCYCL. Philos. Le surréalisme repose sur la croyance à la réalité supérieure de certaines formes d'associations négligées jusqu'à lui, à la toute-puissance du rêve, au jeu désintéressé de la pensée. Il tend à ruiner définitivement tous les autres mécanismes psychiques et à se substituer à eux dans la résolution des principaux problèmes de la vie.
Proust and the New Novel in France
Authors: Zants E.
Published: February 2007

All of the characteristics of the New Novel can be found in Proust: a search for an unknown reality, participated in by the reader whose vision of the world is thereby transformed. The unknown reality consists of ordinary events juxtaposed in such a way that they reveal a new truth or reality to the reader. The characters habitually misunderstand one another; the impossibility of really knowing anyone else makes solitude an inherent state of each character, so that any attempt at possession is necessarily absurd. The New Novelist, therefore, tries to grasp the form of society as a whole rather than to describe the life of one individual. This results in a presentation of existences rather than essences.
Le Feu follet: The Drug Addict as a Tragic Hero
Authors: Thiher Allen
Published: February 2007

Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, like Malraux and other French writers of the nineteen thirties, saw the forces of history as a form of tragic fate. In Le Feufollet he sets forth the tragic destiny of a decadent drug addict who is a victim of his era's decline. Drieu's use of a Racinian structure creates a sense of overwhelming tragic inevitability, but, in the final analysis, his attempt at creating a tragedy based on the decadent's self-destruction is not entirely successful. Rather, the novel appears as an inversion of tragedy in which the glorification of nonbeing foreshadows Drieu's adherence to fascism.
Alice's Invasion of Wonderland
Authors: Kincaid James R.
Published: February 2007

By rejecting Wonderland and the world behind the Looking-Glass, Alice is rejecting not only the horrifying chaos of meaninglessness but the liberating chaos of comedy as well. Thus, the tone of the Alice books is ambivalent in relation to the protagonist. Insofar as Alice suggests a child taking a well-earned revenge on adult silliness or defeating the anarchy of the subconscious, she is supported. But she just as often appears either as an insensitive child, rudely attacking the gentle and the kindly, or simply as a human being, deeply corrupted by her obsession with nothingness, predation, and death. The presence of almost uncontrolled hostility in the Alice books has been noted, but the fact that this malice is often directed at Alice has not. And it is just this tonal ambivalence which makes these books so baffling and complex.