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Little Boxes: The Effects of the Stanza on Poetic Narrative
Christiana Gregoriou
Criminally
Minded: The Stylistics of Justification in Contemporary American Crime
Fiction
Jack Stewart
Lawrence
and the Creative Process
David Herman and Becky Childs
Narrative and Cognition in Beowulf
Matt DelConte
Why You
Can’t Speak: Second-Person Narration, Voice, and a New Model for Understanding
Narrative
John Lawler
Style Stands Still
William Baker
Concerning
Gabriel Josipovici
This article deals with the effects of stanza form on the discourse of narrative poetry. It starts by exploring the antagonistic relationship between stanzas and epic. Milton, writing in an age of rhyme, eschews stanzas in Paradise Lost. Dante invents a stanza, terza rima, that is not self-contained, but allows forward extension. Tasso remains dissatisfied with his ottava rima Gerusalemme liberata and eventually writes an unrhyming epic, Il mondo creato. The article goes on to examine the more harmonious relationship between stanzas and comic or romance narrative and also investigates how different stanzas develop different types of narrative. Ottava rima lends itself to medley poems such as Orlando furioso and Don Juan, which delight in antithesis. Both rhyme-royal and the Spenserian stanza avoid the blatant contrasts inherent in ottava rima and are hence suited to less directly ironic types of narrative voice.
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Christiana
Gregoriou, “Criminally Minded: The Stylistics of Justification in Contemporary
American Crime Fiction”
This paper is part of a study to explore the stylistics of contemporary
American crime fiction. In the paper I conduct an investigation into the
criminal mind as portrayed in contemporary works by Patricia Cornwell,
Michael Connelly and James Patterson, and I address the issue of how the
criminals’ actions are evaluated and justified. The extracts under analysis
convey the criminals’ viewpoints, and are analysed in terms of various
connected stylistic models, including that of mind style, point of view,
the type of narration employed, and the scale of interference that narration
allows. The different criminals are contrasted in an attempt to provide
answers to the question, “Are contemporary American criminals presented
as having been born evil or are their actions justified, for instance by
means of their childhood traumatic experiences?” I finally draw on the
implications that the study has as to the notion of mind style in particular.
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Jack
Stewart, “Lawrence and the Creative Process”
Heidegger argues that we must examine the creative process in order
to understand the work of art. In Apocalypse, Lawrence examines the trace
of a prophetic, pre-logical mind, as it spirals through associated images
towards epiphany. His exposition of “the way of affirmation” exemplifies
that movement in image patterns and syntactic rhythms. David Levin’s poetics
of phenomenological discourse illuminates Lawrence’s “poetic” expression
of phenomenology. A “metaphoric process” reinforces Lawrence’s ontological
vision, as illustrated from The Rainbow, “New Mexico,” and Lady Chatterley’s
Lover, while his essays on art and religion reflect directly on the creative
process that shapes his own style.
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David Herman and Becky Childs,
“Narrative and Cognition in Beowulf”
Focusing on Beowulf as its tutor-text, this essay explores ways in
which narrative functions as a “cognitive artifact,” i.e., something used
by humans for the purpose of supporting or enabling cognition. Drawing
on narrative theory, discourse analysis, cognitive science, anthropology,
and literary studies, we argue that narratives such as Beowulf provide
crucial representational tools helping humans make sense of the world.
More specifically, our essay uses Beowulf to show how stories afford resources
for thinking in five broad problem domains: “chunking” experience into
workable segments, imputing causal relations between events, managing problems
with the “typification” of phenomena, sequencing behaviors, and distributing
intelligence across groups. Beowulf reveals how narrative—from before the
start of literate culture—has served as a support for the formulation,
systematization, and transmission of communal as well as personal experiences
and values. Further, the poem itself represents and thus helps illuminate
the cognitive functions of storytelling.
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Matt
DelConte, “Why You Can’t Speak: Second-Person Narration, Voice, and
a New Model for Understanding Narrative”
In this article I argue that we need to think about narration not in
terms of the narrator alone (a limitation of many influential studies of
narrative structure) but rather in terms of the relationships among the
narrator, characters, and narratee. I begin with an analysis of second-person
narration that exposes why our current models cannot adequately account
for the diversity of narrative structure: second-person narration, which
is defined not by who is speaking but by who is listening, does not fit
into a voice-based model of narration. I then propose a new model that
examines different relationships among narrators, narratees and characters
and offers a new understanding of the rhetorical dynamics of narrative
discourse.
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John Lawler, “Style
Stands Still”
We investigate the meaning(s) of the English word style, as presented
in the OED, first by looking to its etymology (from Latin stilus, an instrument
for writing on wax tablets), tracing that image back to the origins of
cuneiform; thence by tracking the disparity between this word and stylus,
which proves to be related to a different Indo-European root. These roots,
and others with st- initials, are systematically presented, along with
their modern descendants, and we see that the entire ontology of style
recapitulates an ancient and powerful embodied image – the Standing Man
– that illustrates the sacramental nature of writing.
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William
Baker, “Concerning Gabriel Josipovici”
Gabriel Josipovici is a major contemporary writer, critic, and thinker.
Monika Fludernik’s study of his fiction and drama is the first monograph
to be published on any aspect of his work. Since its completion, Josipovici
has published several very significant literary works. Many other aspects
of his multifaceted output deserve attention as well, most notably his
literary criticism.
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