Rhetoric and Poetics
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"Writing Outside the Self: The Disembodied Narrators of W. S. Merwin."
Daniel P. Jaeckle
"Imaging
Social Languages in Marvell's The Last Instructions."
Michael Simpson
"Who Didn't
Kill Blake's Fly: Moral Law and the Rule of Grammar in 'Songs of Experience.'"
James I. Wimsatt
"Rhyme,
the Icons of Sound, and the Middle English Pearl."
Richard Badenhausen
"Representing
Experience and Reasserting Identity: The Rhetoric of Combat in British
Literature of World War I."
Kai Mikkonen
"Theories
of Metamorphosis: From Metatrope to Textual Revision."
Manfred Jahn
"Windows of Focalization:
Deconstructing and Reconstructing a Narratological Concept."
Jim Scannell
"The Method is
Unsound: The Aesthetic Dissonance of Colonial Justification in Kipling,
Conrad, and Greene."
W. S. Merwin's poems are often delivered by "disembodied" narrators whose lack of personal identity assists them in their quest for an original natural world. Their attempts at release from the ego bear similarity to the self-loss of many Eastern religions, the denial of the physical and personal in the Native American vision quest, and the continuous exchange of elements in the phenomenal world. These searches end, typically, not in completion, but in the recognition of traces from "origin."
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Daniel P. Jaeckle. "Imaging Social Languages in Marvell's The Last
Instructions."
In The Last Instructions to a Painter Marvell frequently satirizes
the powerful of his society by creating images of the languages that they
speak. The poem thus lends itself to analysis in terms of the descriptive
categories that Bakhtin has developed for the novel. The Last Instructions
uses what Bakhtin calls hybridization, parodic stylization, parody, stylization,
and variation to place the social languages to be satirized in opposition
to the language of the persona. As a result, Marvell exposes both the linguistic
habits by means of which those in power delude themselves and others, and
the poverty of the received languages of praise in light of the moral decay
of his society.
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Michael
Simpson. "Who Didn't Kill Blake's Fly: Moral Law and the Rule of Grammar
in 'Songs of Experience.'"
Criticism of Blake's `The Fly' has routinely maintained that it is
an especially cryptic poem, but has also assumed that the `events' portrayed
in it are utterly stable. Those events, however, have been actively stabilized
by critical readings that relate the poem, consciously or otherwise, to
literary antecedents that insist on a particular kind of plot. What exposes
this stabilization of the plot as an interpretation of the text is the
possibility of alternative grammars that the criticism has overlooked.
Since the criticism tends to castigate the poem's narrator because of his
part in the postulated plot, this criticism becomes susceptible to its
own strictures once this narrator is seen as a construction based on a
certain reading of the poem's grammar. Even though a few accounts of the
poem find only a sensitive narrator, both positive and negative characterizations
of the narrator share a common and mistaken assumption of their distance
from the poem. Chastizing a destructive narrator presumes the distance
of a moral superiority from him; congratulating a sensitive narrator presumes
the distance of a Humean sympathy. Both of these assumptions are challenged
once the poem's grammar is seen to be unstable enough to require the reader's
involvement in the text.
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James
I. Wimsatt. "Rhyme, the Icons of Sound, and the Middle English Pearl."
Counter to the prevailing assumption that patterns of verbal sound
have no value apart from verbal meaning, application of the semiotic theory
of Charles Sanders Peirce to prosody makes clear that there are two sign
systems operating in poetry, patterns of phonetic qualities as well as
of discursive meaning, which have a symbiotic relationship of mutual dependence
and independent semiotic value. Medieval poetry makes little use of sound
for expressive or imitative effect so that the values of its prosodic "music"
stand out with particular clarity. With three developed systems of "rhyme"--end-rhyme,
alliteration, and refrain-- the Middle English Pearl is a signal examplar
of the potential power of the sound icon in poetry. A statistical study
of the poem's rhyme-words according to etymological source in English,
French, or Old Norse substantiates the overriding importance of the sound
system in the poet's word choice; and statistics on the incidence and coincidence
of the three kinds of rhyme assist in understanding the scope and effect
of systematic sound consonance.
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Richard
Badenhausen. "Representing Experience and Reasserting Identity: The Rhetoric
of Combat in British Literature of World War I."
This essay proposes a psycholexicological model that ties the way language
emerges in consciously literary treatments of the Great War to both the
taxing psychological conditions of the fighting and the soldier-writer's
concomitant need to ground the self, gain control, and finally assert power.
Like many oppressed groups that use linguistic strategies such as slang
and other forms of coded language to create a self-contained community,
protect themselves from the oppressor, and finally subvert that authority,
the writers of the Great War invented a rhetoric of combat that allowed
them to express their frustrations, doubts, and fears covertly without
overtly challenging the supremacy of the military system or risking the
dire consequences that usually followed such a challenge. Far from passive,
objective recorders of the "truth" happening around them (the traditional
view of most First World War soldier-writers), literary participants actually
took a far more active approach in inventing a discourse that gave them
the authority not only to chronicle experience but to shape it in a particular
fashion; and they did so in the face of a linguistic system (army discourse)
that inherently threatened identity.
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Kai Mikkonen.
"Theories of Metamorphosis: From Metatrope to Textual Revision."
In my article I examine the theoretical presuppositions in the most
influential studies on literary metamorphosis as a trope to date. Roman
Jakobson's and Paul de Man's notions of metamorphosis as a trope in self-reflexive
narratives and poems are of particular critical interest in my research
and I aim to enlarge on their theories. For Jakobson, metamorphosis has
a specific kind of tropological structure as it suggests a concrete bridging
of the two elements in a comparison thus introducing a sense of time in
a metaphor. As such, by moving metaphor closer to metonymy, metamorphosis
can, in its self-reflexive use, emphasize the figurativeness of language
and complicate the representations of change. De Man, on the other hand,
elaborates Jakobsonian insights on tropes and Pushkin's figure of the statue's
coming alive in terms of personification or prosopopoeia.
In my reading of the Pygmalion myth I purport to question de Man's views
on prosopopoeic transformation and conceive the metatropological function
of metamorphosis in terms of intertextuality. I argue that we can read
metamorphosis in certain texts not just in relation to the question of
the figurative and the literal but also as a trope for textual revision.
By this I mean that the self-reflexive use of metamorphic imagery may also
be understood as a depiction of the combination of past texts and textuality,
of the necessary transformations between texts that constantly revitalize
certain story traditions like the Pygmalion myth.
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Manfred Jahn.
"Windows of Focalization: Deconstructing and Reconstructing a Narratological
Concept."
Although in Narrative Discourse Gérard Genette strictly associates
focalization with a focal character and with the question "who sees?,"
most narratologists, including Genette, now believe that the original visual
connotations of focalization were too narrow and too metaphoric and that
focalization is not necessarily tied to a focal character. This basic consensus
aside, focalization theory at present is caught in a dilemma of conflicting
approaches. Genette, by his own admission, does little more than adjust,
rename, and typologize traditional insights about "point of view;" Mieke
Bal's theory of perceptible/imperceptible objects and embedded focalizations
is inordinately complicated; and Seymour Chatman's twin concepts of slant
and filter aim at supplanting focalization altogether. The current impasse
is a consequence of a number of flawed premises; a revised theory of focalization
would reinstall both visual field and Jamesian windows as core concepts.
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Jim Scannell.
"The Method is Unsound: The Aesthetic Dissonance of Colonial Justification
in Kipling, Conrad, and Greene."
Rudyard Kipling's Plain Tales From the Hills is the first in a tradition
of justifications in fiction of Britain's colonial project, a tradition
fueled by the assumption, which underlies Marlow's meditation on the map
of Africa in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, that one can discriminate
among imperialisms. Kipling's collection of short stories, Conrad's novella,
and Graham Greene?s novel, The Heart of the Matter, offer three different
justifications for empire. Kipling locates at the center of Britain's colonial
endeavor the ability, which he identifies as peculiarly British, to unite
a spiritual astuteness with a practical knowingness. Conrad finds justification
for empire in the regularizing influence of those material interests which
sought the rich natural resources of the African continent. Finally, Greene
believes that the colonies provide a necessary breadth, a large playing
field, for those aspirations England itself cannot contain. Further, for
Conrad and Greene, the aesthetic shortcomings of their predecessors' texts
attest to the moral or ethical shortcomings of their predecessors' defenses
of colonialism: Kipling's inability to fully embody in fiction the trait
he believed suited the English for colonial rule points for Conrad to the
failure of a colonialism motivated by the Idea, while for Greene Conrad's
adjectival excess becomes an image of his reliance on a materialism that,
because divorced from the Idea, is merely the conjunction of a myriad of
irrational and uncontrollable forces.
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