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“The Tension Is in the Concept”: John Ashbery’s Surrealism
Susann Cokal
“Expression in a Diffuse Landscape: Contexts for
Jeanette Winterson’s Lyricism”
Mark R. McCulloh
“The Stylistics of Stasis: Paradoxical Effects in
W. G. Sebald”
John V. Knapp
“Current Conversations in the Teaching of
College-Level Literature”
Michael Sinding
“Inwit of Inwit”
Jonathan Goodwin
“Cognitive Storyworlds”
John Ashbery’s poetry has been the subject of numerous studies that established loose connections between his work and surrealism, often without resorting to close analysis of specific texts. In this essay I study Ashbery’s surrealism with special attention to his adoption of metaphysical imagery from the Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico. While I track the recurrence of this imagery throughout several of Ashbery’s books, the main aim of this essay is to provide a new perspective on a stylistic lineage that stretches back to Parmigianino and reaches Ashbery via de Chirico. Rather than a collection of purely formal features, what links these three artists is a tension that lies “in the concept / Rather than its realization”—using Ashbery’s own characterization of Parmigianino’s painting.
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Susann Cokal. “Expression in a Diffuse Landscape:
Contexts for Jeanette Winterson’s Lyricism” / 16
This essay addresses the tension between the predominantly pared-down
style of contemporary letters and the resurgence of lyricism in the work
of Jeanette Winterson, examining the relationship between content and form
and her revision of romantic tropes—to her mind, clichés—through
lyricism and metaphor. She calls attention to old notions of plot,
gender, and disease in order to demonstrate that with lyricism, it is possible
to reinvent not only a tired language but also an exhausted world.
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Mark R. McCulloh. “The Stylistics of Stasis:
Paradoxical Effects in W. G. Sebald” / 38
While Sebald uses a peregrinating narrator as the main stylistic device
for “collecting” the various narratives that constitute the greater part
of his fiction, there remains a paradoxically static quality to his prose.
The apparent aimlessness of his writing, which often gives the impression
of teetering on the edge of an enigmatic abyss, is largely responsible
for the “hypnotic” quality in Sebald as noted by numerous critics. At the
same time, Sebald hints in all of his works at a “hidden order of things”
behind the coincidences and repetitions that appear in his stories, stories
which in turn are complemented, enhanced, and sometimes called into question
by photographs—visual manifestations of stasis—throughout his work. This
article explores Sebald’s use of stasis as an overarching narrative technique,
often fraught with irony, and as a literary subject in itself. The essay
concludes with the argument that the photo and description of St. Sebold’s
sarcophagus in The Rings of Saturn represent together the quintessential
emblem of Sebaldian stasis.
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John V. Knapp. “Current Conversations
in the Teaching of College-Level Literature” / 50
In this essay, I will sketch the research in the (mostly college) teaching
of imaginative literature in two somewhat different domains: in the familiar
area of literary study but also in education research. In a mildly
tendentious survey, I cannot be exhaustive—so much is being published recently,
both repetitious and innovative, that keeping up has become a near-impossible
task—but I will include in the final part a few sources not always familiar
to many members of a literature department. My aim is to discuss various
larger theories of teaching imaginative literature and their strengths
and limitations rather than recipes of “how I taught Shakespeare to sophomores”
or “two ways of teaching deconstruction to undergraduates.” Moreover,
my choices have been influenced by more generalized studies of “expertise,”
and by the still-growing body of work that discusses the teaching of imaginative
literature through the lens of pedagogical expertise. I argue that
these expertise studies are both useful and philosophically compatible
with good humanistic teaching practices.
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Michael Sinding. “Inwit of Inwit” / 93
David Lodge’s latest books, Thinks . . . and Consciousness and the
Novel, form a pair: a novel and an essay collection both confronting the
budding scientific field of “consciousness studies,” exploring its challenging
implications for traditional humanistic concerns. Lodge observes that literature,
especially the novel, is often seen as providing the fullest representation
and analysis of consciousness. He examines how novelists developed techniques
for this purpose, and how their conceptions of human experience and self
have evolved. Consciousness studies parallels poststructuralism in its
frequent antagnism to traditional humanistic values, but Lodge sees
scientific and humanistic knowledge as complementary, not contradictory.
I suggest that, rather than complement, they might more fully cooperate.
I sketch some ways to develop Lodge’s ideas about literature as contributions
to the study of consciousness, using his books as examples.
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Jonathan Goodwin. “Cognitive Storyworlds”
/ 114
David Herman’s Story Logic is an encyclopedic attempt to orient current
narrative research in cognitive science. Herman argues that narrative should
be considered as an element of cognitive science and not just related analogously
to the study of other mental phenomena. Using a wide range of sources in
narrative theory and cognitive science, Story Logic seeks to provide a
systematic account of the “storyworlds,” or models of the represented worlds
created in storytelling. I review the argument of each chapter of Herman’s
work before discussing its relation to other current scholarship in literary
theory and some of the possibilities and problems suggested by his approach.
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