bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Genesis and Development of Joyce Cary's First Trilogy
Authors: Hoffmann Charles G.
Published: February 2007

The James Osborn Collection of Joyce Cary manuscripts deposited in the Bodleian Library contains all of the extant notebooks, worksheets, trial scenes, and early versions of Cary's works, both published and unpublished, finished and unfinished. This collection, gathering together in one place all of Cary's manuscripts, provides a unique record of the techniques, intentions, and development of an important contemporary novelist. Though the genesis and development of each of Cary's novels can be traced from an examination of the manuscript collection, I have limited this study to the first trilogy because the complexity of the trilogy form provides a deeper insight into Cary's method of writing and because the trilogy form represents his most important literary achievement.
Oral Residue in Tudor Prose Style
Authors: Ong Walter J.
Published: February 2007

We have recently been growing more aware of the differences between oral cultures and literate cultures. The effects on modes of thought inherent in the successive media of expression—oral speech, analphabetic writing, alphabetic writing, letterpress printing, the electronic media, wired and wireless—have been studied in some detail, and we know something of the effect of (alphabetic) writing on the ability to perform abstract analysis and to exercise individually controlled thinking as against communally controlled thinking.
The Structure of Bartholomew Fair
Authors: Levin Richard
Published: February 2007

The reputation of Bartholomew Fair has undergone some curious revolutions over the years. In its own day, and during the Restoration period, it seems to have been one of the most widely admired of Jonson's plays, but later generations came to judge it more harshly, tending to dismiss it as another example of the generally acknowledged decline in Jonson's artistic powers that was traced from the high point he had attained in the three preceding comedies, Volpone, Epicene, and The Alchemist, down to the final works that Dryden called his “dotages.” More recently, however, the critical pendulum has been swinging in the opposite direction, and by now we have seen a number of students of Jonson who are prepared to discuss this play with the same respect accorded to the three “major comedies,” and even a few who claim to find in it “the culmination of the dramatist's comic art.”
Dryden's Religio Laici and Roman Catholic Apologetics
Authors: Hamm Victor M.
Published: February 2007

For more than a quarter of a century now Professor Louis I. Bredvold's Intellectual Milieu of John Dryden has remained the virtually unquestioned authority on the subject. Only recently have a few dissenting voices been raised against Bredvold's thesis that Dryden's religious development, particularly as that is revealed in Religio Laici, was tainted with skepticism and fideism, and that his conversion, first to Anglicanism, and later to Catholicism, was motivated by irrational considerations. The few voices I refer to are those of Thomas H. Fujimara, whose article “Dryden's Religio Laici: An Anglican Poem,” appeared in PMLA in June 1961, and Elias Chiasson, whose essay “Dryden's Apparent Skepticism in Religio Laici” came out in another journal about the same time. Both of these scholars, working independently, demonstrated the orthodoxy of Dryden's Anglicanism with convincing evidence from texts of Anglican writers extending from Hooker to Jeremy Taylor. But can we go along with such a judgment as that which Mr. Fujimara makes in the conclusion of his study—“that Dryden became a Catholic cannot be explained by anything in Religio Laici”? I think not, for reasons which, I trust, will appear in this article.
Stendhal's Count Mosca as a Statesman
Authors: Weinstein Leo
Published: February 2007

Count mosca has received sharply differing interpretations from two distinguished French novelists of the nineteenth century. In 1840, one year after the publication of Stendhal's La Chartreuse de Parme, Balzac wrote: “M. Beyle a tant exalté le sublime caractère du premier ministre de Parme, qu'il est douteux que le Prince de Metternich soit aussi grand que Mosca. … Tout ce que Metternich a fait dans sa longue carrière, n'est pas plus extraordinaire que ce que vous voyez faire à Mosca. … L'étonnante et fine supériorité de Mosca n'est jamais en défaut, ni en action, ni en paroles.”
The “City Man” in The Waste Land: The Geography of Reminiscence
Authors: Day Robert A.
Published: February 2007

T. S. Eliot composed the first draft of The Waste Land at Margate and in Lausanne during the autumn of 1921, when funds secured through Ezra Pound had enabled him to take a long holiday for rest and recuperation. He sorely needed both, and in fact was under the care of a specialist at Lausanne, for overwork in his double capacity as bank clerk and man of letters had brought him to the verge of a nervous breakdown. Though we must allow that he was distressed by postwar chaos and the decay of Europe, themes of a more specific and less elevated nature were certainly among his thoughts. He could hardly escape from the news of the day, which we find reproduced plainly or masked in much of his early work; and he was, in the words of a recent critic, “preoccupied … with the conditions of his servitude to a bank in London”—Lloyd's Bank, where he held a minor post in the foreign exchange department at a starting salary of £120 per annum.
Musil's Die Schwaermer
Authors: Braun Wilhelm
Published: February 2007

Because Robert Musil's own training and inclinations were scientific, he was particularly qualified to describe the problems of the modern intellectual. Musil believed that although modern man's reason and logic have been acutely developed, his emotional life has been stunted and his social adjustment has been rendered precarious. Intellectual man finds himself isolated and a victim of introspection. Musil contended that the tension between the intellect and the emotions must be resolved, that solutions must somehow be provided which will lead to a richer and higher level of human existence. In Musil's work the intellectual hero strives to heal the fatal split in his psyche and to achieve a more balanced character and a better integration with other human beings.
Yeats and the English Renaissance
Authors: McAlindon T.
Published: February 2007

The profound change which became evident in Yeats's poetry with the publication of The Green Helmet (1910) and Responsibilities (1914) was due in large measure to his defiant adoption of an aristocratic outlook and a corresponding expression of anti-democratic sentiments. It has generally been held that Castiglione's The Courtier, to which Lady Gregory introduced him in (probably) 1907, and his visit with her in the same year to Urbino, Ferrara, Ravenna, and Florence acted as the most important cultural stimuli behind his conversion to the aristocratic ideal and his conviction that this was most perfectly realized during the Renaissance. Yet during the period 1901–06 Yeats had been engaged in a continuous study of the three greatest writers of the English Renaissance. And it was in this process, I submit, that his commitment to the Renaissance, to aristocratic values, and, what is more, to an aristocratically oriented poetry, was finally accomplished.
Spanish Comedias as Pot Boilers
Authors: Leavitt Sturgis E.
Published: February 2007

The comedias of the Golden Age in Spain present a field of investigation that seems to be inexhaustible. The dramatic productions of that unbelievably exuberant period are so numerous that no one can hope to read them all. Even to try to keep up with the research based upon them is a task of the first magnitude. These plays have been studied from the point of view of sources, dramatic technique, versification, style, dates of the plays, authorship, and much, much else.
Pascal et le déséquilibre
Authors: Demorest Jean-Jacques
Published: February 2007

“Alas for this infirm faith, this will not strenuous, this vast ebb of a vast flow! I am God in nature; I am a weed by the wall” (Essays I, “Circles”). “Motion or change, and identity or rest are the first and second secrets of Nature: Motion and Rest” (Essays II, “Nature”). La résonance et le fond sont pascaliens; mais Emerson, très attentif aux accidents de la compensation, pourrait aussi bien répondre que ce n'est pas dans Pascal, c'est en lui-même qu'il trouve tout ce qu'il y voit.
Hermann Brochs Auffassung Des Lyrischen
Authors: Durzak Von Manfred
Published: February 2007

Anders als bei Kafka und Musil, den beiden anderen großen deutschsprachigen Romanciers aus dem böhmisch-österreichischen Sprachraum, hat Hermann Broch zeit seines Lebens Gedichte geschrieben und die Möglichkeiten der lyrischen Gestaltung hoch eingeschätzt. Seine Gesammelten Werke werden nicht von ungefähr mit dem Band Gedichte eröffnet. Das Echo, das diese Gedichte bisher gefunden haben, war äußerst gering. Claude Davids Urteil über Brochs Lyrik hat durchaus typische Bedeutung: “Man hat auch Gedichte Brochs veröffentlicht, die jedoch in den meisten Fällen nicht über das Niveau formaler Übungen hinausreichen.” Auch die Gedichtpartien, die Broch seinen Romanen einfügte, sind ähnlich abwertend beurteilt worden. Über die “Stimmen”, die Gedichte der Schuldlosen, wurde zum Beispiel in Times Literary Supplement bemerkt: “The stories … are linked by some of those homemade verses that German writers for the past century have been so ready to run up on their sewing-machines” (S. 210). Was diese Urteile miteinander verbindet, ist die Tatsache, daß die Maßstäbe der Bewertung von außen herangetragen werden. Welche Bedeutung das Lyrische innerhalb Brochs ästhetischer Anschauung hat, ist bisher nicht untersucht worden. Dieses Problem hat zwei Aspekte. Einmal geht es um die Frage nach Brochs spezifischer Auffassung des Gedichts, und zum andern ist die Frage damit verbunden, welche Funktion das Gedicht und allgemein das Lyrische in Brochs Romanen haben.
Rhetoric and Meaning in Religio Laici
Authors: Corder Jim W.
Published: February 2007

Analysis of the rhetorical structure of Religio Laici, by directing attention to the form and development of the poem, clarifies its meaning. Such an analysis, further, enables us to accommodate equally appealing but apparently contradictory readings of the poem.
Hawthorne's Merry Company: The Anatomy of Laughter in the Tales and Short Stories
Authors: Dusenbery Robert
Published: February 2007

Hawthorne was interested in polarities, and his writings show a keen concern for chiaroscuro effects through description and characterization. Both his fiction and the notebooks reveal his liking for sharp contrasts—light and shade in scene and mood. Hawthorne's use of slants of light and of mirror effects to highlight contrasts is well-known. “Lights and shadows are continually flitting across my inward sky, and I know neither whence they come nor whither they go; nor do I inquire too closely into them.”
The Pygmy and The Giant
Authors: Jones Howard Mumford
Published: February 2007

Like the king of England the president of the Modern Language Association reigns but he does not govern. His constitutional duties are negligible: he presides over a few meetings and he appoints a Committee on Resolutions. To those who fear that if the presidential term were extended beyond one year, they might have to listen to two or more addresses by the same incumbent, I bring comfort: nothing in the constitution nor the by-laws requires him to deliver any address whatever. But the president, again like the British monarch, retains one right—the right to be informed. I have sought to be informed during my year in office; and I pay hearty tribute to the Executive Secretary, other members of the Executive Council, members of the staff of the central administrative office, and about one hundred members of the Association who, in response to inquiry, wrote me, most of them at length, giving me their opinions on the structure and present conduct of our society. In many cases these commentaries were joint products of groups of humanists consulted by the writers of the letters. For what I am about to say, however, I only am responsible.
La Tradición Textual De La Atalaya De Las Corónicas Del Arcipreste De Talavera
Authors: Del Piero Raúl A.
Published: February 2007

Los Estudios de crítica textual no suelen ser la materia más apropiada para los artículos como éste—artículos cuyo principal mérito ha de ser, junto con el interés, la brevedad. Claro es que los lectores que se interesaran en estas cuestiones no se contentarían con la descripción externa de los códices, ni con unas pocas observaciones sobre su valor relativo, sino que también esperarían un análisis paleográfico y diplomático, siquiera somero; la justificación de la genealogía propuesta mediante un buen número de ejemplos; la procedencia y vicisitudes bibliográficas de los ejemplares; los datos, en fin, que sobre tal o cual códice nos haya podido dejar algún personaje de nota que lo poseyó en determinado siglo ... Si pudiera satisfacer cumplidamente todas estas cuestiones, apenas creo que podría agotarlas en un volumen, y tampoco intentaré agotarlas en este breve informe. Por otra parte, al tratar de una obra importante, pero poco estudiada e inédita, como ésta que nos ocupa, también será preciso apuntar algo sobre la estructura y fuentes, antes de pasar revista a los manuscritos a través de los cuales ha llegado hasta nosotros.
Science in Mann's Zauberberg: The Concept of Space
Authors: Prusok Rudi
Published: February 2007

Der Zauberberg contains a great deal of esoteric scientific information that is woven into its symbolic structure, making the novel only partially comprehensible without some knowledge of twentieth-century science. Old concepts are no longer relevant by themselves, but must be fitted into a new Weltanschauung with its new scientific terminology. Mann used the new scientific information as symbol and leitmotif, updated old myths, and created new ones out of the continually accumulating data of the sciences. His novel has characteristics of a scientific experiment, allowing an Everyman Castorp to develop in the controlled parameters of the Berghof microcosm. This development entails a reconsideration of the nature of man in the light of Einstein's Relativity Theory and modern medicine. The former brings about a new perspective by shrugging off the old absolutes of Euclidian space and linear time and thereby adopting a “higher dimensionality” of perception from that of the “flatland” dweller. The latter, medicine and psychology, redefine man in medical terms and reexamine the Romantic myth of genius springing from disease.
Scatology and Eschatology : The Heroic Dimensions of Thoreau's Wordplay
Authors: West Michael
Published: February 2007

Thoreau's puns reflect the widespread philosophic interest in language that flourished in midcentury America. Some of his wordplay is covertly scatological. Though he explicitly defends excrement as natural, philological speculation encourages him to view it as poison. Excremental symbolism bolsters vegetarian ideals and subserves a philosophy where body contaminates spirit. Thoreau's ambivalent anality, evident in his fastidious cleanliness, helps explain his distaste for women, since female biology makes birth unclean and sex dirty. Excremental symbology also colors his view of emotion as a function of the bowels. Unctuous affection seems an oily exudation secreted in social contact, while sympathetic tears are a rendering of the fat accumulated in digestion. His contempt for sympathy as self-indulgent weakness is part of the heroic ethos forced upon him by the consciousness that death tainted his lungs. Dietary scruples are his ascetic strategy for avoiding consumption. Influenced by Wilkinson's The Human Body and Its Connection with Man (1851), Thoreau's covert scatological puns embody in style his philosophy of play, blending estheticism and stoicism in the concept of life as a heroic game. Many nineteenth-century punsters including Carlyle and Nietzsche exemplify similar compensatory attitudes; so do other modern hero-worshipers.
The Wife Who Goes out like a Man, Comes Back as a Hero: The Art of Two Oregon Indian Narratives
Authors: Ramsey Jarold W.
Published: February 2007

Interpreted along structuralist lines, the Clackamas Chinook story “Seal and Her Younger Brother Dwelt There” is a skillful dramatization of a fatal conflict between two goods: decorum and empirical alertness. Seal’s adult concern with propriety keeps her from heeding her daughter’s warning that Seal’s brother’s new “wife” “urinates like a man.” In the subsequent murder of Seal’s brother, the motives and identity of the homicidal “wife” are deliberately obscured so as to emphasize the tragic conflict between Seal and her daughter. Another Oregon Indian text, “The Revenge against the Sky People” (Coos), contains a version of the Clackamas story, but overall it is a narrative of heroic revenge, in which the killer’s motives and feelings are made known to us before he kills his victim. The two stories complement each other structurally and together represent Indian narrative art at its best.
The Court as Text: Inversion, Supplanting, and Derangement in Kafka's Der Prozeβ
Authors: Sussman Henry
Published: February 2007

Kafka’s writings have been illuminated by a spectrum of critical altitudes encompassing theological, psychological, ontological, and existential interpretations. In the present interpretation of Der Prozeß, language, reading, and writing subvert these categories while being bound to them. The Court functions as a literary text, extending and erasing itself and exacting an exchange of writing from its servants and wards. Joseph K., like der Mann in the parable of the doorkeeper, is excluded from the Law while claimed by it. This paradox characterizes K.’s experience. Like literary language, the Court seems to be identical to everyday existence, but, in the multiplicity of the often mutually negating legal interpretations that it entertains and in its anaerobic atmosphere, the Court defines itself as the negation of existence and its logic. Der Prozeß thus demarcates the border between literature and the life it seems to represent.
Event and Structure: The Plot of Zola's L'Assommoir
Authors: Baguley David
Published: February 2007

Though in his criticism Zola welcomed attempts by his contemporaries to abandon traditional forms of the plot, his novels reveal a constant concern for ordered construction. L’Assommoir demonstrates a particularly rigorous unity of design. In its internal organization one can discern a system of interrelated features deriving from a scheme of three controlling structural oppositions that, throughout the novel, character, action, and description illustrate: work/idleness, cleanliness/filth, abstention/indulgence. The development of the plot is the process by which the two principal characters, Gervaise and Coupeau, progressively abandon the positive values of this scheme and submit to the opposite tendencies. Zola traces this process within a symmetrical framework of measured effects and equivalent phases of development organized around the central chapter of the work to form a rigorously structured rising and falling action which adds to a novel of stark, repelling contingencies an engaging formal dimension of harmonious order.
Brechts braver Schweyk
Authors: Knust Herbert
Published: February 2007

A close literary analysis of the text shows that Schweyk im Zweiten Weltkrieg is an artful antimorality play with parodistic parallels to Everyman and Faust. The confrontation and interrelation of the “big” and the “small” provide a thematic and structural pattern on both the political and the social levels of the play. Love, faith, and work of the “little” are exploited by the “big.” Scattered revolution and traditional virtues prove useless in an attempt to fight and survive a totalitarian system. Schweyk is caught between a “big” enemy and a “big” friend. As a typical representative of the “little man” he is pitted against Hitler, whose plans he sabotages by a devious method of opportunism mixed with opposition; as an individual he is also contrasted with the fat glutton Baloun, whom he tries to help. In both respects he is “virtuous.” However, the juxtaposition of Schweyk in the icy Russian steppes and Baloun in the cozy “Keich” inn marks two contradictory, yet interrelated extremes of human existence. Brecht subtly points the way out of these undesirable paradoxes. Only if the “little” resolve their differences will they truly cease to be “little.” Schweyk's virtues and Brecht's “Schweykian philosophy” are dictated by circumstances; they are not meant to be of permanent value.
Image and Introspective Imagination in Montaigne's Essais
Authors: Norton Glyn P.
Published: February 2007

One of the most significant bridges between Montaigne, the thinker, and Montaigne, the writer, is in the use of figurative expression. Through application of a portion of Thibaudet's catalog of Montaigne's images, the organic nature of metaphor in the Essais becomes immediately apparent. Sometimes generating each other, sometimes generated within the writer's thought progressions, Montaigne's metaphors are frequently found in clusters. Such clusters depict the movement of the writer's mind as it strives to give a stylistic form to his thoughts. In both their thematic and organic natures, therefore, his metaphors provide introspective glimpses into the operation of the creative mind.
Remarks Suggested by Fascist Humanism and the Enemy Enlightenment
Authors: Atkins Stuart
Published: February 2007

For mankind in the total orphanage which is this world homeostasis is well served by the diverse learning—as knowledge and as process—with which the members of the Modern Language Association of America are professionally concerned: language as communication and rhetoric, literature as a means of heightened understanding, and the systematic study of these relevant areas of knowledge in the interest of effective instruction in them.
Pendennis and the Power of Sentimentality: A Study of Motherly Love
Authors: Bledsoe Robert
Published: February 2007

In Pendennis Thackeray redefines the meaning of “maturity” in order to suit the unusual needs of Pendennis in his compulsive search for emotional security. The narrator's ability simultaneously to denigrate and to celebrate the sentimental purity of Pen's mother, Helen, is the paradox whose development gives esthetic coherence to an otherwise commonplace story. Both Helen's youthful disappointments and her later possessiveness elicit protective responses from the narrator, although he goes out of his way to make her destructive nature increasingly obvious to the reader and to Pen himself. Moreover, Pen's continued inability to break away from Helen's demands reinforces her insistence on total allegiance from him. The narrator presents his characters' problems within a framework of psychological reality, but solves them only on the level of pseudo-incestuous fantasy. Therefore, final freedom from the terrors of insecurity involves Pen's willing enslavement to the mindlessness of Helen's sentimentality.
Nineteenth-Century American Humor: Easygoing Males, Anxious Ladies, and Penelope Lapham
Authors: Habegger Alfred
Published: February 2007

The basis of much nineteenth-century American humor was a certain male mask—the easygoing, countrified sloven. Women played a complementary role in society and fiction—the anxious manager of house and culture. Thus, Howells' and Mark Twain's couples often consist of a relaxed, humorous man and a tense woman. There was a tradition of female humor, however, best represented by Kate Sanborn's The Wit of Women (1886). The humor in this anthology has a genteel aplomb quite different from the male mask's incompetence. A few women writers, notably Marietta Holley, invented vernacular female humorists, but Howells created the finest of all in The Rise of Silas Lapham. Penelope, the first humorous female lead in an American novel, is a male impersonator, and her droll, unfashionable sensibility proves more attractive than the “gilded” femininity of beautiful, vapid Irene. Yet Howells rejects Penelope in the end.
The Movement of History in Our Mutual Friend
Authors: Palmer William J.
Published: February 2007

Dickens' Our Mutual Friend is an existential novel dealing with the struggles of the central characters to place, in Sartrean terms, existence before essence. This theme of self-definition involves characters singularly preoccupied with analyzing the deadness of past history and with rejecting the impositions of the past upon the present and the future. Boffin's historical reading and Lizzie Hexam's visions in the symbolic fire both reveal the necessity of change if there is to be an existential future. The main protagonist, Eugene Wrayburn, faced with the Shakespearean-Sartrean decision of whether or not to be in his sexual relationship with Lizzie, chooses to reject the pornographic cliches of Victorian sexuality and establish an existence for himself outside of the atrophied “Society” of the novel. Because of these decisions by the central characters to reject the dead history of the past, Our Mutual Friend is an optimistic statement of Dickens' belief in the power of the individual to regenerate a dead world.
Figaro's Games
Authors: Rex Walter E.
Published: February 2007

Whereas literary sources and theatrical conventions such as the unities are quite important for the appreciation of Beaumarchais's Barbier de Séville and La Mère coupable, they prove curiously unhelpful when trying to approach the unique qualities of Le Manage de Figaro. The special ambience of this play is related not to ordinary literary traditions, but to the separate category of children's games. From Cherubin's hide-and-seek in Act I to the grand game of blindman's buff in Act v, these are what give the action of the play its unity and also create the special quality of the fun in the play. Because of the time of life these games imply (i.e., childhood), there is also a special quality to the play's revolutionary overtones. Thus, in many senses, the end of the play represents the ushering in of a new age.
The Paradise Setting of Chateaubriand's Atala
Authors: Spininger Dennis J.
Published: February 2007

The landscape description of the New World that begins Chateaubriand's Atala has suffered from misguided criticism. Hostile critics have approached it “scientifically,” denying the authenticity of its details; admirers have rarely offered more than a theory of exoticism. Neither of these approaches uncovers the governing analogy that shaped the landscape details: the setting of Atala as an approximate paradise. The New World is “le nouvel Éden,” adapted to a tradition of garden paradises, particularly that of Milton's Paradise Lost. While recalling its mythical model, however, the features of Chateaubriand's landscape simultaneously and ironically suggest a fallen condition by presenting dualities in a state of tension. This ambivalence sets up a double relationship to the paradisiacal theme treated in the novel. The terrestrial paradise is recalled as the appropriate setting for another Fall. The conflicting properties of the symbolic locale do not achieve the expected synthesis and the story of the ill-fated lovers parallels the mythical Fall analogue. The emphasis then shifts to the celestial paradise, the religious (and Romantic) reconciliation of opposites. This remains tentative, however, for the final image of the novel is of the “new Eden” deprived of its sacred context rife with dualities.
A Formative Shakespearean Legacy: Elizabethan Views of God, Fortune, and War
Authors: Jorgensen Paul A.
Published: February 2007

One of Shakespeare's first and most formative intellectual legacies, with major influence on his shaping of sources in the historical tetralogies, was Elizabethan thought on the relationship of God, Fortune, and war. For the Henry vi plays, the legacy offered a thematically appropriate concept of Fortune, with humanly meaningless skirmishes and futile stratagems, pointing nevertheless toward the ultimate control of God over Fortune. For Richard iii Shakespeare chose a divinely governed war, with Richmond as a passive instrument having little character. The second tetralogy employs the most dramatically advantageous stage of the legacy: a transitional, confused period when necessity for human responsibility in war becomes first, and somewhat ambiguously, recognized (Richard iii) and then disturbingly, though covertly, prominent and Machiavellian (Henry iv and Henry v). The experience in these formative plays of trying to resolve the conflicting demands of supernatural control and human resourcefulness helped prepare Shakespeare for tragic resolutions deeper than those of military victory or defeat.
Paul et Virginie and the Myths of Death
Authors: Cherpack Clifton
Published: February 2007

A recent defense of Paul et Virginie argues that the status of this work as a masterpiece can be appreciated if we concentrate on its poetic qualities and disregard its often contradictory didacticism. Yet this didacticism can be seen to be integrated into the work's “poetry” if we note that it functions on three levels. The first level is characterized by the demonstration of the irresistible conditioning effect of civilization, even in remote colonies. The second level is informed by the basic pessimism regarding life on earth that pervades the text. Subtending these is a solid mythical foundation which combines what Denis de Rougemont calls the “Tristan myth” with what Joseph Campbell calls the “monomyth of the hero.” The form, style, and message are harmoniously unified in the story itself, but the implications of the work's narrative frame and its survival as literature tend to belie its celebration of death.
Donne and Ecclesiastes
Authors: Bozanich Robert
Published: February 2007

Sometime around 1608, during his years of idleness at Mitcham, John Donne was overwhelmed with a sense of his own vanity in being cut off from “the body of the world.” Since he had been reduced to this state by excessive love of a woman (in his marriage to Ann More) and of knowledge (in his “hydroptic, immoderate desire of human learning”), Donne quite naturally turned to Solomon and the Book of Ecclesiastes for an understanding of his own predicament. The influence endured. The effects of Ecclesiastes are most evident in Donne's Anniversaries but can also be traced through virtually the entire range of his work.
Narrative Discourse in Calvino: Praxis or Poiesis?
Authors: De Lauretis Teresa
Published: February 2007

Contrary to the view of Calvino as a writer divided between sociopolitical concern and escape into fantasy, his works point to an unambiguous poetics in which this apparent dichotomy is in fact a dialectic process. His stylistic and narrative experimentations, from the “neorealist” mode to allegorical and mathematical fictions, and to self-reflexive narrative, disclose a precise ideological intent: to propose ever-changing models of reality, to question each form as it is produced, to explode every narrative system so a new one may be created. By means of lexical and syntactical deformation, of shifts from one semantic code to another, of ironic metalinguistic references, and by the use of special subcodes (e.g., the comic strip), Calvino breaks down the conventional barrier separating high literature from popular culture, opens to question the whole of literary tradition, and exposes the paradoxical nature of writing (écriture) in the dialectics of signification.
Eliot and Hulme in 1916: Toward a Revaluation of Eliot's Critical and Spiritual Development
Authors: Schuchard Ronald
Published: February 2007

MOST RECENT critical studies indicate that as the poetry and criticism of T. S. Eliot move toward their inevitable period of eclipse all of the old critical attitudes are still intact. Since the late twenties there have been numerous charges of inconsistency between Eliot's early and later criticism, and between his criticism and his poetry, and though a few critics have been piecing together the unfinished case for continuity, the cumulative criticism of Eliot's development as a poet-critic-Catholic has led most of us discussing Eliot's work in the classroom to accept the following prevalent assumptions and chronology: that the poems written from “Prufrock” to “The Hollow Men” are those of a despairing, skeptical poet probing spiritual bankruptcy in the modern world ; that from “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) to his conversion in 1927 Eliot's theory of tradition and criticism spring from literary rather than moral concerns; that in 1928, when in the Preface to For Lancelot Andrewes Eliot announces that his attitude is “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglocatholic in religion,” there is a rather sudden turn from an esthetic and literary theory of tradition to a moral and religious doctrine of orthodoxy; that in After Strange Gods (1934) and later Eliot not only sins against literature by employing his dogmatic religious beliefs as the narrow touchstone of his criticism, but yearns nostalgically for the unified sensibility and moral security of a lost medieval world. But these widespread opinions are misleading, for by 1916 Eliot's classical, royalist, and religious point of view was already formulated. A first step toward establishing this assertion, which calls for a full-scale revaluation of Eliot's development and of the primary concerns of his poetry and criticism before 1928, is to examine evidence of Eliot's critical and religious position in 1915–16, and especially the role of T. E. Hulme in defining that position.
Mystic Fusion: Baudelaire and le sentiment du beau
Authors: Osborn Catherine B.
Published: February 2007

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE'S magnificent poetry has aroused constant speculation on his esthetic theory. Critics have felt that an understanding of his esthetics would give a clearer understanding of his poetic technique; this in turn would lead to a more complete appreciation of the beauty of his poetry. He has also left sufficient remarks, if unsystematized and indeed often contradictory, to pique the curiosity of the critic and to suggest various interpretations of his philosophy. His poetry, a consistent interpretation of his theoretical explanations, and the literary climate in which he lived all lead me to believe that his esthetic doctrine is built upon le sentiment du beau. His “définition du Beau,” his “théorie rationnelle et historique du beau,” his “Beau bizzare” all need le sentiment du beau to resolve their contradictions and their ambiguities. More important, this esthetic doctrine is applicable to all of his poetry: it permits a finer appreciation of both the Christian and the Satanic poems and also of the poems that are neither. It maintains the essential esthetic value absent in the many psychological interpretations. It affords more insight into his poetry than a doctrine of metaphor; it permits a more complete interpretation than the theory that his art is based on a fusion of the spiritual and the material. And there is evidence that Baudelaire's theory of the esthetic feeling not only was a logical development of early nineteenth-century esthetics but was under open discussion among the younger poets of the middle of the century. For Baudelaire did know to his satisfaction what this sentiment du beau is: he understood it to be a perfect fusion of the three modes of the human personality—sensation, feeling, and thought. “Il me serait trop facile de disserter subtilement sur la composition symétrique ou équilibrée, sur la pondération des tons, sur le ton chaud et le ton froid, etc. ? vanité! Je préfère parler au nom du sentiment, de la morale et du plaisir.”1
Satan in Moscow: An Approach to Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita
Authors: Wright A. C.
Published: February 2007

BULGAKOV'S NOVEL The Master andMargarita is a confusing combination of different elements: satire, fantasy, serious philosophical and religious questioning.1 The variety of critical commentaries has already shown the impossibility of reducing it to one single interpretation. The action can be stated briefly. Satan, alias Woland, arrives in Moscow with two demonic henchmen, a thug Azazello and a tomcat Behemoth; plus an “interpreter,” Koroviev. Among bureaucrats, petty crooks, and those simply concerned with personal gain they cause havoc.2 But they give aid and protection to a persecuted writer in an asylum, the Master, and to his love, Margarita, after she has agreed to act as hostess for Satan's Ball. A hack poet, Ivan Homeless, is brought to a deeper understanding of life and becomes a “disciple” of the Master. Central to the book is the Master's novel about Pontius Pilate, the chapters of which form part of Bulgakov's text and conclude simultaneously with the story about the Master in an epilogue. A strong connection with the Faust tradition is evident.
Transitional Time in Keller's Züricher Novellen
Authors: Radandt Friedhelm
Published: February 2007

In contrast to the commonly held view that Keller is portraying the high points of Zurich's cultural history in his Züricher Noeellen, the historical phenomenon of periods in transition, particularly the individual response to the fact and realization of transition, appear as the main theme of this cycle of novellas. A detailed analysis of the five stories leads to the observation that the Active present in each novella is a period removed from the actual high point of a given era. Hadfoub, for example, takes place at the very end of the Minnesang period, representing a latecomer among the minnesingers, one who plays an anachronistic role, and Ursula treats events surrounding religious change, in this case the clash between the Zwingli forces and the Anabaptists after the introduction of the Reformation in Zurich. To underscore the idea of transition, Keller makes use of the ironic narrator who frequently voices his discriminating opinion about the characters, and who in the frame novella clearly relates the issue of “transitional time” to Keller's own age, also a period of transition, and in so doing censures those writers who are oblivious to the needs of the present and seek refuge in a glorious portrayal of the past.
Paul Celan's “Todesfuge” : Translation and Interpretation
Authors: Weimar Karl S.
Published: February 2007

Translation is a synthetic approach to interpretation and a paradoxical awareness of the crisis of language. Some of the translator's problems, such as rhythms, grammar, lexical layers, syntax, are illustrated with critical reference to the five published English translations of Celan's “Todesfuge”; their resolution leads to creative apprehension. The provenience of the poem is biblical. The devices of oxymoron, surrealist metaphor, disparate rhythms and meter, inversion of time sequence, and the erotic countersubject all function as verbal correlatives to the paradox and absurdity which aie the poem's theme and represent a peculiar combination of esoteric artistry and commitment. The fugue is structured by four voices (statements with contrapuntal variations) and the echoed simultaneity of “poppy” (verbal narcotic) and “remembrance” (of unreal reality). The poem is placed in the frame of Celan's later development.
Educational Theory and Human Nature in Fielding's Works
Authors: Kropf C. R.
Published: February 2007

The question of the extent to which Fielding's works present a consistent view of human nature may in part be answered by a study of his frequent use of educational theory. Fielding was familiar with the major issues and theories treated in the educational literature of his day and also recognized that various theories of education found their basis in various theories of human nature, the raw material with which education deals. In The Fathers, one of Fielding's lesser-known plays, he seems to assume that education is allpowerful in forming character, but in Joseph Andrews the entire question of education and human nature is treated with ironic ambivalence. In Tom Jones education is irrelevant to character development, and the Nightingale episode reads like a specific reversal of the theme of The Fathers. In the course of these three works Fielding apparently reverses his position, beginning with the assumption that human nature may be defined as a tabula rasa and concluding that human character is predetermined. In Amelia Fielding compromises between these extremes in a manner reminiscent of Locke's position in his Some Thoughts concerning Education.
Blake and the Natural World
Authors: Lefcowitz Barbara F.
Published: February 2007

Although most critics have stressed William Blake's “mystical” disdain for the phenomena of objective reality, his responses to nature are both frequent and varied. While not following any lineal order of development, these responses may be said to assume a hierarchical order once we examine them in their overall context. The hierarchy langes from mere description of nature in a manner reminiscent of the eighteenth-century physico-theological poets through a consideration of nature as an aspect of human perception and an aspect of human will. Finally, nature may be transmuted into art through the shaping power of the imagination, or in Blakean terms, through an inward confluence of Los and Christ.
Disorientation, Style, and Consciousness in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Authors: Ganim John M.
Published: February 2007

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight not only exhibits a profound control of structure and symmetry, but also includes a great many techniques that induce disorientation and confusion in the reader. Such techniques challenge and entertain the audience, and themes of decline, decadence, and dismemberment comment ironically on Sir Gawain’s late fourteenth-century audience’s place in the history that the narrative includes. This article concentrates on one particular technique; the poet divides certain stanzas so that the second half of the stanza causes the audience to revise or question their response to the first half. But such techniques mirror the effects of the narrative as a whole. This constant shift in perspective causes the-audience to question the meaning and value of earthly perception and existence. It also indicates a gently antagonistic—or at least ironic—relationship between poet and audience.
The Parenthetical Function in A la recherche du temps perdu
Authors: Suleiman Susan
Published: February 2007

This essay examines parentheses on the level of individual narrative sequences in A la recherche du temps perdu. A narrative sequence is a limited, linear series of events that can be subsumed under a single label. “Sequence-level parenthesis” may be defined as an independent textual segment inserted between two contiguous moments in the sequence, interrupting its forward movement. The unique feature of Proust's sequence-level parentheses is the multiplicity of functions they fulfill: narrative, interpretive, associative. (1) Parentheses fill in gaps in the story, announce, prepare, or generate events to come, remind us of past events, etc. (2) They qualify or explain specific facts or situations; they also formulate generalizations or laws. (3) Parenthetical associations play a role analogous to that of the metaphor and the phenomenon of involuntary memory: they establish connections (rapprochements) between widely separated textual fragments. To borrow a term used by Proust, Spitzer, and more recently Deleuze, parentheses are the transversales of textual multiplicity.
The Form of Carnival in Under the Volcano
Authors: Arac Jonathan
Published: February 2007

The variety of moods and techniques and the astonishing erudition of Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano have frustrated critical attempts to grasp the work as a unified whole and have fostered instead an emphasis on decoding and explicating. The generic characteristics that Mikhail Bakhtin discerns in the tradition of Menippean Satire, however, provide a fresh and integral interpretation. Bakhtin's description subsumes such formal and thematic aspects of the work as its suppressed comedy, variety of styles, topicality, wide adaptation of other genres, fantastic inventiveness, frequent sharp contrasts and abrupt transitions, scandalous eccentricity, intellectual seriousness, three-leveled world view, utopianism, and psychological abnormality. These apparently heterogeneous characteristics are organized and unified within both Bakhtin's theory and the book's world by the model of carnival festivity. As an annually recurring celebration of change, carnival allows us, furthermore, to understand Lowry's spatializing sense of the book as “trochal,” like the regularly turning wheel of a machine.
A Phenomenological Approach to the Theatrum Mundi Metaphor
Authors: Pearce Howard D.
Published: February 2007

The theater-dream metaphor raises fundamental ontological and epistemological questions and treats them in much the same way as phenomenological thought does. Both the metaphor and Edmund Husserl’s theory “reduce” the ontological problem to a play of experience—to activity and process—leaving the final question of what is “real” unresolved. Such activity necessarily involves Heideggerean “dimensions” that are not only open, mobile, temporal, “in play” but also structural, patterning. Examples ranging from Renaissance to modern drama, from the Russian to the American stage, show how dimensions are revealed both as the familiar structures of our thinking (stratifications, circles within circles, temporal delineations, subject-object categories, etc.) and as the structuring principles by which “real” and “imagined” worlds establish relationships. Thus we can move among such implicit structures to consider multiple stage-world relations—the interplay of subjects and objects of experience and concomitant audience-art-artist implications.
Coleridge's Interpretation of Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads
Authors: Bialostosky Don H.
Published: February 2007

Although Coleridge’s interpretation of Wordsworth’s Preface has shaped subsequent understanding of Wordsworth’s meaning, Coleridge was out not to clarify but to refute Wordsworth. His discussion of the Preface repeatedly shifts the positions to which it objects and misleadingly distinguishes between what the Preface can legitimately be taken to mean and what it probably does mean. It distorts Wordsworth’s account of his choice of subjects and his comments on poetic language. Although intelligible meanings can be discovered for Wordsworth’s remarks about “the real language of men” and the lack of “essential difference” between the languages of verse and prose, Coleridge’s exegesis reduces them to absurdity. The position he offers in opposition to the one he draws from the Preface closely resembles the one Wordsworth actually put forward there. The real agreements and disagreements between Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s views are more interesting than those to which Coleridge’s interpretation has called attention.
The Esthetics of Perversion: Gothic Artifice in Henry James and Witold Gombrowicz
Authors: Merivale Patricia
Published: February 2007

Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw and The Sacred Fount, like Gombrowicz’ Pornografia and Cosmos, are not only Gothic artist parables in the nineteenth-century mode but also metaphysical detective stories and self-reflexive texts in the contemporary mode. Their heroes, whether voyeurs or stage directors, manipulate other, innocent characters into the substance of their own fictions: the creation of texts is thus seen as a morally tainted endeavor.
The Second Shepherds' Play: A Reconsideration
Authors: Mack Maynard
Published: February 2007

Unlike some other plays of the Wakefield cycle, the Second Shepherds’ Play reveals a subtle exploitation of dramatic techniques to minimize the distance between secular and sacred experience. Introduction of the shepherds one at a time; Mak’s play-acting, magic spell, dream prophecy, and sheep stealing; the parallel between Mak and the Angel are all arranged to give the audience a sense in theatrical terms of the meaning of the shift through the farce-drama from the opening lyrics of static despair to a new mode of celebration. Although symbolically presented as the devil or Antichrist, Mak functions dramatically as the bridge to the birth of Jesus.