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“The Tropical Landscapes of Proverbia: A Crossdisciplinary Travelogue.” / 1
Michael Simpson
“Coleridge’s Swinging Moods and the Revision of
‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prision’” / 20
John Knapp
“The Spirit of Classical Hymn in Shelley’s ‘Hymn to
Intellectual Beauty’” / 43
Renee Tursi
“William James’s Narrative of Habit” / 67
Eric S. Neel
“The Talking Being Listening: Gertrude Stein’s ‘Patriarchal
Poetry’ and the Sound of Reading / 88
Jo-Anne Cappeluti
“The Caliban Beneath the Skin: Abstract Drama
in Auden’s Favorite Poem” / 107
Kerry McSweeney
“Literary Allusion adn the Poetry of Seamus Heaney”
/ 130
Rita Ferrari
“‘Where the Maps Stopped’: The Aesthetics of Borders
in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine and Tracks” / 144
Proverbs are brief, memorable, and intuitively convincing formulations of socially sanctioned advice. Virtually all cultures possess a repertoire of such formulations grounded in accumulated experience. Why has the quintessentially oral genre of proverbs remained popular in literate and even postliterate societies? By bridging current gaps between literary and folklore studies and between rhetorical theory and cognitive science, we attribute the staying power of proverbs in individual minds and social circulation to such prosodic, grammatical, and semantic features of memorability as alliteration and rhyme, childlike repetitive syntax, and analogical troping across different conceptual domains. We also note that by lending communal approval to individual dispositions toward recurrent situations, proverbs help to allay any sense of guilt, shame, or regret that humans often experience as a result of their facing a bewildering plurality of behavioral options.
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Michael Simpson, “Coleridge’s Swinging Moods
and the Revision of ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prision’” / 20
Like most of Coleridge’s major poem, “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”
was constituted by a substantial number of drafts and revisions. These
revision, moreover, seem to have been motivated by multiple factors. Certain
revisions of this poem in particular are conditioned on the one hand by
Coleridge’s quarrel and reconciliation with Southey over the issue of the
pantisocratic endeavor, and, on the other, by the documented shift in his
philosophical allegiances from an affiliation with Hartley to a more Kantian
orientation. “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” seeks to vindicate the Kantian
model of an active mind by using it to explain both the rapprochement with
Southey and the resulting revisions of the poem itself. This proving the
efficacy of the Kantian mind, the poem can complete the reconciliation
with Southey by proposing that this mind has established the previously
aborted pantisocracy in a lime-tree bower. What the poem does not do, however,
is share this active mind with its audience. As long-lost friend, but more
particularly as the editor of the anthology in which the poem was first
published, Southey is permitted no reciprocity, since the poem has already
rationalized the loss and regaining of the friendship and has editorially
revised itself. Southey is thus preempted, as are those recent editorial
commentators on the text’s genesis.
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John Knapp, “The Spirit of Classical Hymn in
Shelley’s ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’” / 43
Shelley’s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” which modern critics of Shelley
regard as an ode or, at best, a “Satanic” hymn, is in dialogue with the
classical hymn and includes many features that link it to that genre. In
the manner of the Homeric Hymns and the hymns of Callimachus, Cleanthes,
and Julian, Shelley’s “Hymn” follows a tripartite sequence of exordium,
exposition, and peroration, and reckons with fundamental separateness while
aspiring to unity. The dialectic of containment and effusion that recent
Shelley critics recognize operating in language itself is taken up generically
by Shelley, vis-à-vis classical hymn, and indicates his sophisticated
understanding of the mutability, rather than the inertness, of genre. Generic,
formal, and stylistic consistencies bear on meaning in Shelley’s poetry,
as the “Hymn” illustrates, and they make invaluable contributions to Shelley
studies by increasing the coherence of works that might otherwise remain
enigmatic and indeterminate.
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Renee Tursi, “William James’s Narrative of Habit”
/ 67
In recovering from a mental and moral crisis that he described as an
“ontological wonder-sickness,” William James discovered in the ideas of
habit a language with which to express his restored creative energy. The
narrative of habit that subsequently infuses his work contributes integrally
to his thinking on the processive self and challenges assumptions about
habit’s aesthetic force. Unlike Josiah Royce, who saw our daily mental
negotiation of sense experience as the “destruction of possibility,” James
believed we have “reproductive power” stored in habit, a startling notion
when considered creatively, especially in view of Walter Pater’s 1888 credo
that we fail creatively by forming habits. Echoing the empiricists and
the pragmatic view, James’s narrative illustrates how habit banishes our
experiential uncanniness by making our thoughts feel “at home,” thereby
steeping our epistemological process indelibly in moral hues. Ultimately,
as we see in his metaphysical inquiries especially, James has created a
poetics of habit.
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Eric S. Neel, “The Talking Being Listening: Gertrude
Stein’s ‘Patriarchal Poetry’ and the Sound of Reading / 88
This article considers the sound of Gertrude Stein’s “Patriarchal Poetry”
as a complex accompaniment to its script. Paying particular attention to
the interpretive challenges and possibilities of reading aloud, the paper
engages the sound and rhythm of the long prose poem as a supplement that
simultaneously reinforces and exceeds the anti-patriarchal logic of its
argument. The paper listens to Stein’s language for the phonotext which
resonates with meaning’s excess. In addition, it argues that a reader’s
vocalization of the piece constitutes a collaborative alternative to conventional
vocabularies of interpretation and identity. Confronting the difficulty
of Stein’s dense, repetitive passages, I suggest that readers have a responsibility
to sound them out in order to generate the text’s music, and I conclude
by arguing that this music is the evidence of possibilities outside the
conventional vocabulary of inter-subjectivity.
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Jo-Anne Cappeluti, “The Caliban Beneath the
Skin: Abstract Drama in Auden’s Favorite Poem” / 107
This argument views the dog-skin’s soliloquy in W. H. Auden’s collaboration
with Christopher Isherwood: The Dog Beneath the Skin, or Where is Francis?
as a precursor of Auden’s favorite poem, “Caliban to the Audience,” the
last section of The Sea and The Mirror. Studying this connection as an
illustration of what Auden incorporates from drama into poetry reveals
the way in which Auden incorporates abstract drama (the drama of ideas)
into a prose poem. That is, from his dog-skin soliloquy, he learns how
to use the dog-skin, and subsequently Caliban, as an actor/mouthpiece for
the imagination. Both are inarticulate entities to which Auden gives speech,
dramatizing through them the off-stage process of the imagination addressing
the self by echoing the self. The argument thus delineates the aesthetic
strategy of Auden’s stylistics in dramatizing the making activity of the
imagination, of using himself as a poet to make poetry out of what he names
in his 1956 essay, “Hic et Ille,” his “ripostes to his reflection” in the
mirror. A final discussion argues the benefits of reading Caliban’s address
in light of Auden’s aesthetic strategies, over and against the benefits
of readings that attempt to use Auden’s life to explain this complicated
piece of art.
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Kerry McSweeney, “Literary Allusion adn the Poetry of Seamus Heaney”
/ 130
Recent critcal and theoretical work has brought into sharper focus
the device of literary allusion as distinguished from echo, quotation,
reinscription, and intertextuality in the involuntary sense. The poetry
of Seamus Heaney, who makes frequent use of the device, is an excellent
place to consider critical questions relating to its function in lyric
poems: the means of control of the intertextual dynamics triggered by an
allusion; the fact that an allusion necessarily intoduces a reflexive or
meta-element into a poem; the relationship between a reader’s catching
the allusion and the allusion’s effectiveness; and the critic’s responsibility
if an allusion is perceived to weaken rather than strengthen a poem. “The
Ministry of Fear,” “Holding Course,” “The Guttural Muse,” and the last
of the “Glanmore Sonnets” are discussed in detail. The last contains Heaney’s
most complexly successful literary allusion—a whole-to-whole intertextual
relationship in which both the antecedent text and the alluding text are
illuminated.
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Rita Ferrari, “‘Where the Maps Stopped’: The
Aesthetics of Borders in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine and Tracks” / 144
In her novels about Native American characters confined within and
defined by the borders of a reservation and the boundaries of ethnic definition,
Louise Erdrich uses the concept of the border as metaphor and narrative
strategy for a newly imagined negotiation of individual and cultural identity.
Writing about characters who are displaced by definition, Erdrich uses
aesthetic displacement to critique any master narrative or totalizing viewpoint.
Her negotiation of borders in her novels is a way not only of redrawing
the boundaries of cultural representation, but of making the idea and image
of the border or boundary problematic. This essay examines the problem
of representation in Love Medicine and Tracks as it is illuminated through
actual and metaphorical borders. It focuses on the various inflections
of the relation between inside and outside as these inflections reveal
the relation of self to other and of both to language.
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