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Critical Thumbprints in Arcadia: Renaissance Pastoral and the Process of Critique
Joe Bray
The Source of “Dramatized Consciousness”: Richardson,
Austen, and Stylistic Influence
Brett Zimmerman
Frantic Forensic Oratory: Poe’s “The Tell-Tale
Heart”
Scott A. Kemp
“They But Reflect the Things”: Style and
Rhetorical Purpose in Melville's “The Piazza Tale”
Philip G. Hadlock
The Light Continent: On Melancholia
and Masculinity in Maupassant’s “Lui?” and “Une famille”
Gerald Doherty
Upright Man/Fallen Woman: Indentification
and Desire in James Joyce’s “A Painful Case”
James Bloom
The Occidental Tourist: The Counter-Orientalist
Gaze in Fitzgerald’s Last Novels
James J. Paxson
Revisiting the Deconstruction of Narratology:
Master Tropes of Narrative Embedding and Symmetry
Bruno Zerweck
Historicizing Unreliable Narration: Unreliability
and Cultural Discourse in Narrative Fiction
Arguing that the pastoral is best understood via its critical and revisionary nature, “Critical Thumbprints in Arcadia: Renaissance Pastoral and the Process of Critique” builds on the work of Harry Berger, Louis Montrose, and Raymond Williams to shed new light on the shared mechanics of pastoralism and its literary criticism and theory. The essay dissects the appropriation of antipastoral discourse by revisionary pastorals and then indicates the ways in which this appropriation is further complicated by contemporary theories of pastoralism. In other words, the argument explores how contemporary critics of pastoralism participate in a “culture” of critique by productively mimicking the critical methodologies of Renaissance pastoralists and antipastoralists like Christopher Marlowe, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Sir Philip Sidney, and thus provides a fundamental illustration of the familiar post-structuralist mantra that the critic is almost incomprehensibly implicated in that which he/she critiques.
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Joe Bray, “The Source of ‘Dramatized Consciousness’:
Richardson, Austen, and Stylistic Influence”
This essay searches for the roots of a stylistic technique that is
of great importance in the history of the novel. Though “dramatized consciousness”
(to use F. R. Leavis’s term) has often been regarded in English literary
history as the creation of Jane Austen, it is possible to trace the style
at least back into the eighteenth century. The source under investigation
here is the epistolary novel, a genre rarely examined for this technique,
perhaps because of its first-person form. Yet the way that first-person
narrators dramatize their own past consciousness bears comparison with
the way that third-person narrators represent the thoughts of characters.
This essay focuses particularly on The History of Sir Charles Grandison
(1753-54), Samuel Richardson’s third epistolary novel, and the way the
past thought-processes of its heroine, Harriet Byron, are re-enacted in
her present writing. Similarities with the representation of Elizabeth
Bennet’s and Emma Woodhouse’s consciousness establish the stylistic influence
of Grandison on Austen.
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Brett Zimmerman, “Frantic Forensic
Oratory: Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’”
“The Tell-Tale Heart,” while usually read as a confession, can be seen
more accurately as a defense—a specimen of forensic oratory. The narrator
employs four of the six parts of a classical speech. His exordium (introduction)
attempts to condition the audience through praeparatio and a friendly concession
(paromologia) as part of his ethical appeal (eunoia). The second part,
the narratio (statement of the case), features the defendant’s explanation
of the events and their causes through expeditio, aetiologia, and necessum.
He skips the third part of the classical speech (divisio) but combines
the traditional fourth and fifth parts (confirmatio, refutatio), and a
central device of this section is paradiastole, the narrator’s revaluation
of values—a sure sign of his schizophrenic split between thought and feeling.
Poe presents a fascinating but pathetic spectacle, a “jarring collocation”:
insanity employing principally the Aristotelian rhetorical appeal to logos
(reason) within a classical framework.
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Scott A. Kemp, “‘They But Reflect the
Things’: Style and Rhetorical Purpose in Melville’s ‘The Piazza Tale’”
Absent among the major studies of Melville’s short fiction is discussion
of his style at it relates to his larger rhetorical choices during the
writing of his serialized fiction, 1853-56. If style as a rhetorical choice
is central to Mardi, Moby-Dick, and Pierre, then it is worth examining
during Melville’s tenure as a serial writer between 1853 and 1856. As arguably
the most stylistically embellished tale in the Melville ouevre, “The
Piazza Tale” is exemplary for analysis. By analyzing the stylistic techniques
in this tale, we may better appreciate how the syntactical components in
Melville’s sentences reinforce how he establishes character tension and
subverts the narrative voice. Ultimately, the story illustrates the breakdown
of community as the sailor-narrator chooses to maintain a literal and psychological
perspective that does not fully account for the reality around him, including
Marianna, the “damsel whom he visits in the tale.
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Philip G. Hadlock, “The Light Continent:
On Melancholia and Masculinity in Maupassant’s ‘Lui?’ and ‘Une famille’”
At least since the time of Freud, critical and literary theorists have
reflected on the question of the “riddle” of femininity. One of the primary
consequences of these reflections has consisted in positing the feminine
as a fundamental expression of alterity. In a reading of two tales by Guy
de Maupassant, this essay considers the connotations of this scenario for
the masculine. The masculine, which has frequently served as a clear and
constant foil to the feminine’s otherness, emerges in Maupassant’s typology
as an expression of an aporia central to “phallocentric” culture: the semiotic
primacy of the masculine transcends the primal moment in which the patriarchal
phallus becomes central to signification through its very obscurity. This
moment, most cogently articulated in the myth of the drunken, naked Noah
covered by his sons, predicates the meaning of the masculine upon an undisclosable
melancholia.
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Gerald Doherty, “Upright Man/Fallen
Woman: Identification and Desire in James Joyce’s ‘A Painful Case’”
This interpretation of James Joyce’s “A Painful Case” weaves together
three disparate strands to demonstrate how intimately they mesh with each
other: a tropological strand, which structures the plot around three major
metaphorical matrices (ascent/descent/alimentation): a psychoanalytical
one, which uncovers the maimed psychical dispositions that underwrite each
of these matrices: and a colonial one, which reveals the larger socio-political
forces that generate these maiming-effects.
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James Bloom, “The Occidental Tourist: The
Counter-Orientalist Gaze in Fitzgerald’s Last Novels”
A memorable set-piece in Tender is the Night stages a face-off between
the Occident and what used to be called the Orient, between “princely households,
one of the East and one of the West,” on a provincial French “station platform.”
This passage constitutes a climactic moment in Fitzgerald’s career-long
effort to identify and anatomize his own “home” civilization. Remapping
as a reflection of Fitzgerald’s career-long preoccupation with the constitution
of civilizations became at once more far-reaching and more oblique in Fitzgerald’s
later work. As a complement to well-established scholarly attention to
Fitzgerald’s interest in Spengler and the implications of his work, my
paper relies on two more recent and related heuristics: the counter Orientalist
critique that Edward Said introduced to literary studies a generation ago
and the concern with gaze that feminist critics have made a critical commonplace.
With these twinned heuristics as my points of departure, this essay argues
that in his two last sustained narratives, Tender and (with less emphasis)
The Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald pushes his narrators and readers beyond a mutually
and durably fantasized identity as “Westerners” in pursuit of a critically
cosmopolitan, anti-ethnocentric perspective and thus against what we often
continue to regard as the primacy and normative inevitability of “the West.”
In articulating this critical cosmopolitanism, both novels in their entirety
probe prevailing but limited and noxious understandings not only of what
it means to “be civilized” but of what our constructions and demarcations
of so-called “civilizations,” as Western or otherwise, entail. This essay
examines how Fitzgerald conducts these explorations.
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James J. Paxson, “Revisiting the Deconstruction
of Narratology: Master Tropes of Narrative Embedding and Symmetry”
Although significant studies on narrative embedding or framing (Jeffrey
Williams’s Theory and the Novel; William Nelles’s Frameworks) have come
to light in recent years, narratology can continue to benefit from a fuller
analysis that exploits the rhetorical theory of deconstruction and of the
classical history of rhetoric. I show how narrative embedding, that I christen
in this study “para-antimetabole,” can be understood as a subset of the
rhetorical tropes antimetabole and chiasmus—both of which involve syntactical
structures that get reversed at a linear or syntagmatic midpoint. Using
Johannes Kepler’s posthumously published allegory Somnium (1634)—a text
about life on the moon—I then demonstrate how a frustrated desire for symmetry
characterizes these mutually related devices, the poetic deployment of
which can undo the formalist and structuralist impulses in conventional
narratology.
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Bruno Zerweck, “Historicizing Unreliable
Narration: Unreliability and Cultural Discourse in Narrative Fiction”
The concept of “unreliable narration” cannot be adequately explained
in terms of text-centered and synchronic models or with recourse to the
concept of the implied author. Thus, the recently developed cognitive narratological
approach to the phenomenon of unreliability (which represents a first
paradigm shift) has to be extended towards a historical “cultural narratology.”
Such a second paradigm shift—a historical and cultural turn—goes beyond
a synchronic and constructivist cognitive approach in the direction of
a diachronic cultural-narratological theory of unreliable narration. The
central thesis here rests upon the realization that, because unreliability
is the effect of interpretive strategies, it is culturally and historically
variable. It therefore reflects a number of prominent synchronic and diachronic
developments within different cultural discourses. These discourses have
at the same time “produced” and been influenced by the notion and the use
of unreliable narration in narrative literature over the last two centuries.
After a brief sketch of the cognitive turn and its implications for our
understanding of what exactly constitutes unreliable narration, four theses
highlight the central features and the minimal conditions of unreliable
narration and point out the necessity of a historical and cultural turn
in the study of narrative unreliability. They are followed by four diachronic
theses that illustrate how a history of unreliable narration would look.
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