https://summit.sfu.ca/system/files/iritems1/17772/etd10458_NSzymanski.pdf

Emulous Fellowship and the Elizabethan Pastoral Eclogue

The notion of the gendered desert as an ambivalent setting, encompassing death and survival, has found manifestations in both modernist and postmodernist Anglophone literature. The wasteland topos is seen here as a paradoxical offshoot of the pastoral tradition. Whereas T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) employs it to express post-war disillusionment in abstract, psychological terms, Shelley Jackson's hypertext narrative Patchwork Girl – or A Modern Monster (1993) – turns it into a symbol of deconstructing a male-dominated literary paradigm. Desert landscapes are understood as gendered in both texts – representing the female as a jigsaw totality of womanhood. From a diachronic point of view, Eliot's text renders its female subjects as victims of failed Western civilisations. An ecofeminist reading compares the desert landscape with sterilised female sexuality and spirituality. By contrast, Jackson's hypernarrative invites a rather more optimistic, cyberfeminist reading, denoting the overcoming of gender ...

Women in wasteland - Gendered deserts in T. S. Eliot and Shelley Jackson.

The representation of interiority is often thought of as the special preserve of fiction, in fact as one of the signal characteristics that distinguish fiction both from non-fictional genres like historiography and from other media, like film.1 In fact, this turf, which fiction has indeed very successfully cultivated in the course of its history, is not immune from the encroachment of other types of writing and media, not just because techniques developed by novelists can be borrowed and imitated or because genres are unstable and evolving, but because the links between fiction and mind-reading, between mind-reading and a specific set of verbal techniques, and between interiority and its linguistic expression are arbitrary and conventional. A semiotics of interiority different from the one that arose within the history of the novel is thinkable; visual conventions for conveying interiority, not just emotions that are legible on the body but complex, invisible thought processes can be (and are being) devised for film and dance. If they are not as rapidly readable and as automatically reusable as the modes for rendering interiority in fiction, it is because they still lack the repetition and re-use that made fictional techniques so codifiable by the second half of the twentieth century. The novel, in any case, having had the advantage of operating in a medium (language) which itself was rich in expressions for interiority, has over the centuries succeeded in developing an impressive number of techniques for opening a window onto a character's mind. It has been able to lay his (or her) brain upon the board and pick the acrid colors out, to paraphrase Wallace Stevens' aspiration for the Man with the Blue Guitar. How did interiority get into the novel to begin with? What parts of what kinds of minds found their way into novels, and why? By what tricks of conveyance? Answering these questions is well beyond the scope of this essay, which seeks merely to contribute to an answer by calling attention to an innovative mid-eighteenth-century work that appears to mark an important point of entrance of psychology into the third-person novel. Oddly, the work is German. Brilliant innovations in the genre of the novel had thus far not originated in Germany; they came from England, France, Spain. But then, considering the rise of psychology in eighteenth-century Germany, perhaps it is not so odd.2 The work is Wieland's Geschichte des Agathon, first published just two years after Rousseau started writing his Confessions. I argue that Wieland combined existing narrative techniques for constructing interiority and devised new ones, thereby outdoing previous attempts at psychological portraiture in the European third-person novel. His purpose was to showcase the emotions of a young man in love. In his quest to represent his hero's changing passions in words, he experimented with style, even to the point of developing a technique of free indirect thought, to which narratology traditionally assigns a later date of origin. Wieland's pathbreaking achievement in representing human psychology and thus changing the genre of the novel was noticed and applauded by Agathon's first admirer, Christian Friedrich von Blanckenburg, in 1774, but of course that admirer did not discuss its complicated formal machinery, much less in today's terminology. That will be my undertaking here. Wieland's Geschichte des Agathon, first published in 1766-67 and subsequently revised and expanded twice, has been repeatedly singled out as a turning point in the history of the German novel. Wieland's contemporary Blanckenburg lavished praise on it in his Versuch uber den Roman of 1774, upholding it as a model that finally made the genre respectable (VII 9). Blanckenburg asserted that Agathon showed the novel-form its destiny by placing character rather than plot at the center, by revealing the inner state of people, and by demonstrating how their inner state affected their actions (337, 19, 335, 264). …

Constructing Interiority in Eighteenth‐Century Narrative Fiction: Wieland's Geschichte des Agathon

It seems that all we can do is compose introductions to the pastoral, although recently these introductions have begun to grow longer and longer and their vocabulary larger and more disparate. We now require words like power to aid our compulsive need to prove that shepherds were poets and poets were courtiers-- and, indeed, many commentators have done an exquisite job of discovering what it meant to write in the fickle courts of the English royalty. (1) But in this short reintroduction to the Renaissance pastoral and theories thereof, I will largely ignore the presence of power and the court and indulge instead the fundamental means of pastoral allegory--critique. Because the pastoral has taught us to value the very idea of critique, it is important to remember that the critiques contemporary readers place into the context of prior critical apparatuses often tell us as much about the process of critique as about the subject itself. "Any collective critical project," Louis Montrose writes, "must be mindful t hat it, too, is a social practice that participates in the very interplay of interests and perspectives that it seeks to analyze" ("New" 415). In elucidating the place of critique in this genre, (2) I will first briefly outline "some versions of pastoral," to borrow William Empson's language, and trace how Raleigh's response to Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" (3) and Sidney's Old Arcadia exemplify two rather confusing but quintessential processes of pastoralism and pastoral critique. Second, I will survey how notable contemporary theories of pastoralism often only imitate their subject. Thus, in the context of Montrose's still-vital desire to "draw attention to what seems [...] a vital though largely unremarked conjunction of form and function" ("Gentlemen" 432-33), I wish only to discuss the "function" of the pastoral "form": what it means to criticize, how pastoral writers and critics have gone about it, and how we continue to go about it today as we teach and write about the Renaissance pas toral. Writing of the "intense preoccupation and experience" (3) revolving around critical employments of the country and city, Raymond Williams suggests that the "initial problem" we face "is one of perspective" (9). A few pages later in The Country and the City, he assigns the same problem--that of perspective--to the history shrouding the pastoral. What is the pastoral, Williams asks, how should we view it, and how did pastoral poets themselves see it? Do we look to the stated subject of the pastoral fiction or to the other fictions to which it alludes and upon which it feeds? Finally, even before attempting to determine perspective, Williams wonders, how do we discern the properties and boundaries of the pastoral itself; when, for example, does a pastoral become antipastoral, and when is it "simply" nature poetry or fiction? In the same vein, in What is Pastoral?, Paul Alpers laments that "it sometimes seems as if there are as many versions of pastoral as there are critics and scholars who write about it" (8). Yet even apart from this problem of a contemporary critical perspective--one fascinatingly implicated in the politics of post-structuralism--the genre of the pastoral poses numerous problems of definition and effect, and did so even to Renaissance writers themselves. (4) One of the cruxes of these problems, both in form and perspective, lies in the idea of critique. The pastoral, antipastoral, and critical theory thereof denote a process of critical reflection and awareness that exploded in the Renaissance--the pre-modern-and has continued to develop to the present day--the post-modern. Moreover, recent critical theory of pastoral and antipastoral productively mimics the trenchant business of the antipastoral cited above. In this business of critique, the pastoral exists as the given text, the antipastoral as critique, and literary criticism as meta-critique. But this paradigm oversimplifies the relationships, for what initially sounds plain is unavoidably heterogeneous: the entire process surrounding pastoralism is critically charged. …

Michael Everton

Papers

Critical Thumbprints in Arcadia: Renaissance Pastoral and the Process of Critique