Aesthetics and Interpretation
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"Ways of Personifying"
Paul Eggers
"By Whose Authority? Point of View in the First
Chapter of Harold Frederic's The Damnation of Theron Ware"
Paul Pellikka
"'Strange things I have in head, that will to hand':
Echoes of Sound and Sense in
Macbeth"
John Pier
"Roy Harris and Writing Without Speech"
Dennis Schofield
"Beyond The Brain of Katherine Mansfield: The
Radical Potentials and Recuperations of Second-Person Narrative"
Reuven Tsur
"Douglas Hodge Reading Keats's Elgin Marbles Sonnet"
Joyce Wexler
"Speaking Out: Dialogue and the Literary Unconscious"
Eric Wilson
"'Terrible Simplicity': Emerson's Metaleptic Style"
It is possible to construct a typology of personifying practices based on the way in which the trope/figure has mediated between the divine and the ordinary, the typical and the specific. Since many commentators have linked personification with the sublime, one must first address the way in which its tropic form has achieved sublimity by defying the reader's ability to visualize the image it creates. One must then set in place two additional categories: prosopopoeia effected (a) by deification and (b) by euhemerism--or, in other words, by incarnation and enlargement. The first is represented by the way in which poets such as Collins have created religious contexts for their personifications, the second by the way in which others (Gray and Keats, for example) have given ordinary figures in the landscape a representative function.
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Paul Eggers, "By Whose Authority? Point of View
in the First Chapter of Harold Frederic's The Damnation of Theron Ware"
/ 81
Recent studies of The Damnation have focused on the novel's
interrogations into the issue of authority and posited the reader's desire
for "authoritative reading" as a mirror to the novel's thematic concerns.
To date, critics have assumed that Frederic's interrogations of authority
begin at the earliest with chapter two, which establishes the novel's focus,
point of view, and several of the major characters. Drawing from the work
of Roger Fowler on point of view, one may show that, through perplexing
shifts of points of view, chapter one contributes significantly to an understanding
of the novel's concern with authority. On the one hand, the chapter contains
several easily distinguished shifts; on the other, it contains textual
ambiguities militating against an apprehension of the point of view. Through
this confluence of clarity and ambiguity, the first chapter implicates
readers in "unauthoritative" readings much earlier than critics have assumed.
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Paul Pellikka, "'Strange things I have in head,
that will to hand': Echoes of Sound and Sense in Macbeth" / 14
Shakespeare's plays were conceived not as literary texts but as dramatic
texts for the heightened spoken language of acting. But since most analyses
of Shakespeare's language take a literary approach, there is a need for
both aural analyses themselves and examples showing methods by which such
aural analyses might be made. Macbeth offers an excellent example
for analyzing aural style. An audience can hear the play as a complex network
of language effects in which the actual sounds of the words relate, echo,
and enhance the sense of the words, and which create a unique tonal fabric
for the play, serving also to underscore important structural, semantic,
thematic, and ironic relationships. In particular, the effects of alliterative
consonance and complex alliteration function as a stylistic principle throughout
the play. In addition, other less easily classifiable though clearly discernible
language effects increase the complexity and the meangfulness of this particular
style found throughout Macbeth.
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John Pier, "Roy Harris and Writing Without Speech"
/ 134
Through its account of the graphic features peculiar to the written
text that casts serious doubt on the linearity of the signifier, Roy Harris's
Signs
of Writing provides a theory of writing that radically dissociates
the written sign from the spoken sign. The integrational semiology upon
which this work is based, taking exception to the bi-planar paradigm of
Saussurean-inspired semiologies as well as to telementational theories
of communication, seeks to outline a theory of written communication, a
theory of the written sign, and a theory of writing systems that contribute
to a theory of writing within the context of various intersecting biomechanical,
macrosocial, and circumstantial factors. While writing incorporates a number
of features that have no equivalent in speech, be it in the production,
processing, interpretation, or syntagmatics of the written sign as opposed
to those of the spoken sign, Harris's innovative study nevertheless calls
for a closer consideration of reading.
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Dennis Schofield, "Beyond The Brain of Katherine
Mansfield: The Radical Potentials and Recuperations of Second-Person Narrative"
/ 96
Dominant dyadic structures of theories of point of view and narrative
person have given little space for the exploration of narrative in the
second person, but having become an issue for criticism and theory, the
second person is bringing narrative theorists to re-examine their traditional
distinctions and assumptions. Might the second person offer the next development
in the tradition of point-of-view analysis, or a critique of the very assumptions
inherent in that tradition? One fruitful approach involves seeing the metaphors
of narrative person not as providing an analytical perspective on fiction,
but as constituting part of the fiction-making process itself. More particularly,
it involves seeing them as strategies of naturalization and anthropomorphism--strategies
deeply unsettled by you-narrative's strangeness--which act to maintain
particular normative ideological and discursive structures. Seeing them
this way entails a critique of what might be called the Cartesianism that
deeply informs these metaphors and of the coherent, stable, and knowable
subject that this logic, whether explicitly or covertly, constitutes as
the prior, authorizing agent and condition of texts and reading.
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Reuven Tsur, "Douglas Hodge Reading Keats's
Elgin Marbles Sonnet" / 34
One may explore the nature of the rhythmical performance of poetry
by a close scrutiny of some crucial points in Douglas Hodge's recording
of Keats's Elgin Marbles sonnet. The manipulations of the vocal devices,
on the one hand, and the postulated mental processes, on the other, enable
the listener's cognitive system to perceive both the language and the versification
units when those conflict. This conclusion contradicts the received view
(formulated by Chatman) that when the poetic text requires conflicting
prosodic patterns, the reciter can actualize only one of them in his or
her reading.
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Joyce Wexler, "Speaking Out: Dialogue and the
Literary Unconscious" / 118
To detect the unconscious of a literary text, one must regard all its
explicit elements as manifest content and the nonexplicit links among them
as latent content. One tends to think of the more idiosyncratic language
of narration as the primary site of unconscious meanings because its distinctive
style corresponds to the analysand's individual associations, but dialogue
may be a better place to seek the unconscious of the text because it is
conventional. Dialogue is governed by social usage that provides the unconscious
with a ready-made disguise. On the one hand, Freud's dependence on conventional
symbols and Lacan's claim that the unconscious is formed by cultural codes
make speech a node of overdetermined meanings, and, on the other, linguists
account for the special capacity of dialogue to bear multiple meanings.
To illustrate how psychoanalytic theory and linguistic analyses of conversation
and dialogue can provide access to the unconscious of any narrative or
dramatic work, one may analyze two texts that express homosexual desire
in contrasting ways--latently in Henry James's story "The Beast in the
Jungle," and manifestly in Tony Kushner's play Angels in America: A Gay
Fantasia on National Themes.
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Eric Wilson, "'Terrible Simplicity': Emerson's
Metaleptic Style" / 58
Emerson's style was animated by his observations of nature, from which
he learned that matter is comprised of energy, be it organic life or electrical
force. This discovery struck him as sublime, suggesting that things are
not discrete and static, but condensations of vast systems of force. He
translated this insight into a sublime writing style, in which sentences
are dynamic patterns charged with meaning on semantic, syntactic, and auditory
levels. He constructed his essay Nature (1836) to agitate readers as nature
excited him. The master trope of Nature is metalepsis, which, as John Hollander
has shown, compresses numerous tropes, figures, and allusions into dense
linguistic sites that overwhelm readers with complexity. The trope has
a diachronic and synchronic modality. Diachronically, it alludes to while
revising earlier texts; synchronically, it condenses several tropes and
figures into the same space. Emerson employs the trope in both modalities
in Nature in an effort to write a new Bible. In the famous "transparent
eye-ball" passage, he alludes to and revises revelatory moments in Judeo-Christian
scripture in fashioning himself as a Visionary of natural revelation. He
discloses his vision in ecstatic speech that imitates nature, exuberant
with significance, stirring readers with the sublime. Thus metalepsis is
a trope apt for detailing the formal qualities of indeterminate language
and a locus where classical rhetoric and a poetics of indeterminacy enter
into dialogue.
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