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“No ideas but in things”: Fiction, Criticism, and the New Darwinism
Reuven Tsur
Issues in Literary Synaesthesia
Michael D. Hurley
The Pragmatics of Prosody
Patrick Dunn
“What If I Sang”: The Intonation of Allen Ginsberg’s Performances
In recent literary criticism, one of the more controversial ideologies to emerge in the wake of postmodernism has been a new Darwinism that pledges allegiance to findings in cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, and evolutionary social science. In its radical form developing as a new fundamentalism, the new Darwinism is marked by intolerance of nonscientific modes of knowledge, by stories of conversion in which critics discover truth and salvation in evolutionary science, and by a disregard for the cognitive gap dividing science’s materialism from forms of idealism exhibited in literature. Regarding issues it raises, Ian McEwan’s novel Enduring Love has become something of a lightning rod. While McEwan explicitly attaches himself to Darwinist ideology, the novel itself shows how problematic for art and criticism is any attempt simply to toss out knowledge from fields other than science. Based on a concept of erotomania (de Clérambault’s syndrome) that developed from studies in psychiatry and psychoanalysis, Enduring Love illustrates how persistently—and perhaps irreducibly—divergent are sciences’s materialism and fiction’s philosophic realism.
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Reuven Tsur. “Issues in Literary Synaesthesia”
/ 26
This paper distinguishes between synaesthesia as a neuropsychological
and a literary phenomenon. In the former the sensations themselves are
derived from two sensory domains, in the latter the terms that refer to
them. While in the former sense associations are involuntary and rigidly
predictable, the latter leaves room for great flexibility and creativity.
It insists that when explaining a synaesthetic image, one must be aware
of what it is that one has explained, for example, its genesis, its emergent
meaning, or aesthetic effect. From the stylistic point of view, synaesthetic
images are “double-edged”: they may generate witty or strongly emotional
effects. Coleridge defined imagination as the balance or reconciliation
of opposite or discordant qualities. If the opposition or discordance are
emphasized in the text, the effect is witty; if the reconciliation, it
is emotional. It explores two devices in the service of these opposing
strategies. First, upward transfer typically generates emotional effects,
downward transfer—witty effects. Second, stable characteristic visual shapes
tend to resist fusion and increase the incongruence of the terms derived
from the different sensory domains; thing-free and gestalt-free qualities
tend to facilitate fusion. Chaotic overdifferentiation may override the
witty effect of downward transfer. Finally, the paper considers two French
Symbolist sonnets notorious for their synaesthetic imagery, Baudelaire’s
“Correspondances” and Rimbaud’s “Voyelles.”
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Michael D. Hurley. “The Pragmatics of Prosody.”
/ 46
By redefining and reclaiming the role of authorial intention in literary
interpretation, this paper seeks to recommend the relevance of poetry’s
prosodic features as pragmatically expressive. Far from being merely artisan
or ornamental or algebraic, the sound patterning of poetry is an inevitable
and primary source of meaning that inflects rather than reflects the semantic
“content.” This proposition is set against the jouissance of the deconstructionists,
the earnestness of the ideologues, and the scientism of the linguists,
each of which has implicitly marginalized if not explicitly stigmatized
the semiological function of verse form.
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Patrick Dunn. “What If I Sang”: The Intonation
of Allen Ginsberg’s Performances / 65
Allen Ginsberg’s readings of his own poetry display intonation patterns
that are not predicted by current models of intonation. Although
he does frequently use intonation to indicate the status of information
in his readings, he also uses it for iconic and metrical purposes.
His iconic use of intonation imitates the rising or falling of mood or
tension, while his metrical use of intonation establishes and repeats patterns
of pitch. Ginsberg also employs a dramatic change in pitch and volume when
going from prose to poetry, a change resulting in what I have called the
poetic paratone.
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