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English Department at NIU

Northern Illinois University

Todd Berliner and Philip Furia
The Sounds of Silence: Songs in Hollywood Films since the 1960s

Kerry McSweeney 
“What’s the Import?”: Indefinitiveness of Meaning in Nineteenth-Century Parabolic Poems

Jan Alber 
The “Moreness” of “Lessness” of “Natural” Narratology: Samuel Beckett’s “Lessness” Reconsidered

Andrea Gerbig and Anja Müller-Wood
Trapped in Language: Aspects of Ambiguity and Intertextuality in Selected Poetry and Prose by Sylvia Plath

Anthony Purdy 
The Bog Body as Mnemotope: Nationalist Archaeologies in Heaney and Tournier

André Furlani 
“When Novelists Become Cubists”: The Prose Ideograms of Guy Davenport

Dorit Naaman 
Minding the Gap: Visual Perception and Cinematic Gap Filling

Jennifer Hobgood 
Anti-Edibles: Capitalism and Schizophrenia in Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman

James W. Stone 
The Mirror of Hermaphroditus 

Todd Berliner and Philip Furia, “The Sounds of Silence: Songs in Hollywood Films since the 1960s”
Since the 1960s, filmmakers have responded to the demise of the classical Hollywood musical, especially to the loss of the convention that characters could spontaneously “burst into song” without realistic motivation. Nashville, All That Jazz, Yentl, and Everyone Says I Love You, as well as films we do not ordinarily think of as musicals, such as The Graduate and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, have developed new conventions for presenting song in film that build upon traditions established by studio-era musicals.
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Kerry McSweeney, “‘What’s the Import?’: Indefinitiveness of Meaning in Nineteenth-Century Parabolic Poems”
For Poe, the “intrinsic and essential character” of Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” is “a suggestive indefinitiveness of meaning” and thus a “definitiveness of [. . .] effect.” This description may also be applied to other nineteenth-century parabolic or fabular poems: Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Keats’s “La Belle Dame sans Merci” and “The Eve of St. Agnes,” Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” and Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market.” These poems encourage interpretive activity in the reader but allow for a plurality of meanings. An aesthetic approach to these poems takes issue with the reader-response premises of Jack Stillinger’s “Reading ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’: The Multiples of Complex Literary Transaction” (1999). A reading of “Childe Roland” emphasizes the poem’s dreamlike features and that several leading interpretations are all instantiations of the poem’s archetypal plot—a testing encounter with a greatly superior opponent. A consideration of “Goblin Market” subsumes both Christian and new historicist-feminist readings and illustrates the usefulness of an aesthetic approach in making qualitative discriminations and evaluative determinations.
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Jan Alber, “The ‘Moreness’ of ‘Lessness’ of ‘Natural’ Narratology: Samuel Beckett’s ‘Lessness’ Reconsidered”
In Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (1996), Monika Fludernik reconstitutes narrativity on the basis of experientiality, i.e., humanity’s embodiedness in the world, and claims that incomprehensible texts can be made more readable if one attempts to narrativize them. Since Samuel Beckett’s short prose work “Lessness” is one of the most enigmatic texts of the twentieth century, it serves as an ideal test case for this new narratological paradigm. “Lessness” does indeed lose its initial strangeness if one reads this piece as narrative. Moreover, although a “natural” narratological analysis paves the way for a new interpretation of “Lessness,” the new paradigm provides only a partially satisfying analysis of it. To make the text fit into the new consciousness-oriented paradigm, Fludernik’s quasi-universal naturalizing mode has to ignore certain aspects such as the mechanical structure of “Lessness.” Beckett’s later prose work challenges narrativization and the “natural” narratological project. A reading of “Lessness” should be liberated from the confines of experientiality and instead concentrate on the role of chance and chaos. Beckett’s text must be located in a counterworld, a limbo between signifier and signified. One should allow this limbo world to seep into the “real world” and not attempt to explain this different counterworld by means of “real-world” knowledge.
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Andrea Gerbig and Anja Müller-Wood, “Trapped in Language: Aspects of Ambiguity and Intertextuality in Selected Poetry and Prose by Sylvia Plath”
The interplay of intertextuality and ambiguity is a major feature in the work of Sylvia Plath. Critics may avoid biographical readings of her work by combining linguistic and literary approaches. Emphasis on the linguistic and meta-linguistic aspects of selected examples of her poetry and prose illustrates that what is unsettling about Plath’s style is in fact unsettling about language in general. “Language speaks,” to adopt the by-now proverbial dictum; it speaks all the diachronic changes of which it is the repository. Historically determined and shaped, language has its own dynamics, and users of language, however contrived the transformations they impose upon it, cannot escape them. While Plath skillfully exploits this potential by creating intertextual nets derived from a variety of cultural and personal experiences, she nevertheless falls prey to the very ambiguities she thereby establishes.
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Anthony Purdy, “The Bog Body as Mnemotope: Nationalist Archaeologies in Heaney and Tournier”
The sometimes beautifully preserved Iron-Age bodies that used to turn up from time to time in the peat-bogs of northwestern Europe have moved and intrigued writers since P. V. Glob published his classic archaeological account, The Bog People, in 1965. Locating the specificity of the literary bog body in its ability to compress time and to render the past visible in the present, the figure functions as a mnemotope, defined provisionally as any chronotopic motif that manifests the presence of the past, the conscious or unconscious memory traces of a more or less distant period in the life of a culture or an individual. Texts by Seamus Heaney and Michel Tournier serve to focus a study of the play of mnemotopic values in archaeologies purporting to shed light on the workings of national and cultural memory. Analysis of these texts foregrounds the part played by bog bodies in rhetorical strategies that have proved particularly controversial.
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André Furlani, “‘When Novelists Become Cubists’: The Prose Ideograms of Guy Davenport”
Guy Davenport’s narratives are hybrids of fiction, documentary, poem, and illustration. A disciple of Ezra Pound, he adapts to the short story the ideogrammatic method of The Cantos, where a grammar of images, emblems, and symbols replaces that of logical sequence. This grammar allows for the grafting of particulars into a congeries of implied relation without subordination. In contrast to postmodernists, Davenport does not omit causal connection and linear narrative continuity for the sake of an aleatory play of signification but in order to intimate by combinational logic kinships and correspondences among eras, ideas and forces. His collages (he calls them “assemblages of fact and necessary fiction”) are arbitrary without being gratuitous, play proceeding in them under the auspices of emancipatory containment. These features of Davenport’s experimentation are revealed in three exemplary texts. Although rich meditations on squandered or misdirected cultural possibility, each is encomiastic and prospective rather than elegiac and nostalgic. Davenport summons and rechannels dormant energies released by his archival subjects—the Vorticist art of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, the discovery of the Aurignacian cave paintings at Lascaux, and the utopian project of Charles Fourier.
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Dorit Naaman, “Minding the Gap: Visual Perception and Cinematic Gap Filling”
Models of narrative in film narratology and cognitive psychology are problematic since they rely on linguistic models of computation and complex, high-order cognitive operations. But because visual perception and cognition operate differently from language perception and cognition, the existing models are unable to address the effects of visual data on film comprehension. Gap filling, in particular, requires the perceiver to draw on visual and audio memories, ones that are not necessarily computed in propositional, high-order cognitive sequences. A sample analysis of a scene from Dead Poets Society that features a dramatic gap not only exposes the problematics of existing models but also points toward new and more inclusive models of narrative comprehension. These models rely on a variety of mechanisms of memory storage and retrieval, ones that operate simultaneously and, therefore, explain the speed and efficiency of cinematic gap filling.
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Jennifer Hobgood, “Anti-Edibles: Capitalism and Schizophrenia in Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman”
Typically, critics have read Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman as either an optimistic celebration of female “liberation” or a materialist-feminist protest. But Atwood’s style—primarily her manipulation of a shifting narrative point of view and her use of an unbalanced, tripartite structure—reflects a more complex picture of capitalism and female subjectivity in the 1960s. By varying structural and narrative form within the novel and by using anorexia as a discursive technique, Atwood constructs states of paranoia, decomposition, and schizophrenia to emphasize the dynamic nature of the capitalist system—its exploitative disposition as well as its potential to release female desire from systemic constraint.
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James W. Stone, “The Mirror of Hermaphroditus”
In Francis Beaumont’s Ovidian epyllion Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, there is a linguistic, as opposed to an anatomical, formation of the hermaphrodite. In Beaumont, the crossing of images of red and white, of intertwining “Ivy” and “Iv’ry” and “one” and “none,” the crossed expectations of the female in pursuit and the male in flight, and the rhetorical reversal performed by chiasmus–all prescribe the anatomical mixing that consummates the tale. Hermaphroditic sexual union is antithetical: neither one nor none, neither male nor female, both ecstatic liquid mingling and cursed dissolution.
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