bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Framing theAlices
Authors: Madden William A.
Published: February 2007

The frames that Lewis Carroll provided for the twoAlicebooks have largely been ignored, when not simply dismissed, in recent Carroll criticism. Their conventional form and diction may account for this negative response, but examination of their provenance, their function within the structure of the two books, and the artistry evident in the individual frame components indicate how and why the frames are important to our understanding of Carroll's vision and purpose. The frame poems are designed to lead the reader into and away from the central dream tales through a process of lyric transformation and estrangement.
Joseph's Bones and the Resurrection of the Text: Remembering in the Bible
Authors: Schwartz Regina M.
Published: February 2007

The Hebrew Bible depicts interpretation as a continual process of losing and finding, of forgetting and remembering. Texts are lost and found, and in the Joseph story (Gen. 37–50), Joseph himself is abandoned and recovered, with all memory of him repressed until it is dramatically recalled. His story demonstrates that repression is the condition of interpretation, and that interpretation—not resurrection—holds forth the promise of a future life. Nonetheless, the repeated losses that punctuate the Joseph narrative have inspired the opposite conclusion: that Joseph is a type of Jesus, that his descents and ascents prefigure the final one. Typology, a mode of biblical interpretation that prevailed during the early church, has enjoyed a recent revival in the context of literary studies; but I argue that the typological language of “fulfillment,” of shadows and truth, is alien to Hebraic—and postmodern—understandings of textuality.
Art and Power in the Spectacle Plays of Calderón de la Barca
Authors: Greer Margaret Rich
Published: February 2007

The court spectacle plays of Calderón de la Barca, when viewed within their historical, physical, and dramatic context, reveal a polysemous structure of meaning that both supports and criticizes the ruling monarch. The first of these, El mayor encanto amor, reproves Philip iv's pursuit of sensual pleasures in time of war and his surrender of power to his prime minister; the last, Hado y divisa de Leonido y Marfisa, attempts to forge a credibly regal image of the weak Charles ii. These plays dramatize the belief that the polyphonic richness of theatrical representation can not only serve and guide the king but also generate his authority, that the proper constitution of the central figure in the theater of power may depend on the power of theater.
Garcilaso's Poetics of Subversion and the Orpheus Tapestry
Authors: Barnard Mary E.
Published: February 2007

The Orpheus tapestry in Garcilaso's third eclogue is an intertextual construct, a rewriting of the myth through a dismembering and reconstruction of classical and Italian models. Revisionary and corrective, Garcilaso's creative imitation of his antecedents involves a deliberate act of subversion; his text not only remakes its sources but seeks to overcome them. Thus Garcilaso's version of Orpheus and Eurydice rivals its predecessors by its own accuracy of presentation; it depicts exquisite, fragile beauty violently destroyed and a brooding, solipsistic lover deprived of his lyric power. By subverting the ancient artist-magician, Garcilaso appropriates the Orphic power of song for the lyric speaker's self-presentation as poet, providing the speaker, in the process, with a rite of passage into the mythological world of the nymphs. Finally, an elaborate game of voices, anchored on the Orphic, reveals the text both as an artifact and as a product of an act of rewriting.
A Titan in Extenuating Circumstances: Sturm und Drang and the Kraftmensch
Authors: Leidner Alan C.
Published: February 2007

Sturm und Drang's self-critique of its rebellious impulses resembles Kant's virtually contemporaneous struggle to formulate the principle of autonomy, for both involve the reconciliation of individual freedom with rules that can make such freedom accountable. Dramas of Goethe, Klinger, and Schiller acknowledge the need for principles of accountability by presenting the violent Kraftmensch within plots designed to justify the figure's actions. The frequent repetition of words and phrases in the drama of Sturm und Drang is part of the tradition's search for repeatable rules within the scope of its own impulsiveness. Among major writers of Sturm und Drang, only J. M. R. Lenz avoids depicting the Kraftmensch. Because Lenz will not mitigate the culpability of his characters, his drama can deal more honestly with problems of freedom and individuality.
Mateo Alemán's Problem with Spelling
Authors: Johnston Mark D.
Published: February 2007

Mateo Alemán's Ortografía castellana ‘Castilian Orthography’ (Mexico City, 1609) is one of many little-studied Renaissance treatises on correct spelling. It offers a modest scheme for reforming the representation of spoken Spanish sounds in writing, argued with elaborate artifice and based especially on the claim that written letters communicate thanks to inherent Pythagorean harmonies. The treatise includes a full illustration of these reforms in an appendix called the “Problem,” which tells how two courtiers inconclusively debate whether speech or writing possesses “greater excellence.” By offering arguments composed entirely of topoi, establishing a rhetorical paradox, and employing devices of admiratio, the “Problem” achieves a fusion of “intersubjectivity” and “intertextuality” that identifies as a single reading experience the wonder of the paradox posed with the success of the improved spelling.
The Resistance ofEffi Briest: An (Un)told Tale
Authors: Greenberg Valerie D.
Published: February 2007

Rereading the canon in the light of recent theory and criticism can turn into a subversive project when one finds that a novel long considered easily accessible and safely categorized may be neither. Such is the outcome of this essay's reading of Theodor Fontane's popularEffi Briest(1894–95). Incomplete stories in the text lead to a reassessment of its ending, of the heroine's position, and of the text's political implications. What emerges is a modern, self-reflexive, incipiently feministEffi Briestthat resists the standard readings and instead moves closer to “shocking” texts of the time (such as Wedekind's first Lulu play and Freud'sStudies on Hysteria) than to those texts with which it is traditionally compared.
The Construction of the Narrator inThe Nigger of the “Narcissus”
Authors: Henricksen Bruce
Published: February 2007

Mikhail Bakhtin's concern with the dialogic nature of the fictional text and of the self serves as an important precursor to more recent theoretical work on “the problem of the subject.” Bakhtin's dialogism is an especially useful tool with which to approach the familiar problem of point of view inThe Nigger of the “Narcissus.”A dialogical reading of this novel reveals a polyphony of ideological voices out of which the “I” narrator, who emerges only on the final pages of the novel, is born. Conrad's novel lays bare this function of ideology, the construction of individual subjects. Recalling Conrad's preface, we might say that this process is what the dialogically attuned reader is made to “see” or “hear.”
Barthes, Góngora, and Non-Sense
Authors: Smith Paul Julian
Published: February 2007

A fragment in Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes suggests that any attempt to transgress the binary prison of male and female (active and passive) tends to invert the traditional terms without disrupting their oppressive and spurious authority. Barthes proposes a neutral and utopian “third term,” or “non-sense,” that will transcend transgression itself and that he identifies with a “happy” sexuality and a “Gongorine” text. The poetics of Golden Age Spain are underwritten by implicitly gendered conceptions of the rhetorical body: ornamental style, lyric genre, and Italianate ethos are associated with the “female” text and hence made subordinate to their “higher” male equivalents. In the Soledades Góngora stresses the “female” terms, but his usage may not be transgressive: generic confusion (sexual and textual) was already widespread elsewhere. He tends, rather, to a nomadic indeterminacy that displaces author as active origin and reader as passive recipient of authoritative and authoritarian meaning.
Dickinson and Patriarchal Meter: A Theory of Metrical Codes
Authors: Finch A. R. C.
Published: February 2007

An analysis of Emily Dickinson's metrics suggests that her meters—even in individual lines of poetry—can be read as signs for the connotations they have acquired and for the cultural contexts that have empowered them. Iambic pentameter, the dominant meter in Dickinson's poetic lineage and culture, although rare in her work, plays a significant role in some of her most famous poems. Dickinson's iambic pentameters usually occur in a dynamic with her ordinary meter, the hymn stanza, a relation that reflects her ambivalence toward the male-identified poetic authority represented by iambic pentameter. Reading key poems for their semantic-metrical connections—the ways in which the semantic and metrical levels comment on each other—illuminates Dickinson's association of canonical poetic strength with patriarchal structures such as Christianity, with social conventions of fame and power, and with both triumph and failure.
Why Selima Drowns: Thomas Gray and the Domestication of the Imperial Ideal
Authors: Kaul Suvir
Published: February 2007

Thomas Gray's ode on the death of Walpole's cat is paradigmatic of eighteenth-century English incidental verse. Such verse often draws strength from, and facilitates, the larger historical discourses of mercantile and imperial expansion. The images, themes, and worldviews of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century poems on public themes also extend into “occasional” private poems, which turn into palimpsestic records of the influence of empire on the poetic imagination. In particular, negative representations of female desires function as ideological surrogates for the playing out of the more anxious scenarios of imperial desire. Gray's ode, which takes the overt form of the animal fable, is also an allegorical satire on women and a displaced account of the eighteenthcentury British domestication of the imperial ideal. This essay unravels the representational, literary, and sociohistorical codes that enable the ode to perform equally and effectively at all these levels.
The Metaphysics of Translation and the Origins of Symbolist Poetics in Meiji Japan
Authors: Jackson Earl
Published: February 2007

Japanese modernity is often equated with Westernization, and the cross-cultural link is restricted to the Western influence on Japan. The translations of Western philosophy and poetry in the Meiji period (1868-1912), however, relate to native symbolist poetics, in a way that has earlier parallels: Japan's alchemical cultural interaction with China in the transformative cultivation of Zen in the medieval period and its complex responses to Neo-Confucianism in the Tokugawa period (1603-1868). The consistent metatextual dynamics suggested by these parallels cannot be adequately described through influencebased comparative methods. This essay defines Japanese modernism as a creative conflict stimulated by the introduction of transcendence-based texts into fundamentally immanence-grounded aesthetic, epistemological, and semiotic systems.
The Politics of Comic Modes in Virginia Woolf'sBetween the Acts
Authors: Cuddy-Keane Melba
Published: February 2007

Comedy is the genre of collective experience; however, comic modes differ in the degree of inclusiveness that each implies. By examining the interactions of satiric, amiable, and liminal comedy, we can see how Woolfs final novel,Between the Acts, becomes a fully inclusive form. This form is radical and subversive, standing in antithetical relation to the epic genre. Woolf loosens the habitual dominance of the leader or spokesperson figure through a decentering of authority and creates a new choric voice that implies a fluid and noncoercive sense of community. This handling of genre is thoroughly political in substituting, for the definition of politics as the exercising of power, a model of community as the dynamic inhabiting of mutual space.
Artist Descending a Staircase: Stoppard Captures the Radio Station—and Duchamp
Authors: Guralnick Elissa S.
Published: February 2007

In Artist Descending a Staircase, Stoppard has constructed a play so well suited to radio that it cannot be translated to any other medium without a significant loss. The play thereby calls into question the popular notion that radio is inferior to the stage as a forum for drama. The play also questions our ability to know, with any certainty, those things we have not witnessed, not to mention those we have. Thus, the two mysteries at the heart of the play—Who killed Donner? Whom did Sophie love?—remain essentially unsolved, even though the play suggests convincing solutions. Similarly, although the play does not explicitly discuss Marcel Duchamp, a portrait of the artist nonetheless emerges, drawn in meticulous detail. Artist, then, is built upon paradox, teasing us at every turn with “Now you see it, now you don't.”
“A Quest for the Peaceable Kingdom”: The Narrative in Northrop Frye's Conclusion to theLiterary History of Canada
Authors: Lecker Robert
Published: February 2007

The conclusion Northrop Frye contributed to theLiterary History of Canada(1965) depicts in narrative form his evolving sense of how critics necessarily become involved in their critical creations and, further, of how the degree of this involvement provides a measure of their own imaginative development. Frye reads the Canadian literary tradition as a romance that implicates him in its structures. Because the conclusion glosses the fall-and-redemption myth that inspires much of his work, it illustrates his conception of literary history making as simultaneously an act of self-making. Viewed from the perspective of Frye's own transforming voyage through it, the conclusion appears in a new light as a romance about the creation of the idea of Canada, a metaphoric conception that is transhistorical, autonomous, and distinctly literary. (RL)
The Montaigne Monopoly: Revising the Essais under the French Privilege System
Authors: Hoffmann George
Published: February 2007

Does the business of writing shape the works of even the most private authors? A demonstration that one of the major figures of French literature was influenced throughout his career by Renaissance publishing policy might clarify the relation of professional demands to individual genius. The way Montaigne expanded and enlarged his book from edition to edition, one of the most salient features of his writing, has been variously attributed to biographical and philosophical causes—that is, to sources in his creative energy. The historical records, however, suggest that Montaigne's revision of his Essais was inspired also by the need to reestablish ownership over a work that was about to fall into the public domain. Legislation from the period reveals that publishers regularly released revised editions to renew their privileges (short-term bookselling monopolies). (GH)
Exile, Elegy, and Auden in Brodsky's “Verses on the Death of T. S. Eliot”
Authors: Bethea David M.
Published: February 2007

During the last three decades the in memoriam genre has come to occupy pride of place in the work of the exiled Russian poet Joseph Brodsky. Through his belatedness (which is not necessarily Bloomian), his permanent exile status at the edges of two empires, and his profound poetic speculations on death as the ultimate border crossing, Brodsky now embodies the elegiac tradition in his homeland as no one has since his high‐modernist precursors, Osip Mandelstam and Marina Tsvetaeva. And yet—and herein lies his distinct contribution to Russian verse of this century—Brodsky has constantly sought out other, nonnative precursors to mediate the dead letter of his primary Soviet culture. In “Verses on the Death of T. S. Eliot” he adopts the “mourning tongue” of Auden's “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” while speaking of the death of Eliot in his own distinctive Russian elegy. In this way, not only does he keep “the death of the poet… from his poems,” he keeps death from the door of his own ailing tradition.
Prisoners of the Caucasus: Ideologies of Imperialism in Lermontov's “Bela”
Authors: Scotto Peter
Published: February 2007

Lermontov's “Bela” (the first part of A Hero of Our Time) is deeply connected to the realities of Russian expansion into the Caucasus during the nineteenth century. The mistreatment of the story's heroine, Bela, by its Russian heroes, Grigoriy Pechorin and Maksim Maksimich, has its roots in the culture and ideologies of Russian imperialism.
Ellison's Invisible Man: Emersonianism Revised
Authors: Lee Kun Jong
Published: February 2007

This essay elucidates Ellison's complex relation to Emerson, an issue that has not been adequately addressed in the criticism of the “most read” novel in the African American tradition, Invisible Man. Although in his fiction and critical writings, Ellison consciously claims his namesake's cultural vision, he sees the apparently universalist Emersonianism as circumscribed by an inherent racism that expels the African American from its sphere. Consequently the novelist affirms the promise of Emersonianism while neutralizing its racist aspect, resocializing its spiritualized premises, and reinterpreting its dogmatic implications. Ellison's appropriation and redirection of Emerson are especially manifest in his variations on the Emersonian senses of self-reliance, representativeness, and social organicism. Paradoxically, by “signifying” on Emerson's project, Ellison becomes a truer American scholar in the Emersonian tradition, which, by its internal logic, asks for critique and reinterpretation in each age.
Hardy Ruins: Female Spaces and Male Designs
Authors: Knoepflmacher U.C.
Published: February 2007

Whereas Hardy's novels follow the conventions by which male mansions become domesticated by female occupants, his poetry depicts the far more precarious fate of female enclosures. Like Wordsworth, Hardy associates a female place of origin with death. His youthful poem “Domicilium,” in which a mediator helps her grandson retreat into a lost natural habitat, is soon subverted by “Heiress and Architect,” which gives an ironic twist to the yoking of houses, femininity, and death found in nineteenthcentury poetry. Desire becomes paramount again in Satires of Circumstance and Moments of Vision, where Hardy recalls his wife in various abodes to fill his home with remembered sound and movement. Built on a Bachelardian “dream-memory” of his earliest home and hence associated with a mother's body, Hardy's poetry dramatizes his sense of eviction from a primal refuge even when re-creating odd structures like the mother hull of the sunken Titanic.
Incorporating the Text: Kleist's “Michael Kohlhaas”
Authors: Koelb Clayton
Published: February 2007

Kleist's “Kohlhaas,” though much admired, is also much criticized for the “subplot” concerning the gypsy woman and her prophecy. Many readers believe that Kleist spoiled his story by introducing material that is not germane to the plot's central concern. Such criticism is based on the assumption that the novella initially revolves around Kohlhaas's horses but then swerves to focus on the slip of paper containing the gypsy's prophecy. But the assumption is incorrect. The same issue is central at the beginning and at the end: the possession and interpretation of powerful documents. Even the horses themselves turn out, when examined carefully, to be stand-ins for missing papers. The prophecy material is no swerve, for it provides Kohlhaas with a document he can use to counter the power of another document (the Paßschein) that has been withheld from him. When Kohlhaas swallows the gypsy's paper, he incorporates the mysterious power that it represents. Kohlhaas thus redeems himself by means of a piece of writing just as Kleist hoped to redeem himself in the eyes of his Prussian family by producing texts like “Michael Kohlhaas.”
Coetzee's Dusklands: The Mythic Punctum
Authors: Castillo Debra A.
Published: February 2007

The novels of the South African writer J. M. Coetzee are frequently criticized for their lack of specific application to the social and political concerns of his country. In Dusklands, the first and least studied of these texts, the author makes an implicit response to the controversial and weakly defined question of the political value of literary works in postcolonialist discourse. For Coetzee, the inherently masculinist, aggressively terrorist underpinnings of the very concept of value urgently require demystifying; for the purposes of this paper, Roland Barthes's distinction between studium and punctum provides the analytic key.
Presidential Address 1991: One More Time: Explanation and Collective Understanding
Authors: Valdes Mario J.
Published: February 2007

Queridos Colegas, estimados amigos, bienvenidos a la conventión de la MLA. Especialmente quiero saludar a nuestros compañeros californianos y a todos los hermanos y hermanas hispánicos de estos Estados Unidos.

In the past, the association's presidents have used this occasion to inform members about issues that have arisen during the year and the ways that the officers have responded. Some of my predecessors have had years as eventful as mine and have gone to considerable length to present the MLA's actions as clearly as possible. Here the memorable address of Barbara Herrnstein Smith comes readily to mind. In times of controversy this annual rite has served the equally significant purpose of providing leadership, and in this respect few can match the example of Catharine Stimpson. I too shall give you an accounting of what the association has said and done in your name and how it has represented your manifold interests. But I also devote a major part of my remarks tonight to still another aim of this tradition: to remind ourselves why we are here and what we are about. In attempting to fulfill these goals I look at the MLA from the outside, viewing it as a participant in the social and political reality of our times, and also from the inside, inquiring into how it works.
Unheard Melodies: The Force of Form
Authors: Brown Marshall
Published: February 2007

Music is the realm where meaning is not ruined by saying. With the phrase “unheard melodies,” Keats's “Ode on a Grecian Urn” evokes the unspeakable in a passage whose logic has collapsed. Literally unheard melodies, along with related phenomena, appear in music by Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Strauss, Schönberg, and Beethoven; each hidden melody resonates with the expressive structure of the piece containing it—with the felt idea that performance must actuate. Unseen pictures in paintings function similarly. Thus in unheard melodies thought acts unmediated by utterance. They—and not the Imaginary—are the Platonic ideal Mallarmé sought. They show how form is power and life.
Vorticist Performance and Aesthetic Turbulence in Enemy of the Stars
Authors: Graver David
Published: February 2007

More than just an innovative early-twentieth-century play or the product of an avantgarde movement, Wyndham Lewis's Enemy of the Stars assails conventional notions of art without rationalizing its attack through an appeal to an explicit aesthetic or social program. Lewis is not so much establishing an aesthetic position as playing with the idea of aesthetic positioning. An examination of the shifting stances taken in the play highlights some of the most important sources of formal and thematic turbulence exploited by the nonprogrammatic avant-garde and exposes the means by which this turbulence is contained. The mimetic world of the drama is at first undercut by the visual enticements of the page and by references to the social institution of art; then the drama is hybridized with narrative representational techniques and overlaid with shifting allegorical implications. Ultimately, these aesthetic contortions turn the text into a performance staged on the pages of the magazine Blast.
Representation and Performance: The Uses of Authority in Shakespeare's Theater
Authors: Weimann Robert
Published: February 2007

The twentieth century has witnessed a crumbling not just of diverse types of authority but of the social and intellectual foundations on which the very idea of authority is built. This “crisis of authority” needs to be viewed in historical perspective. Ever since the Protestant Reformation, attempts have been made to internalize authority, “to shift the basis of its verification from external and public modes to internal and private ones” (Harris 1). This controversial shifting of credentials is connected to a comparable change in the representational forms and functions of authorizing discourse. The increasingly uncertain premises of representation, especially its ambivalence as a mode of linguistic and cultural organization, appear to have much to do with the “present confusion” of authority (Arendt 95). Since many voices have been raised against representation, there is little need to document the intellectual disaffection it has produced, except to recall what, in our context, is the most characteristic charge of all: namely, that the much deplored power of representation to order and to command language and to impose on it “the imperious unity of Discourse” (Foucault 386) forces on us an incompatible link between language and humankind.
The Old Price Wars: Melodramatizing the Public Sphere in Early-Nineteenth-Century England
Authors: Hadley Elaine
Published: February 2007

Early English stage melodrama was one version of a melodramatic mode that pervaded the nineteenth century in response to the effects of a growing market culture, especially the classificatory procedures of government bureaucracies and the concomitant formation of a class society. By examining the relation between this genre and the rioters who initiated the “Old Price Wars” in Covent Garden Theatre in 1809, I show how melodrama resisted a class society by supporting more traditional status hierarchies. Melodrama represented the contemporary confrontation between these two distinctive forms of social organization as a family conflict that included the audience. By means of climactic moments of audience participation in its plot, melodrama elicited the spectators' recognition of their own familial ties and therefore facilitated a symbolic reunion that both reflected and encouraged the behaviors of the Old Price rioters, who materially resisted the introduction of market relations into the theater.
Where He Danced: Cocteau's Barbette and Ohno's Water Lilies
Authors: Franko Mark
Published: February 2007

While some recent gay scholarship attempts to appropriate a naturalized position within the patriarchal tradition that apparently excludes it, this essay aims to situate the gay within an expanded concept of maleness. The critical response to homophobia does not overcome the binary-opposition codes that form the basis of conventional sexual difference. Jean Cocteau's 1926 essay on transvestism, “Une leçon de théâtre: Le numéro Barbette,” shows those binary codes in operation as the female impersonator Barbette moves across gender boundaries only in a death-defying high-wire act. The Butoh dancer Kazuo Ohno's 1988 performance pieceSuiren‘Water Lilies’ offers an alternative to the traditional sexual polarities asserted by Barbette's cross-dressing. Embodying “through-dressing” in a model of mutual inclusion, Ohno suggests the unconventional sexuality of a middle voice that preserves the ability of sensation or inner experience to fashion appearance.
The Impossible Genre: Reading Comprehensive Literary History
Authors: Johnstone Robert
Published: February 2007

Recent comprehensive literary histories affirm their own impossibility, a gesture that once belonged to opponents of the genre. The challenge of “the impossible whole,” of course, has always influenced the design of histories of entire literary traditions, but the open avowal that the form is a project of the cultural imagination has several notable consequences. In this new understanding, for example, the histories of a given tradition answer to and provoke rather than supersede one another in sequence. Literary works cease to be pseudoevents listed to achieve the appearance of a full history; they dematerialize, and the literary historian uses their instability to maintain the discomfiting question of the relations among “history,” “literature,” and “nation.” For these reasons, the impossible genre will remain a medium of choice, and of controversy, as long as the current academic and public debate over textual, authorial, and cultural identities continues to rage.
The Man with Two Brains: Gothic Novels, Popular Culture, Literary History
Authors: Mudge Bradford K.
Published: February 2007

This essay centers on the Gothic novel's status as an impassioned, and hence suspect, subliterary form. The traditional division of the Gothic by gender into two supposedly equal generic strands is somewhat misleading, since the majority of Gothic novels were written (as well as read) by women and since Gothic novels were feminized—disparaged in gender-specific ways—by a critical establishment outraged by both the passion and the popularity of the form. Because the debate over the Gothic also concerned the boundaries between high and low literature, the polemicists' use of gender clarifies how literary argumentation participated fully in larger cultural issues. Both the controversy surrounding the Gothic novel in the 1790s and the furor over prostitution in the 1840s focused on a potentially disruptive female passion, and understanding the connections between these debates sheds light on the evolution of Britain's literary and cultural identity and on the current dialogue over literary history.
Sound Symbolism as Drama in the Poetry of Robert Frost
Authors: Borroff Marie
Published: February 2007

An understanding of the workings of sound symbolism in poetry is essential to theoretical and practical criticism alike. During the past few decades, we have come to recognize that sound-symbolic effects are solidly based on linguistic facts. Studies of the ways in which sound symbolism is put to use generally in the works of a given poet can fruitfully supplement traditional analyses of particular passages. Though Robert Frost is known for his proficiency in mimetic sound effects, the language of his “speaking voice” is not conspicuously marked by the systems of alliteration and assonance that characterize the verse of Tennyson or Swinburne. Yet such systems, among other features, appear in certain poems in a “chanting voice” associated, overtly or symbolically, with the protagonist's fear of death. Ultimately, this proves to be the poet's fear of obliteration, of succumbing to the power of a now obsolete music and thus vanishing from the poetic scene without a trace.
Nobel Lecture 1989: In Praise of Storytelling
Authors: Cela Camilo José
Published: February 2007

My old friend and mentor Pío Baroja, who was not awarded the Nobel Prize, for the flame of fame does not always light up the right man's head, had a clock whose face displayed some wise words, a frightening maxim that referred to the passing of the hours: They all hurt, the last kills. Well, those hands that move only ahead have marked the tolling of many hours in my heart and soul, and today, with one foot in the considerable life I have left behind and the other in hope, I come before you to speak of words and, in good faith and perhaps with good luck, to discuss freedom and literature. I am not sure where the border checkpoint of old age is, but just in case I have already passed through, I will take refuge in something Francisco de Quevedo once said: we all want to live to a ripe old age, but we all deny we have gotten there. Since I am very well aware that we cannot ignore the evidence, and since I am also not unaware that the calendar is a relentless tool, I am ready to say all that I should without leaving anything up to inspiration or improvisation, two notions I despise.
Aesthetics, Ethics, and Politics in Donoso's El jardín de al lado
Authors: Mouat Ricardo Gutierrez
Published: February 2007

This paper seeks to elucidate the complex interaction of aesthetics, ethics, and politics in El jardín de al lado by using a heuristic and dialogic approach—that is, by counterpointing Donoso's novel and one of its implicit subtexts, Thomas Mann's “Death in Venice.” Focusing on the aesthetic contradiction between modernism and postmodernism brought on by the rise of the culture industry, El jardín de al lado dramatizes an artistic crisis that has ethical and political implications. The narrator's traditional discourse of value is subverted by the ethics and aesthetics of the marketplace, which create contradictions (bourgeois versus bohemian subjectivity, production of the text versus reception of it) similar to those Mann deals with in “Death in Venice.” Ultimately, El jardín de al lado is a response to political crisis from the standpoint of autonomous literature.
Suffering and Sensation in The Ruined Cottage
Authors: Swann Karen
Published: February 2007

Recently, Jerome McGann has criticized The Ruined Cottage's fostering of “the grand illusion” of Romanticism, “the idea that poetry, or even consciousness, can set one free of the ruins of history and culture.” But to characterize Wordsworth's poem in this way is to overlook its direct engagement with one social field, the literary marketplace; as an experiment with genre the poem sharply confronts a public taste for sensational literature. This confrontation is also a form of collusion, for the technical innovations that distinguish Wordsworth's poetry of suffering from popular sensational literature deploy the tactics and create the effects of that literature. The Ruined Cottage at once entices and reproves the public taste. Intended to appeal to a public of feminized readers, it also creates the readers-to-be of high Romantic poetry—an audience whose pleasure it is to distance itself from the captivated feminine heart.
In Defense of Plato's Gorgias
Authors: Kastely James L.
Published: February 2007

Histories of rhetoric have characterized Plato as an opponent of rhetoric and have seen Gorgias primarily as a negative critique of rhetorical abuses. Such an understanding ignores the dialogue's own rhetoric and slights Plato's insight into the problem of inescapable and inadvertent injury that confronts anyone who uses language. But it is such injury that makes rhetoric philosophically interesting. Socrates's claim that the value of rhetoric lies in its ability to allow us to attack our loved ones is not an ironic dismissal of rhetoric but part of his attempt to develop the ethical point of refutation, as Gorgias itself is not an attempt to prove the obvious point that rhetoric can be abused but rather an eloquent argument as to why rhetoric should be taken seriously.
Lu Xun's “Diary of a Madman” and a Chinese Modernism
Authors: Tang Xiaobing
Published: February 2007

A critical rereading of Lu Xun's “Diary of a Madman,” a canonical text in modern Chinese literature, suggests a need to invoke modernism as a historicizing concept and to rethink modern Chinese literary historiography. Contrary to the conventional view of Lu Xun's story as no more than a realist fiction, the new interpretation shows how the work persistently and ingeniously articulates a modernist sensibility of time as well as a modernist politics of language. The Madman's madness not only expresses a self-consciousness that is radically modern in its break with a traditional gemeinschaft but also demarcates a new, oppositional symbolic order and practice. At the forefront of the historical New Culture movement, this archetypal text of deconstructive reading simultaneously promises a critical and a productive discursive strategy. The work's modernism, finally, requires modernity to be understood as both a concrete historical experience and a global situation.
Historical Subversion and Violence of Representation in García Márquez and Ouologuem
Authors: Aizenberg Edna
Published: February 2007

The rediscovery of history, a recent literary-critical event, is problematic in its elision of the non-Western past and its subsumption of non-Western fictional works. Likewise, some new studies on the interplay of violence and representation, while offered as critiques of Western discourse, ignore significant earlier Third World theorizations. This essay, in focusing on Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Yambo Ouologuem's Bound to Violence, aims to reinstate the absent history: those Third World conditions and exigencies that link postcolonial novels and a desire to think historically. Both books adopt a violent narrative strategy that reflects their status as products of a ruptured history scarred by imperialization.
Presidential Address 1989: Mediating the Work: Or, The Legitimate Aims of Criticism
Authors: Brombert Victor
Published: February 2007

It is not always easy to communicate with the larger community and the general public. In the field of literary studies our times betray a deep malaise. Belletristic exercises have been discredited as frivolous and elitist. The very underpinnings of any critical discourse are being scrutinized. What is criticism, and what for? To some, it is an analysis of functions, to others an elaboration and testing of theories, to still others a study of the modes of production and reception, while to not a few it has an ideological thrust of its own. There are those who nourish even more grandiose ambitions—who see criticism as a means of rethinking or undermining Western metaphysics and of shaking the foundations of a logocentric and anthropocentric cultural consciousness.
The Political Truth of Heidegger's “Logos”: Hiding in Translation
Authors: Rand Nicholas
Published: February 2007

Since late 1987 there has been an energetic, at times impassioned international debate about the relation between Heidegger's political activities and the substance of his works. Putting aside references to the fact or circumstances of Heidegger's involvement with National Socialism, I interpret his 1951 commentary on Heraclitus. This indirect approach sketches an avenue of reading the philosopher's works politically without recourse to historical documents, an avenue that seeks to demonstrate the inherent possibility of a nationalistic stance in Heidegger's text.
Linguistic Models and Recent Criticism: Transformational-Generative Grammar as Literary Metaphor
Authors: Henkel Jacqueline
Published: February 2007

Because the stated focus of transformational-generative grammar was on speakers' “knowledge of language,” early reader-oriented critics found this linguistic theory an attractive literary analogy. But as the generative model became a critical metaphor, both its internal, mental interests and its semantic aims were necessarily distorted to suit literary problems. The set-defining apparatus of generative grammar came to be read as a text-processing mechanism, its syntactic claims as a rudimentary theory of discourse. Yet recent critics have attacked, not the limitations of this model as revised for criticism, but the putative authoritarianism of linguistic study itself. This rhetorical strategy defines criticism against an outside field while masking the character of its own interdisciplinary efforts.
The Poetics and Politics of Bardicide
Authors: Levin Richard
Published: February 2007

The Death of the Author creates a hermeneutic vacuum that must be filled by some other determinant of meaning. For many of the new Marxist critics of Shakespeare, this author surrogate is a universal law of textual behavior. The text becomes an enemy that adopts various strategies (displacing the real subject, concealing contradictions, offering an imaginary resolution, etc.) to trick us into accepting its hegemonic ideology, but it always manages to expose and defeat itself. This construction of the text serves the political professions of these critics, since it enables them to wage—and win—a war against the forces of evil represented by the textual project and thus to act out in this displaced arena their “commitment” to transform society. Many feminist neo-Freudian critics of Shakespeare use a similar universal law wherein the text's masculine project (or fantasy) is always subverted by a feminine subtext, often embodied in an absent but omnipresent mother.
Presidential Address 1994: Reality—Our Subject and Discipline
Authors: Spacks Patricia Meyer
Published: February 2007

My mother taught me that So what? was a rude question, but I can't get along without asking it. What my mother objected to, of course, was its rhetorical usage, as a contemptuous judgment—not a question at all, really, but a derogatory statement. I, however, use the expression for serious inquiry, in the classroom and in my head. This question, I tell every class, is what they should ask themselves as they write, what keeps me honest as I write. I think that Clarissa is a great novel: So what? This passage echoes the theological views of Isaac Watts: So what? The question challenges me to justify what I'm saying, to articulate assumptions, and to confront intellectual difficulties and reminds me not to relax into simply having an opinion or to take my views, habits, behavior, and judgments for granted.
Birth of the Cyberqueer
Authors: Morton Donald
Published: February 2007

While the return ofqueeris usually explained locally as an oppressed minority's positive reunderstanding of a negative word, as the adoption of an umbrella to cover diverse marginal subjectivities, or as a sign of generational difference, the term's reappearance must instead be historicized—systematically and globally—as one of the theoretical, cultural, and social changes that result from the uncritical acceptance (for class reasons) of the premises of ludic (post)modern theory in the dominant academy and the culture industry. By elevating the category of desire (mode of signification) and occluding the category of need (mode of production), ludic theory encourages the notion that in advanced technoculture, mutant subjectivities—such as the “cyberqueer”—occupy a new and freeing virtual reality of desire beyond mere need where they can write their own histories instead of being written by history. In the end, (cyber)queerity is but a new expression of an old class ideology.
Of Creole Symptoms, Cuban Fantasies, and Other Latin American Postcolonial Ideologies
Authors: Colás Santiago
Published: February 2007

Postcolonial theory and criticism have tended to ignore the specificity of Latin American experiences of decolonization, which are largely early-nineteenth-century phenomena. Using Slavoj Žižek's Marxist and psychoanalytic theory of ideology, I highlight the particularities of the poetry of independence in the 1820s and the political and cultural discourses of the Cuban Revolution of 1959. From these instances, I elaborate a concept of Latin American postcoloniality as the recurring product of an intellectual and political elite driven by an unconscious desire for the persistence of external and internal colonial relations, and I argue that the practice of Latin American studies in the United States should be related to this concept.
The Wound of History: Walcott'sOmerosand the Postcolonial Poetics of Affliction
Authors: Ramazani Jahan
Published: February 2007

The figure of the wound is central to Derek Walcott'sOmeros, one of the most ambitious works of postcolonial poetry. Walcott grants a European name to the primary bearer of the wound, the black fisherman Philoctete, who allegorizes African Caribbean suffering under European colonialism and slavery. This surprisingly hybrid character exemplifies the cross-cultural fabric of postcolonial poetry but contravenes the assumption that postcolonial literature develops by sloughing off Eurocentrism for indigeneity. Rejecting a separatist aesthetic of affliction, Walcott frees the metaphoric possibilities of the wound as a site of interethnic connection. By metaphorizing pain, he vivifies the black Caribbean inheritance of colonial injury and at the same time deconstructs the experiential uniqueness of suffering. Knitting together different histories of affliction, Walcott's polyvalent metaphor of the wound reveals the undervalued promise of postcolonial poetry.
Petrarch at the Peak of Fame
Authors: Asher Lyell
Published: February 2007

In “The Ascent of Mont Ventoux,” a letter to a former confessor, Petrarch famously admits to having ascended a peak for no other reason than to admire the view. As a failed conversion narrative, the letter is ultimately as gratuitous as the climb it recounts. Noting a number of similarities between climbing the mountain and composing the letter, I argue that the literal ascent he describes is a figure for his literary ascent, through this letter and other texts, to fame and notoriety. In condemning the climb, Petrarch figuratively condemns the letter, censuring what he does even as he does it.
The Hermit's Scream
Authors: Rich Adrienne
Published: February 2007

He said I had this that I could love,

As one loves visible and responsive peace,

As one loves one's own being,

As one loves that which is the end

And must be loved, as one loves that

Of which one is a part as in a unity,

A unity that is the life one loves,

So that one lives all the lives that comprise it

As the life of the fatal unity of war.

Wallace Stevens, “Yellow Afternoon”

I am a failure then, as the kind of revolutionary Anne-Marion and her acquaintances were. (Though in fact she had heard of nothing revolutionary this group had done, since she left them ten summers ago. Anne-Marion, she knew, had become a well-known poet whose poems were about her two children, and the quality of the light that fell across a lake she owned.)

Alice Walker, Meridian (200–01)

I've been haunted by a poem, as apparently simple as a ballad and with a ballad's appeal of timelessness. It's by Elizabeth Bishop, a white North American with middle-class roots. Orphaned and deracinated as a child, she grew up as a lesbian, a traveler-exile, living a significant part of her life in Brazil. She's not thought of as a political poet by most people who admire her; she's most often praised as a poet of minute observation and description. The poem is called “Chemin de Fer”:
Reading between Worlds: Contemporary Greek Women's Writing and Censorship
Authors: Van Dyck Karen
Published: February 2007

This essay accounts for the recent prominence of women's writing in Greece by examining how women writers applied writing strategies developed under the dictatorship (1967–74) to their critique of fixed gender roles. Margarita Karapanou's novel Kassandra and the Wolf deconstructs the victor-victim opposition and poses the process of inversion itself as a position from which to write. Jenny Mastoraki's collection of poems Tales of the Deep works out a similar perspective formally, suggesting that such a position requires that the order of language also be disturbed. By analyzing these texts in the historical context of the dictatorship and in the theoretical contexts of feminist works such as Christa Wolf's Cassandra and Luce Irigaray's Speculum of the Other Woman, I show how Karapanou's and Mastoraki's responses to censorship are not individual exceptions but key components of recent Greek women's writing.