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Synecdoche, Tropic Violence, and Shakespeare’s Imitatio in Titus Adronicus
Maurice Hunt
Antimetabolic King John
Dwight Eddins
Darkness Audible: The Poem of Poetic Failure
Ann-Marie Priest
“In the Mystic Circle”: The Space of the Unspeakable
in Henry James’s
The Sacred Fount
Roland A. Champagne
An Ethical Model in a Postmodern Faust: The Daemonic
Parody of the Politics of Friendship in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus
Damon Marcel Decoste
Waugh’s War and the Loop of History: From Put
Out More Flags to Brideshead Revisited and Back Again
Martin Bidney
“Controlled Panic”: Mastering the Terrors of Dissolution
and Isolation in Elizabeth Bishop’s Epiphanies
Mark D. Hawthorne
Homoerotic Bonding as Escape from Heterosexual
Responsibility in Pynchon’s
Slow Learner
Exemplifying a rhetorical theory explicated in a relatively unknown Renaissance text by Samuel Shaw called Words Made Visible: Rhetoric Accommodated to the Lives and Manners of Men, Shakespeare makes synecdoche a central motif in Titus Andronicus, revealing the figure of speech as a figure of thought and of action, pointing ultimately to character. Shakespeare shows the misuse of this figure to be the violent thought pattern motivating and reflecting the thirst for vengeance. In creating character through an imitation of universal language patterns and in drawing attention to the connection between the predominant thought patterns of characters and the resulting behaviors, Shakespeare provides a psychological analysis of violence, overgoing Titus's, Aaron's, and Ovid's acts of imitation. This stylistic self-consciousness suggests an artistry in a play frequently criticized for lack of artistry and, significantly, reveals stylistic awarenesses in the Renaissance much more sophisticated than modern literary or rhetorical critics of the period have supposed.
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Maurice Hunt, “Antimetabolic King John”
A chiastic trope, antimetabole, represents a microcosm of the experience
of watching and interpreting Shakespeare’s King John. More specifically,
the many antimetabolic tropes of King John condense and translate for auditors
and readers the various mirrorings and impasses of this chronicle history
play that help create its characteristic indeterminate meaning. In this
respect, antimetabole can be added to the list of classic rhetorical tropes,
such as metonymy and synecdoche, that Lawrence Danson and others have shown
typify Shakespeare plays such as Coriolanus and Cymbeline. Chiasmus has
been applied to King John, notably by Adrien Bonjour and A. R. Braunmuller,
but for these critics it exclusively describes an X-shaped pattern of intersecting
rising and falling dramatic actions. In King John, however, schematic chiasmus
is less than figurative; it is illusory. This fact suggests that any analysis
of chiasmus in King John ought to focus on the play’s style. Twenty-two
appearances of the chiastic trope antimetabole in this play’s language
condition how we think about Shakespeare’s portrayal of early English history.
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Dwight Eddins, “Darkness Audible: The Poem of
Poetic Failure”
Poems about the inability to write poetry present a paradox by their
very existence and sometimes by their evident poetic power. Examples by
Coleridge and Yeats demonstrate that these metapoetic laments are special
cases of the Romantic lyric’s intricate, reflexive dialectic between poetic
vision and selfconscious perspective on that vision. The differentiating
factor is the replacement of the vision by an empty vision-space that exerts
a constant force of imaginative dispersal, as opposed to synthesis. This
space inexorably tinctures the metapoetic discourse centered upon it with
negativity and despair even as it desublimates the images of visions past
put in to “fill” it. The process as a whole creates an absorbing drama
of desolation sharpened by nostalgia, while the contradictions inherent
in the process force us to rethink theories of genre formulated by Derrida
and Bakhtin.
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Ann-Marie Priest, “‘In the Mystic Circle’: The
Space of the Unspeakable in Henry James’s The Sacred Fount”
In their insistence on keeping open a space for the unspeakable, Henry
James’s later texts use rhetorical and linguistic strategies very similar
to those used in the texts of apophatic mystics. Apophasis is a form of
mystical discourse that evolved out of attempts by mystics to speak about
the ineffable. It is characterized by what Michael Sells calls “unsaying,”
a “double movement” in which every statement is contradicted or modified
(“unsaid”) by a following statement that is then unsaid in its turn. The
result is a linguistic regress that frustrates the normal workings of logic
and thought and thus creates a (hypothetical) space “beyond” language where
meaning (presence, God) resides. This double movement, characterized by
contradiction, paradox, and irony, is very much in evidence in The Sacred
Fount. The novel’s narrator continually “unsays” his own meanings and certainties,
frustrating the assignment of stable meaning and invoking in its place
some truth “beyond” language. It is this commitment to the unspeakable
that locates the novel midway between traditional apophatic mysticism and
postmodern deconstruction.
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Roland A. Champagne, “An Ethical Model in
a Postmodern Faust: The Daemonic Parody of the Politics of Friendship in
Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus”
Responding to Style’s special issue on ethical criticism in Summer
1998, this example of ethical criticism focuses on directing the ethos
of postmodernity. Dysfunctional friendship is a feature of postmodernity
that appears to be simply duplicated through the simulacrum of a copy of
a copy. By applying the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas and the politics of
Hannah Arendt to Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus (1947), “ethical criticism
exemplifies the daemonic simulacrum” by which a copy subverts its model,
both questioning the model’s validity and substituting a viable alternate
model. Mann’s use of parody not only exemplifies the postmodern daemonic
simulacrum but also provides insights into how friendship can be functional
in its ethical response to the call from the other. Through the friendships
woven into Mann’s narrative, Mann proposes a new humanism for ethical friendship
that can be a model for postmodernism. This model is based on the literal
meaning of religion found in its root word, religare, meaning to be bound
back together in a common origin. Doctor Faustus exemplifies the daemonic
simulacrum for such a liturgical model for the binding back of ethical
friendship and thus merits being read for the commentary of its form and
content on postmodernity.
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Damon Marcel Decoste, “Waugh’s War and the
Loop of History: From Put Out More Flags to Brideshead Revisited and Back
Again”
World War II is central to Waugh’s two wartime novels, both to the
stylistic rift that separates them and to their common status as meditations
on the character of historical experience. In Put Out More Flags, the war
is the exemplary event through which history is disclosed as a matter of
war and its cyclical rehearsal, and thus serves to vindicate a view of
history espoused in the earlier comic novels. While such meaningless repetition
as the war figures accords with Waugh’s standard farcical mode, it sits
less well with his frustration with the absurdities of the war he experienced
first hand. In an attempt to treat a war as meaningful as he himself felt
the Second World War to be, Waugh introduces both the question of faith
and his first cast of rounded characters, transforming the status of the
war and of that history it frames. Serving, first, to instance a history
of rupture and decline rather than of repetition, Brideshead’s war then
complicates this and its own nostalgia. For ultimately Ryder’s elegiac
evocation of an apparent interbellum idyll prizes only its devotion to
the suprahistorical, to the divine, and, indeed, paints the historical
past, here, as well as war and its recurrence. Finally, however, Brideshead’s
war redeems this circular course by positing as likewise continuous a hope
of salvation understood as our redemption from a history that, in its essence
in war, itself constitutes our fallenness.
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Martin Bidney, “‘Controlled Panic’: Mastering
the Terrors of Dissolution and Isolation in Elizabeth Bishop’s Epiphanies”
In the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, there is a pattern of element, motion,
and shape in her epiphanies that embodies contrasting, interimplicated
terrors. On the one hand, sudden, violent motions (surges or plunges of
erupting volcanoes and annihilating waves, or lateral movements of armored
cars and blackout currents) convey a threat of identity-dissolution. But,
on the other, rounded objects (black drops, poison berries, helmets, rings
of wire) evoke the equal peril of deadening constriction, deprivation,
and isolation of the weakened ego. Clarifying the dilemma, preoedipal psychoanalyst
W. R. D. Fairbairn shows that fear of mutual “swallowing,” as well as ego-threatening
fear of deprivation, can afflict the child dependent on what is felt to
be an unreliable caregiver. To attain psychological mastery of epiphanic
terrors, Bishop in her verse uses three techniques: spatial distancing
or miniaturizing, conceptual framing or allegorizing, and compassionate
empathy with a fellow sufferer, a visionary love object.
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Mark D. Hawthorne, “Homoerotic Bonding as
Escape from Heterosexual Responsibility in Pynchon’s Slow Learner”
In his early collected short stories called Slow Learner, Pynchon developed
a clearly articulated pattern that illustrates and supports his introductory
contention that “boys will be boys.” This pattern is a pregenital erotic
bonding of men with men that enables them to escape societal responsibilities,
especially those responsibilities supported and maintained by women. These
stories explore psychic spaces that go beyond contemporary sexual categories
and classifications. By not distinguishing among homosexual, homosocial,
and homoerotic, Pynchon places adult male escape in the unthinkable location
where homosexuality and heterosexuality meet, merge, and cancel out each
other as meaningful categories.
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