Showing papers in "Comparative Literature in 1980"

Narrative discourse : an essay in method

Abstract: Foreword by Jonathan Cutler Translator's Preface PrefaceIntroduction 1. Order 2. Duration 3. Frequency 4. Mood 5. VoiceAfterword Bibliography Index

The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation

Abstract: A reader may be in" a text as a character is in a novel, but also as one is in a train of thought--both possessing and being possessed by it. This paradox suggests the ambiguities inherent in the concept of audience. In these original essays, a group of international scholars raises fundamental questions about the status--be it rhetorical, semiotic and structuralist, phenomenological, subjective and psychoanalytic, sociological and historical, or hermeneutic--of the audience in relation to a literary or artistic text.Originally published in 1980.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The Originality of Texts in a Manuscript Culture

Abstract: T HIS PAPER will perhaps make more or better sense if I say beforehand that it is controlled by a distinction between two kinds of text: the closed text of a print culture and the open text of a manuscript culture. I use the word "kinds," but really my subject has to do with the ways in which textuality is imagined, and with the ways in which this imagining bears upon or, indeed, shapes the act of writing. This is, of course, an impossibly large subject, against which I can only claim for my neat distinction an abstract and chiefly heuristic value: like most distinctions, this one serves mainly to regulate an inquiry, and (as in the best of times) to show what sorts of conclusions one may desire. By a closed text I mean simply the results of an act of writing that has reached a final form. What form this finality will take is variable in nearly every respect that one can imagine, but there is this interesting feature: a text is generally said to be finished when it succeeds into print (whereupon it is called a "work"). Print closes off the act of writing and authorizes its results. The text, once enclosed in print, cannot be altered-except at considerable cost and under circumstances carefully watched over by virtually everyone: readers, critics, the book industry, the legal profession, posterities of every stripe, and so on. There are numerous (numberless) complicated forces of closure in a print culture, although one hardly notices them because they are so rarely challenged. One has to imagine odd cases, such as that of the serial novelist who is compelled to produce a heterogeneous text because he cannot, once an episode has been published, revise it on behalf of continuity. Publication closes him off from his work and poses in turn a dramatic obstacle to invention. What is printed cannot be altered-except, of course, to produce a revised version or edition, which is the result of a reopening that introduces into the text new or different matter, or removes from it mat-

The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature

Abstract: Preface Prefatory note to the Second Impression Acknowledgements PART ONE: PROBLEMS AND EXECUTIONS 1. What is Literature 2. George Orwell's 'A Hanging', and 'Michael Lake Describes' 3. Oscar Wilde: 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol' 4. What is Realism? 5. Arnold Bennett: The Old Wives' Tale 6. William Burroughs: The Naked Lunch 7. The Realistic Tradition 8. Two Kinds of Modern Fiction 9. Crticism and Realism 10. The Novel and the Nouvelle Crtique 11. Conclusion to Part One PART TWO: Metaphor and Metonymy 1. Jackobson's Theory 2. Two Types of Aphasia 3. The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles 4. Drama and Film 5. Poetry, Prose and the Poetic 6. Types of Description 7. The Executions Revisited 8. The Metonymic Text as Metaphor 9. Metaphor and Context PART THREE: MODERNISTS, ANTIMODERNISTS AND POSTMODERNIST 1. James Joyce 2. Gertrude Stein 3. Ernest Hemingway 4. D.H. Lawrence 5. Virginia Woolf 6. In the Thirties 7. Philip Larkin 8. Postmodernist Fiction Appendix A: 'A Hanging' by George Orwell Appendix B: 'Michael Lake Describes What the Executioner Actually Faces' Appendix C: Extract from The Naked Lunch by William Burroughs Notes and References Index

The Medieval Oedipus

Abstract: N OT SO LONG AGO it was readily accepted that the eccentric taste of the Middle Ages simply rejected or misunderstood writings which both the ancient and modern worlds universally appreciated. Medieval thinkers either neglected these celebrities (Horace and Lucretius), transformed them (Virgil the Necromancer, Ovid the Moralist), or lacked the knowledge to read them (the Greek authors). More recently, close study has revealed that while medieval writers may not have shared the outlook of the ancient world or the Renaissance, their distinctive taste did include a complex and imaginative savoring of classical stories. An outstanding example of the medieval understanding of ancient matter is the "Lament of Oedipus."' The "Lament" was apparently written in the twelfth century, and along with other similar poems it seems to mark a new departure in Latin poetry.2 These laments (planctus) take the form of intimately personal, emotionally charged dramatic monologues. The best known and most influential recreated the words of Christ on the Cross or of the

Levana: Levitation in Jean Paul and Thomas de Quincey

Abstract: JN DE CIVITATE DEI (IV.11), Saint Augustine ridicules the degeneration of the classical gods into a numerous tribe, each deity presiding over some particular domestic function. One of the many pagan tutelary deities whom Augustine mentions is the goddess Levana, whose function was to lift the newborn infant from the ground ("Ipse leuet [eos] de terra et uocetur dea Leuana").J This seemingly insignificant goddess-a relic in a dying pagan tradition who only merits Augustine's briefest disdain-was invested with a new value in the early nineteenth century, as indicated by her importance to the German novelist, Jean Paul Richter, and his English admirer, Thomas De Quincey; their revival of Levana offers a key to certain features of the literature of education (Bildungsliteratur) during the Romantic period. For both authors, this otherwise unremarkable Roman deity was a dim, mythical prototype of the recurrent literary motif of the beautiful, enlightened woman who performs some kind of educational or consolatory service for a deluded or despairing spirit.2 For both of them, moreover, Levana

Midday in Italian literature : variations on an archetypal theme

Abstract: Although midday is commonly associated with indolence or the languishing of both nature and humanity in stifling heat, Nicolas Perella shows that this connection--however real--is secondary to an archetypal encounter with noontide as a moment of existential crisis of spiritual as well as erotic dimensions. First tracing the literary presence of this image from classical and biblical antiquity to Nietzsche and other modern writers, he then analyzes the preoccupation with midday in the imagination of Italian authors from Dante to the present. When the sun is at its point of greatest strength, the blaze of noon is variously experienced as a wave of glory or a moment of dread, as an occasion for reaching out to the Absolute or retreating from the Abyss, as a source of fullness and energy or of emptiness and lethargy, that ultimately may either expand or annihilate being. The author contends that it is the intimation of crisis surrounding this ambiguous moment that accounts for the richly variegated psychological and aesthetic experience of its imagery in Italian literature.Originally published in 1979.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Shakespeare and Durrenmatt: From Tragedy to Tragicomedy

Abstract: T HE URGE TO REINTERPRET or embellish Shakespeare for contemporary audiences seems to be growing stronger. Of the eighty-three works discussed in her recent Modern Shakespeare Offshoots, Ruby Cohn has identified more from the last ten years than from any previous decade.1 Diirrenmatt's Kanig Johann (1968) and Titus Andronicus (1970) participated in and helped generate this surge of enthusiasm, which made Shakespeare the most performed dramatist on the German stage in the late 1960s and early 1970s.2 Like most contemporary adaptations, these reworkings reveal as much about the adapting playwright's sense of drama as they add to our knowledge of Shakespeare. For instance, since most contemporary successes have been derived from the acknowledged masterpieces, e.g., Edward Bond's Lear, Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Ionesco's Macbett, it is interesting that Diirrenmatt chose early and relatively obscure plays for his only adaptations. It is also interesting that although Diirrenmatt is not known as a major political voice in contemporary Swiss or German drama, these adaptations are politically motivated, albeit less so than others in the German language, such as Brecht's Coriolan and Hartmut Lange's own Kanig Johann.3 Finally, it is clear that despite the importance of the political motivation, many of the changes seem rooted in Diirrenmatt's fascination with the

A Socialist Faust

Abstract: N 1901 an anonymous article published in the Revue Blanche made the following striking declaration: "Gcethe, ce matin, avec une certaine solennite, m'a rv616l un grand projet congu dans ces dernieres annies : il veut &crire un troisihme Faust." With these words its author, the young critic and politician, Leon Blum)( 1872-1950), began to sketch the portrait of a socialist Faust. Although socialist critics had taken an early interest in interpreting Goethe's Faust, it was not until the twentieth century that socialist versions of the drama first began to appear.2 Five years after Blum's depiction of Faust as an "agitateur socialiste" in his "Nouvelles Conversations de Gocethe avec Eckermann," Anatolij Vasil'evi6 Luna'arskij (1875-1933) began work on his own socialist version of the Faust myth, which he completed in one month in 1908. After some revision, it was finally published in 1918 as Faust and the City: A Drama for Reading (Faust i gorod: Drama dlja c'tenija). In comparing these two works with Goethe's Faust, I do not mean to suggest that they are of equivalent artistic value. My purpose here is rather to compare ideas: to examine the ways in which two twentiethcentury socialist writers have adapted Goethe's work to their own political and artistic purposes, and to determine to what extent the resulting creations are basically unrelated to Goethe's story. Despite differences in conception, both Blum's and Luna'arskij's versions of the Faust myth raise similar issues: what happens when a cosmic drama is translated into the terms of political struggle? when a Faust more or less closely allied with Evil is replaced by a hero unambiguously perfect and worthy of emulation? when an unpredictable future which demands perpetual individual striving is transformed into a future which is predetermined and which therefore requires no further struggle ? Although most interpretations of Goethe's Faust have stressed the

Fairy Tales and After: From Snow White to E. B. White

Abstract: Roger Sale invites us to discover anew some of the great works of children's literature, works that have been read and loved but seldom given the benefit of serious literary assessment. It takes a critic of special gifts receptiveness, discrimination, clarity of perception, independence of judgment to discuss these books as illuminatingly as Sale does.This is not a survey but a very personal book: Sale writes about stories and books with which he feels an imaginative sympathy. As it happens, they include a great many of the classic children's texts, works as disparate as Beauty and the Beast and \"Alice,\" \"The Wind in the Willows\" and \"Babar,\" The Snow Queen and \"Peter Rabbit,\" the \"Jungle Book\" and the Oz books. He conveys a fresh sense of what is special and memorable about each of them.While avoiding conventional literary history, he sketches the circumstances of the author's life when they provide insight into the works. Unlike Bettelheim and others, Sale is not concerned with the uses of children's literature. He writes for adults, with the conviction that adults can find delight in these books. Many already do, and perhaps with his stimulus, many more will.\