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English Department at NIU

Northern Illinois University

Marcia Macaulay
When Chaos Is Come Again: Narrative and Narrative Analysis in Othello

Ira Clark
The Trappings of All’s Well That Ends Well

Maurice Hunt
Shakespeare’s ‘Still-Vexed’ Tempest

Paul J. Hecht
Spenser out of His Stanza

Jennifer McKellar
The Poetics of Interruption in Mark Twain’s Roughing It

Yinglin Ji and Dan Shen
Transitivity, Indirection, and Redemption: Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook
 

Marcia Macaulay, “When Chaos Is Come Again: Narrative and Narrative Analysis in Othello” / 259
Shakespeare’s Othello has provoked extensive interpretive response because at the heart of the play a man murders his wife in a state of jealousy largely of his own creation, abetted by a villain whose own motives have been queried.  Three different interpretive positions have been taken to explain how this murder is brought about in the play.  Some critics exonerate Othello of any blame, others see Iago as an honest realist, and a third camp sees Othello and Iago as sharing responsibility as well as aspects of personality.  This essay examines the central role of narrative as a speech act in the play.  Narrative, in fact, provides what William Labov calls the “complicating action” of the play, otherwise termed “the seduction scene.”  The characters in Othello engage in narrative construction of themselves and others throughout the play.  The play provides four principal tellings of Othello’s wooing of Desdemona, including importantly that of Desdemona herself.  These narratives come into conflict as the play unfolds, and in conflict they propel the story forward to the ultimate betrayal of Desdemona by Othello himself.
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Ira Clark, “The Trappings of All’s Well That Ends Well” / 277
All’s Well That Ends Well belongs to a period of the London stage dominated by problem plays that depend on trickery and reversals, most often sexual trickery combined with familial, economic, and sociopolitical calculation, played out for gain as contests of wit.  All’s Well’s style too focuses on witty proverbial language to sum up wisdom, stimulate thought, analyze actors and actions, embody abundant intellectual and emotional energies, and provide rhetorical display. The play’s characters predominantly and repeatedly employ such language with other stylistic techniques such as recurring image references, linguistic trappings, to challenge and counter-challenge and ultimately entrap each other.  Moreover Shakespeare replicates and varies the dominant patterns of intrigue plotting notable in problem plays by offering a series of reversals that constitute false temporary endings before presenting the extensive climactic set of surprising and revealing reversals that reaffirm his heroine’s extraordinary witty victory in the battle of the sexes and society.  This reading thus tries to illustrate the importance of analyzing style for understanding the inseparably intertwined narration and theme. 
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Maurice Hunt, “Shakespeare’s ‘Still-Vexed’ Tempest” / 299
Commentators on Shakespeare’s plays have shown how early modern rhetorical figures, as described for example by George Puttenham in The Art of English Poesie (1589), provide the paradigm for better understanding the values of Titus Andronicus and Hamlet (synecdoche), King John (antimetabole), and Coriolanus (a combination of metonymy and synecdoche).  These commentators have not shown, however, how a single phrase in a Shakespeare play encapsulates a rhetorical trope that describes a signature experience of that play.  This is what I do for The Tempest.  The phrase in question is “still-vexed,” appearing in Ariel’s utterance “where once / Thou called’st me up at midnight to fetch dew / From the still-vexed Bermudas” (1.2.229–31). This two-word phrase, once recognized as an oxymoron, represents a primary dramatic effect of The Tempest.  Analysis conducted in terms of the oxymoronic paradigm “still-vexed” describes in a new way the persistence of a dynamic in The Tempest that plays into and indirectly makes possible the drama’s emphasis upon release from bondage.
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Paul J. Hecht, “Spenser out of His Stanza” / 316
The eclogues in couplets in The Shepheardes Calendar, which are metrically “rougher” than other eclogues, display qualities crucial to the success of The Faerie Queene, qualities that are absent of deficient in the stanzaic eclogues. In the nonstanzaic poems we see irregular groups of lines and speeches that have a sense of motion that is independent of meter or line or rhyme scheme. Spenser’s poetic development from the Calendar might better be regarded as a synthesis of techniques than as a selection of one kind of poetry (in stanzas) over others.
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Jennifer McKellar, “The Poetics of Interruption in Mark Twain’s Roughing It” / 336
By adapting the techniques of digression and hesitation that he used in the lecture hall into a model for writing, Mark Twain crafts an interpolative style that is almost instantly recognizable and that functions as a efficient vehicle for both his humor and his serious commentary.  Roughing It is Twain’s most sustained effort at fashioning this distinctive style, and thus deserves more serious attention in itself rather than simply by virtue of its relevance to his other work.  While some critics have noted Twain’s handling of language as a dismissal of “conventional narrative logic,” none has proposed that Twain substitutes an alternative logic or structure.  Instead, they seem content to characterize the novel as adopting a “looser attitude” toward structure.  Examining Twain’s techniques of interruption, I propose that these techniques constitute a pervasive formal structure to which the text carefully adheres, a structure that not merely overlays a loose narrative structure but rather supplants narrative structure altogether.
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Yinglin Ji and Dan Shen, “Transitivity, Indirection, and Redemption: Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook” / 348
While stylistics in various forms has been flourishing in Britain over the past forty years or so, its development has been rather limited in America since the late 1970s. One of the major reasons underlying American scholars’ neglect of stylistics is that they tend to hold stylistic analysis to be “circular,”that is not able to offer fresh interpretations of literary texts. The present study aims at demonstrating the usefulness and even indispensability of stylistics by analyzing the hidden and neglected relation between transitivity patterning, indirect presentation, and the theme of redemption in Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook. It is revealed that, in connection with the theme of redemption, the authorial narrator purposefully presents the protagonist in a particular way through ingenious linguistic choices. The stylistic revelation may not only shed fresh light on the protagonist’s character, but also alter the understanding of plot progression, thereby helping resolve relevant critical controversy. Further, it is shown that the transitivity model greatly facilitates a systematic analysis of the writer’s indirect way of presentation, especially when such indirection constitutes a general stylistic strategy of the text.
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