Showing papers in "Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate in 2013"

Studying Writing in Second Person: A Response to Joshua Parker

Abstract: In his article "In Their Own Words: On Writing in Second Person," Joshua Parker reflects on second-person narration and looks at the issue from the perspective of authors who use such narration in their works. In Parker's view, authors' self-commentaries may help us understand better the possible functions of second-person narration in fictional texts. Parker's main claim is that these authors are men and women "with professional experience as writers, who are capable of speaking quite eloquently on their own reasons for writing in second person" (167). One argument that seems to follow from this, although it is not expressly mentioned in the text, is that authors' viewpoints ought to be favored over narratological or other literary-theoretical approaches or ought at least to be taken more seriously than has hitherto been the case. As Parker puts it, there is "a surprising dissonance between what theorists often tend to assume about the form and what authors themselves experience in creating it" (167). He even proposes, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, a "writer response theory" in analogy to reader response theories (167). Parker presents authors' self-reflexive comments, quoting writers such as, among others, Chuck Palahniuk, Denis Johnson, David Foster Wallace, Pam Houston, Lolo Houbein, Peter Bibby, and John Encarnacao, who talked in interviews or wrote in non-fictional writing about their use of secondperson narration. The main result of Parker's survey of these com*Reference: merits and of a number of texts written in second person is the following: "Seeing the self as 'other' often only takes place during descriptions of certain events or over periods of text. This self, like its experiences, is unstable. What is inscribed in second person, then, is the author's relationship to this self, a relationship often in flux" (171). Before I address Parker's main claims in more detail, I will outline four aspects that, to my mind, need to inform any research on writing in second person not only because they already appear individually or in combination in most scholarly work addressing this type of narration (e.g., Fludernik, "The Category of 'Person'"; Kacandes; Richardson) but also because they allow for interdisciplinary approaches to the topic (see Mildorf): 1. the anthropological dimension; 2. generic distinctions; 3. structural typologies; 4. functions and effects. Parker mixes up these aspects or does not follow them up assiduously enough, which explains why some of his claims are essentially flawed.1. The Anthropological DimensionParker begins his article with the example of the cave paintings at Lascaux, arguing that "their author conceived of an experiencing point of view other than his own" and that he created these paintings "with the consciousness of designing images [...] for an Other" (165). This is then linked by Parker to "what any writer working today might likewise pursue" (165). One can object to this associative connection by quoting Denis Dutton, who said that "[t]he state of the arts today can no more be inferred from looking inside prehistoric caves than today's weather can be predicted from the last Ice Age" (Dutton 3). It is also not unproblematic to link painting and writing without paying due attention to their respective medial expressivity. And one may question the underlying presupposition that art is always created for an "other." Could I not simply paint or write for my own pleasure, without having any specific audience other than myself in mind?Leaving these points of criticism aside, however, one can see in Parker's argument an attempt to bring into sharper relief something more fundamental concerning the relationship of human beings to fellow human beings, which is also expressed in the very use of the personal pronouns "I" and "you": namely, that we are ultimately "relational beings," as psychologist Kenneth J. Gergen has it. Gergen argues that "there is no isolated self or fully private experience" and that instead "we exist in a world of co-constitution" (xv). …

Keeping You Unnatural: Against the Homogenization of Second Person Writing. A Response to Joshua Parker*

Abstract: I read Joshua Parker's "In Their Own Words: On Writing in Second Person" with great interest and enjoyment. Parker deftly covers a vast swath of second person narratives as well as corresponding narrative criticism and theory in this impressive article, bringing in new material and casting fresh light on older pieces. Especially fascinating are the many accounts he has assembled by authors explaining their decision to employ the second-person form. He also packages the various scattered uses of this technique into a single, plausible, unified position. Unfortunately, the very virtues of Parker's approach also lead to what I see as its limitations. The homogenization of these disparate texts can be questioned on three counts, concerning their reception, production, and theoretical conceptualization.ReceptionDrawing on Helmut Bonheim's "open definition" (or, rather, loose account) of the subject, Parker presents second-person narration as part of a continuous spectrum of other uses of the second person, such as the apostrophe or direct address to readers or narratees. This allows him to compile and juxtapose a wide range of material with a considerable historical reach. My own sense, however, is that there is a tremendous difference between established, conventional uses of the second person and what I have called "unnatural" uses that do not occur in ordinary discourse and are only found in innovative fiction (Unnatural 18-19; 134-40).1 Consider the difference between the following passages; first, the beginning lines of Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men: "You follow Highway 58, going north-east out of the city, and it is a good highway, and new. Or was new, that day we went up it. You look up the highway and it is straight for miles" (3). This is a conventional deployment of "you" to mean "one."Now compare your experience reading those lines with the following: "You are the second person. You look around for someone else to be the second person. But there is no one else. Even if there were someone else there they could not be you ... You make a pathetic effort to disguise yourself in all the affectations of the third person, but you know it is no use. The third person is no one. A convention" (116). The second passage, by W. S. Merwin, is unconventional and much more jarring. It is disorienting, seeming to address the reader and then (perhaps) using this form of address to depict a character's thoughts, producing what David Herman has called "double deixis," something that does not occur in natural discourse and therefore is perceived either as mistaken, unnerving, or ludic. In fact, I would argue that this destabilization of the standard communicative frame is one of the most powerful effects of second-person narration and the reason why many innovative authors choose to use it. I strongly believe that the uniqueness of this effect should be foregrounded and appreciated. The distinction between conventional and nonconventional secondperson forms also extends to digital fiction, as Alice Bell and Astrid Ensslin have convincingly shown: second-person narration in some hypertext fictions "ask for reader input, but they also limit the involvement of the reader by preventing her from identifying with 'you' completely" (313). This distinction is in fact also central in Joyce Carol Oates's story, "You," which at first seems to be an unnatural second-person narration but then is revealed to be simply the apostrophe of a disappointed daughter addressing her absent mother.ProductionParker does an excellent job uncovering authors' statements concerning their decision to use the second person and seems to suggest that the second-person form is typically or especially used to disguise or distance what is essentially a first-person discourse. This is no doubt often the case, and Parker deserves credit for establishing this connection. But often it is not the case, and the authorial "I" is resting far away from the textual "you. …

"Undressed- / Today's Role Dangles / from a Metal Hanger": Figurativity and the Economy of Means in Contemporary English Haiku

Abstract: Critics routinely assert that the genre of haiku is characterised by an utmost "economy of means" (e.g. Harris 280; Hokenson 694; Takeuchi 7; Norton 81). Just as routinely, they fail to offer a precise definition of this term. Does economy of means signify that a haiku comprises a limited number of syllables (quantitative definition)? Does it mean that a haiku employs relatively simple language (qualitative definition)? Does it mean that the genre achieves much with little (relational definition)? If so, how are the terms much and little to be understood? In this paper, which considers the connection between figurativity and the economy of means in English-language haiku, I will adopt the third, relational definition. A version of this definition is provided by Peter Sprengel in his book Literatur im Kaiserreich. Commenting upon a work by the German (non-haiku) poet Otto Nebel, Sprengel notes: "[H]ier herrscht Okonomie der Mittel, [...] hier gilt jenes 'Prinzip von dem Minimum der anzuwendenden Kraft und dem Maximum des Leistungseffekts'" (195).1 Sprengel thus defines economy of means in poetry as the principle of using minimal means to achieve a maximum effect.If one applies this definition to the English haiku,2 one can say that the genre strives for an utmost economy of means in that it employs minimal means with a view to producing a maximum of effect. Minimal means, in this context, is to be understood quantitatively: English haiku comprise no more than 17 syllables, typically fewer.3 The question of how these syllables can be made to yield the maxi- mum effect lies at the heart of much Anglo-American theorising about haiku (a substantial portion of which takes place in the virtual space of the internet-on haiku-related websites, open-access journals, blogs, etc.). If one distils the work of the most prominent theorists,4 who are generally not averse to couching their poetics in normative terms, one arrives at something resembling a consensus, according to which a haiku achieves the maximal desired effect if it displays the following characteristics as fully as possible: concreteness, immediacy, affective appeal, affective polyvalence, semantic underdetermination, and (with some restrictions) intellectual appeal.In the context of English haiku studies, these characteristics may be defined as follows. Concreteness: instead of offering abstract thoughts or epigrammatic reflections, the haiku presents concrete "images" -a term that, in haiku theory, denotes not only visual images but all sensory impressions of an object, event or action (see Higginson 115). Most theorists voice a preference for a combination of two images, one of which may be more sharply focused than the other (Higginson 11619). Immediacy: the haiku is constructed in such a way that the images are quickly conjured up in the reader's mind, requiring no lengthy process of interpretation (Willmot 211). Affective appeal: the conjured images do not leave the reader untouched but produce an emotional response in her (Harter 174).5 Affective polyvalence: while creating an emotion in the reader, the haiku does not "tell [...] the reader what emotion to feel"; instead, it allows for a wide range of emotional responses (Harter 174, my italics; cf. Higginson 22). Semantic underdetermination: the haiku provides "only the bare essentials" of an image, thus allowing and demanding a maximum of readerly participation in the construction of the image (Heuvel x; cf. xv-xvi and British Haiku Society, sect. c). This aspect is neatly encapsulated in the notion of "the half-said thing"-a term that was introduced into the theoretical discourse on haiku by F. S. Flint in 1908 and has been common currency ever since (Pondrom 50). Intellectual appeal: when haiku critics speak in general terms, they tend to assert that "the appreciation of haiku should not be demanding intellectually" (British Haiku Society, sect, e);6 when they discuss individual haiku, however, they frequently laud them for a feature that, for lack of a better term, I call intellectual appeal through delayed reflection. …

Echoic Effects in Poe's Poetic Double Economy-Of Memory: A Response to Hannes Bergthaller and Dennis Pahl

Abstract: The words of one of these rhapsodies I have easily borne away in memory. I was, perhaps, the more forcibly impressed with it, as he gave it, because, in the under or mystic current of its meaning, I fancied that I perceived, and for the first time, a full consciousness on the part of Usher, of the tottering of his lofty reason upon her throne. The verses, which were entitled "The Haunted Palace," ran very nearly, if not accurately, thus [...]. E. A. Poe, "The Fall of the House of Usher" (148)1This epigraph contains a subtle echo of a theme at the heart of Poe's aesthetic practice, mentioned among other places in "The Philosophy of Composition," regarding how melodic verse can elevate the soul through "the under or mystic current of its meaning." We do well to recall that Poe defines "the Poetry of words as The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty" ("The Poetic Principle" 185; Poe's original emphasis). Alert to the importance of this theme, Dennis Pahl refers to it in the first note of his response to Hannes Bergthaller's essay on the putative tension between Poe's "two distinct inflections of the notion of poetic economy" (Bergthaller 15). Pahl counters that, "[d]espite Poe's concern with aesthetic unity, we find in his writing irruptive ironies and 'under-current[s] of meaning' ("Philosophy" 70), which, inasmuch as they cannot be contained or 'kept down,' result in enriching while at the same time making problematic and unstable his otherwise unified narrative structures" (Pahl 24nl). These under-currents of meaning, `which in the Unes leading up to "The Haunted Palace" are qualified further as being "mystic," deserve closer scrutiny. For, as Pahl argues, "'Poe's economies,' despite Bergthaller's attempt to define them as coherent identities, are less unified and less stable than one might imagine" (Pahl 24nl). Less stable indeed because Poe maintained, as will be argued in what follows, that his experiments in verse moved his project beyond the sentimental and moral-infused poetry of his day which, as Bergthaller correctly observes, he regularly derided in print even going so far as to take on New England luminaries such as Emerson and Longfellow. Less stable still because on several occasions Poe inserted a previously published lyric into a new story, and not simply to assure that his poems reached a wider audience. After all he made the choice to remove the poem originally called "Catholic Hymn" (and later simply "Hymn") from "Morelia" (1839), a textual decision that even Rufus Griswold honored in his 1850 edition of Poe's Works.2"The Haunted Palace" is a suitable place to launch my investigation, building on Bergthaller's apt focus on "The Fall of the House of Usher," because of what it can tell us about Poe's poetic economy by virtue of its having been resituated within the tale, as well as for what it has to reveal about the "under or mystic current of its meaning" as regards the dynamics of loss and memory. My critical engagement with Poe's work seeks to clarify how Poe, as a self-conscious litterateur, at once literally and emblematically went about "house management," as the etymology of the word "economy" historically denotes. Economy concerns the management of expenditure, and so I shall be discussing how this applies to Poe's special cache of treasured up linguistic resources and emblematic associations in a special House or Palace of Memory from which he drew his carefully stored and fastidiously husbanded materials as time and opportunity permitted. He did this, I will argue, to achieve a very particular end with respect to his thrifty use of key terms and images; namely, to depict and set in place a mirror world of ideas focused on drawing out and projecting his special understanding of "the contemplation of the Beautiful" which "alone" makes it "possible to attain that pleasurable elevation, or excitement, of the soul, which we recognize as the Poetic Sentiment" ("The Poetic Principle" 185; Poe's original emphasis). …

Poe's Faltering Economies: A Response to Hannes Bergthaller

Abstract: As a writer associated with Gothic tales of terror and obsession as well as with critical essays detailing, in an almost scientific way, how he creates his poetic "effects," Edgar Allan Poe has always had the reputation for being as much a romantic artist as a pragmatic craftsman How is one to sort out such differing images of the author? Is Poe the dreamy, melancholy poet (perhaps as hypersensitive as some of his characters) caring only for supernal Beauty and Truth? Or is he more the clever manipulator of emotions, the "coldly-calculating literary hack" (Bergthaller 14), shaping his aesthetic commodities to gain as large a readership as possible? In his essay "Poe's Economies and 'The Fall of the House of Usher,"' Hannes Bergthaller argues that the "the striking contradictions that have always confounded scholars of Poe's work"-contradictions, as he sees it, between Poe's "aggressive commercialism and his haughty aestheticism" (14)-stem from "two distinct inflections of the notion of poetic economy," one oriented toward the literary marketplace and the other revolving around art as an approximation of "divine natural order" (15)1 Focusing on these "economies" in Poe's work, Bergthaller tries to show how "Poe's reflections on his craft bear traces of his struggle to make these two different sets of constraints congruent, to establish the economy of the work of art as a kind of common denominator between the commercial and the divine" (15) Bergthaller's prime example of Poe's ability to establish a sense of unity, of congruence, between the two economies is the Gothic tale "The Fall of the House of Usher," which Bergthaller analyzes toward the end of his essayObviously inspired by the historicist turn in Poe criticism and especially by Terence Whalen's Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses (1999), which reconnects the romantic Poe to his cultural-historical world and attempts to see Poe's writing within the context of the nineteenthcentury literary marketplace, Bergthaller makes use of "economy" as a term enabling him to draw together, and offer insight into, both the divine and commercial implications of Poe's aesthetics Finding evidence of Poe's romantic idealism, of his divine economy, is not difficult, especially in Poe's "poetological essays" (18), where his theoretical remarks, taken at their face value, convey a view of literary art that is amoral and ahistorical and that mainly concerns the abstractions of Beauty and Truth To detach the cultural-historical implications, the commercial aspects of Poe's art, from his purely aesthetic concerns, however, requires more maneuvering on Bergthaller's part And in this regard his method is to demonstrate Poe's hoaxing nature, his making seemingly "ludicrous" (18), "quasi-scientific" (19) pronouncements about his "philosophy" of composition, as a vehicle for selling his science of writing Furthermore, as Bergthaller asserts, Poe's artistic interest in "brevity" and "unity of impression" (18)-aesthetic principles articulated both in Poe's Hawthorne review and in "The Philosophy of Composition"-has mainly to do with capturing readers who could experience aesthetic pleasure with the least cost in terms of time spent away from their working schedules That Bergthaller uses for this argument Poe's critical essays on poetry is a bit daring, given that Poe, as Whalen has pointed out, initially turned to writing tales rather than poetry for strictly commercial reasons, so as to reach a wider audience (Whalen 9) This does not of course negate some of the commercial implications of his "poetological" essays; but one wonders if the argument being made for Poe's commercial poetics becomes somewhat strained, and if it does not obscure the more crucial features of an aesthetics that, while profoundly mate- rialist, is not so thoroughly guided by the forces of the marketplace as one might believeTo understand Poe's scientific pronouncements, as Bergthaller does, as a kind of "intellectual grandstanding" (18) for the purpose of gaining commercial respectability is to overlook the fact that behind the posing is a serious aesthetic intention-one inclined less toward the spiritual or the cosmic (the second "economy" Bergthaller discusses) than toward empirical interests …

Poetic Insertions in Tolkien's the Lord of the Rings

Abstract: 1. Poems and Songs in The Lord of the Rings: A SurveyThroughout The Lord of the Rings (1954-55), narrative prose is supplemented by poems and songs.1 As this practice does not correspond to the established conventions of twentieth-century novel writing, I propose to investigate the nature and functions of these insertions in Tolkien's work of fiction, with a view to providing some indications as to the poetics of this mixture of genres.Concerning the poetic insertions in The Lord of the Rings (more than 60) I should like to proceed from two observations: firstly, all of them appear to fulfil a function within the narrative; they are all part of the plot and motivated by narrative developments.2 Most of the poems and songs are sung by a group of characters or recited by one character for the benefit of a group of listeners; they constitute or record communal experiences; and they serve to convey important information.Secondly, the poems and songs inserted belong to different, and often very specific, genres and traditions: they include songs which accompany wandering, marching to war, drinking, and even bathing; songs which, like ballads, tell a tale from ancient mythology or recent events; riddles, prophecies and incantations; hymns and songs of praise and complaint. They are of varying length and make use of a large variety of metres and rhyme schemes (a list of the poems and songs is given in the Appendix to this article).The origins of some of these genres go back to Anglo-Saxon poetry, which includes riddles, charms, complaints (or "elegies"), poems of memorizing as well as tales of heroic deeds (corresponding to nos. 2, 7, 10, 11 and 12 on the list printed in the Appendix).3 The nature poems (no. 6) may remind us of songs in Middle English, like the Harley Lyrics, and their French and Provencal antecedents. Others of the poems and songs in The Lord of the Rings belong to genres or traditions which are part of English "folklore"; they are reminiscent of songs sung at festivals, in taverns, in the nursery, in barracks, at school or in church, serving communal functions specific to the environments mentioned. This particularly applies to the poems and songs listed under nos. 1, 4, 5 and 13, which accompany habitual social activities. Drinking songs (no. 4) have been recorded since antiquity, and some are also found in modern anthologies of English folk-song4; similarly, military officers have always made use of the stimulating effects of music and song (no. 13). Wandering songs (no. 1) are rather wellknown in Germany, while they may have been less prevalent in England. The hymns listed under no. 3 can also be considered as "functional poetry" as they obviously accompany some kind of religious observance.5The communal functions of the poems and songs listed under the headings of nos. 8 and 10 are not as obvious, as their main purpose is a narrative one. They belong to poetic traditions, however, which certainly flourished (and flourish?) at festivals and in taverns. Narrative verse, in the form of "ballads," constitutes the bulk of the texts found in anthologies from Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) to The New Penguin Book of English Folk Songs (2012). Many of the traditional ballads deal with England's or Britain's historical and mythological past (like "The Ancient Ballad of Chevy Chace," "The Ancient Ballad of the Battle of Otterbourne," "Sir Lancelot du Lake," etc.)6 and can thus be compared to the tales told in verse about Gil-galad, Tinuviel and Earendil (Appendix 8.1, 8.2, 8.4)7The poems and songs found in The Lord of the Rings are thus reminiscent of a wide range of English poetic traditions and practices8; they do not, however, belong to the category of poetry which is considered to constitute the literary canon. Common definitions of poetry or "the lyric" emphasize the subjectivity of poetry and its function of expressing the poet's personal feelings, as well as "the immediacy of felt experience" (Lindley 3),9 qualities which are certainly found in the work of "canonized" poets like Petrarca, Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Keats. …

The Function of Poetic Epigraphs in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda

Abstract: Daniel Deronda was never what one might call a "popular" novel. When F. R. Leavis, in 1946-47, notoriously described it as consisting of two separate halves, he was merely summarizing the critical reception of the book since its publication. By comparing the "magnificent [...] achievement [of] the good half" to the "astonishing badness of the bad half" (94), Leavis voiced the common discontent with the book's lack of unity. He therefore suggested a new title for "the good part of Daniel Deronda," which he then kept using throughout his essay: "Gwendolen Harleth" (100). The considerable impact of Leavis's Great Tradition on the further reception of Daniel Deronda can be seen by the humble scholarly interest the novel attracted in the period immediately after the publication of Leavis's book.1Leavis's criticism is at odds with Eliot's expressed belief in the novel's unity. In 1876 she complained to Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon about readers who "cut the books to scraps and talk of nothing but Gwendolen," and added: "I meant everything in the book to be related to everything else there" (The George Eliot Letters 6: 290). The sharp contrast between the notion of unity on the one hand (Eliot), and the feeling of a split between plot Unes on the other (Leavis) has been an issue of critical debate ever since, and an unresolved one, mostly due to the fact that literary critics never agreed on what "unity" in a fictional text is supposed to denote. Apologists of the novel's unity have argued for such diverse forms of "unity" as self-sufficiency (Leavis 138), "thematic unity" (Beaty 18), "structural unity" (Carroll 369), "unity of imaginative conception" (Daleski 28), and a unity of imagery (Hardy 14). In addition, the general dissatisfaction that readers have felt about Daniel Deronda's bipartite structure ever since its publication seems to be based on the Aristotelian notion of the unity of plot, in which the "various incidents must be so arranged that if any one of them is differently placed or taken away the effect of wholeness will be seriously disrupted" (Aristotle, Poetics 1451a). That concept reverberates in one of Eliot's later poetic essays, "Notes on Form in Art" (1868), in which she defines unity as that in which "no part can suffer increase or diminution without a participation of all other parts in the effect produced and a consequent modification of the organism as a whole" (Selected Critical Writing 358). The resemblance between Eliot's definition of formal unity and Aristotle's definition of plot unity points at her notion of the novel as a "wholeness [...] which may be broken up into other wholes" (Selected Critical Writing 358), i.e. formal unity and plot unity.I argue that Eliot attempted to achieve an overall unity by, perhaps somewhat paradoxically, including quotations from other texts than her own in the form of epigraphs. These paratextual elements link the main text of the novel to numerous other texts outside it, thereby potentially threatening the sense of closure that a novel often is supposed to have. Eliot's specific use of epigraphs does, however, achieve a unifying effect by linking several aspects of the novel (different topics, characters, plot lines, images and so forth) together. To highlight this idea of internal unity achieved through the inclusion of external texts, I will confine the following analysis to the poetic epigraphs in the novel. Thereby I intend to demonstrate how Eliot uses texts from another genre (poetry) to unite different characters and topics of her prose work, the novel Daniel Deronda. I further argue that Eliot employs a dialectic method to create a sense of unity, by sublating the epigraph's internal /external, textual/paratextual, and poetic/prose dichotomies. A detailed survey of the epigraph's literary functions, its formal classification, and its quality to indicate literary history is added to the analysis of the organic function in Daniel Deronda in form of a comprehensive supplement. …

The Curious History of Imagism: Of Hulme, Bergson, Worringer, and Imagism's Readers. A Response to Andrew Hay

Abstract: Imagism has long occupied a curious position in the history of Modernism. Many modernist scholars have regarded imagism as central, even essential, to the development of twentieth century poetics, yet, at the same time, its short lifespan calls its very centrality into question.1 The American literary critic and dramatist Glenn Hughes made an early case for the significance of Imagism in his study Imagism and the Imagist (1931). However, it was T. S. Eliot's claim, made in a 1953 lecture, that granted primacy of place to a movement which had all but faded from view by the time of his remarks: "The point de repere, usually and conveniently taken, as the starting-point of modern poetry, is the group denominated 'imagists' in London about 1910" (Eliot 58). Indeed, as Andrew Hay notes in his recent, perceptive reengagement with Imagism: "When contextualised in the history of Modernism, Imagism might seem to be little more than an ancillary concept" (304). How can Imagism be both essential and ancillary? An answer, as Hay's article suggests, can be found in the tension between the poetics of Imagism and the product of those poetics as well as in the (re)construction of those tensions by critics over the last one hundred years or so.Hay's article begins with a return to the debates surrounding Imagism. It provides a useful exposition of the poetics of the movement and reminds us of its historical context. Not surprisingly, he revisits the pivotal roles that T. E. Hulme and Ezra Pound played in establishing this new poetics, and he also examines the theories of some of the writers and thinkers they drew on in the process of developing their approaches. Familiar names make appearances-the German aesthetician Wilhelm Worringer, the French philosopher Henri Bergson, and the French poet Remy de Gourmont, to name three prominent contemporaries of the Imagists. Hay goes on to update the familiar Imagist "talking points" by relating them to the works of mid- and late twentieth century critics/scholars such as Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and Geoffrey Batchen. In doing so, he not only emphasizes the continuing relevance of Imagist poetics, but also implicitly points to the coded ways in which they have been integrated into subsequent aesthetic debates.Hay's article is an engaging and engaged reappraisal of Imagism, and though I might quibble with a few of his characterizations or readings, I think it is a commendable piece of scholarship. What drew my attention, and what I would like to respond to, are two comments he makes which I think deserve to be teased out more fully.While I fully appreciate that the length and scope of Hay's article necessitates a somewhat abbreviated assessment of Imagism, at least as a starting point, I find overly schematic his assertion that "[w]here Pound's rhetoric prescribes the image in poetic practice as distinctly non-representational, Hulme's insistence upon clear visuality as the stylistic apotheosis of the best new poetry means that the poetic is fundamentally and inescapably intertwined with the mimetic" (308). I don't think their positions (or implicitly, their roles) are as clear-cut as Hay claims. Greater nuance is called for with respect to both Pound and Hulme's role in the genesis of Imagism and their understandings and use of the image. This is particularly true given the different trajectories the two men's careers had after the initial, formative period of Imagism. However, my comments are constrained by space, just as Hay's were, so my own response precludes a full engagement with this line of his argument. Nonetheless, I would like to suggest that a more nuanced account of Hulme's engagement with Bergson and Worringer, in particular, would reveal a somewhat different assessment of Hulme. I am especially interested in the way that Hulme blends Worringer's ideas with Bergson's to arrive at his own views on the image.The second comment that drew my attention is Hay's conclusion- "the proliferation of labels in Imagist theory gives way to a more diverse form of poetic practice, with multiple conceptual/interpretative possibilities" (323)-which strikes me as opening a fruitful avenue for further discussion, particularly in light of Hay's incorporation of post-structuralist thought into the discussion. …

Embedded and Embodied Poetry in Edgar Allan Poe's "Ligeia" and "The Fall of the House of Usher"

Abstract: Edgar Allan Poe constantly revised everything he wrote from publication to publication. His revisions consisted mainly of deletions or alterations of phrases, but they also sometimes included more extended insertions of text, such as epigraphs and even poems. Although there are other instances of inserted poetical elements in Poe’s tales (e.g. The Assignation 1850), this paper will focus on two examples in which Poe incorporated a poem of his own in one of his short stories. The first is “The Haunted Palace,” published in April 1839 and inserted a few months later in his famous short story “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and the other “The Conqueror Worm,” first published in 1843 and incorporated a few years later, in 1845, in a second revised reprint of his short story “Ligeia” (first published in 1838). What I propose to show is that, despite their seeming obscurity, the poems are invested with a crucial double function within the narrative. In terms of content, they offer the reader a key for interpreting the mysterious poetic characters who utter them. As narrative devices, by their placement in the middle of the stories in which they are embedded, they are figuring as an omen of the bad fortune ahead, foreshadowing the sinister ending of the tales. I will attempt to show that poetic speech in this context is given as a source of solemnity and authority so as to enhance the effect of inevitability in the outcome of the narrated tales. This addition of a disruptive element in the narrative level, aiming to draw the reader’s attention on the semantic level, *For debates inspired by this article, please check the Connotations website at

Signs of Life in Robert Lowell's "Skunk Hour"

Abstract: Our colloquial phrase "signs of life" presupposes signs of death, and plenty of them, in the midst of which, or despite which, signs of life emerge. In order to detect any in Lowell's poetry, where illness and death threaten to prevail, we need to become textual exegetes, rogue semiologists, and adepts in sign reading ranging from biblical typology to textual phonology. In this article I will be linking textual phonology with three of Lowell's master tropes that participate in a contested formation of signs of life in "Skunk Hour": falling/rising/standing, hands/touch, and hunger/food/eating.Illness and death pervade Life Studies (1959), and as Part IV progresses, heading toward "Skunk Hour," Lowell shifts attention to his own recurrent manic-depressive illness. "Waking in the Blue" adverts to a stay in "a house for the mentally ill" (183) that was neither his first nor his last. The following poem, "Home After Three Months Away," depicts his homecoming as a "cured" mental patient, "Cured, I am frizzled, stale and small" (186). The sylleptic play on "cured" here at the end harks back to the "gobbets of porkrind in bowknots of gauze" that were tied on a tree to feed hungry sparrows in line 5. The poet's bouts with mental illness reach a climax in "Skunk Hour," in which "the season's ill" (stanza 3), the speaker's "mind's not right" (stanza 5), and he hears his "ill-spirit sob" (stanza 6). Furthermore, the phoneme cluster ill infiltrates the entire poem, creating an acoustic chamber of ill-ness, until in stanza 7 it is consumed in an ameliorative trope of hunger, food, and eating, thanks this time not to sparrows but to hungry skunks.1Ill first makes itself heard as a phoneme cluster in the opening line, "Nautz'/us Island's hermit," followed in stanza 1 by "heiress st ill," "her sheep st ill," and "our villageNautilus Island's hermitheiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage;her sheep still graze above the sea.Her son's a bishop. Her farmeris first selectman in our village;she's in her dotage.Ill as an acoustic sign is augmented orthographically by age in "village, " which joins "cottage" and "dotage" in an age-ing weak rhyme. At the outset, "us" follows the phoneme cluster "ill" in "Nautilos," which also harbors an acoustic play on "Naut" / naught. The incorporation of ill in "still lives" fashions a sign of ongoing life that gives credit to the hermit heiress's pertinacity, however "ill" she may be. In "Skunk Hour," the terminal poem in Life Studies, the hermit heiress is the terminal "life study" of a dying New England aristocracy, to which Lowell himself belonged.The opening stanza resounds with ill and is occupied by her, the "hermit / heiress. " Everyone and everything are hers. Her cottage, her sheep, her farmer, her son fill designated roles-pastoral, agricultural, political, religious-within the mock-feudal domain of this lady of the manor. "Her sheep still graze above the sea" is the only line that does not end on a falling rhythmical note, and within it "above" rises. For a nostalgic, idyllic moment we are transported into a changeless pastoral world, a "still" world of otium and timelessness.2 Little do they know it, but the sheep also inaugurate hunger, food, and eating as a trope that skunks will appropriate in the final stanza.In stanza 2, the hermit heiress seeks to preserve her best of all worlds by removing visual signs of a new order, the "eyesores" facing "her shore":tThirsting forthe hierarchic privacyof Queen Victoria's century,she buys up allthe eyesores facing her shore,and lets them fall.The phrasal verb "buys up" and the verbal phrase "lets fall" team up to invert the primal trope of falling/rising/ standing that endows Lowell's poetry with signs of life restored. Pitch first rises-"she buys up all"-then falls-"lets them fall." The theme of the poem thus far might be summarized ill all fall, which also encapsulates the doctrine of original sin, that congenital spiritual "illness" which we all inherit. …

The Influence of Narrative Tense in Second Person Narration: A Response to Joshua Parker

Abstract: In his recent article, "In Their Own Words: On Writing in Second Person," Joshua Parker argues that authors employ second person narration to distance themselves from certain events in their stories, namely those that might seem embarrassing or shameful; this is most noticeable in works that contain oscillating narrative voices, when the second person appears during those potentially embarrassing events. Parker's primary support comes from authors' own testimonies. By focusing on why authors use second person, Parker redirects the more common rhetorical interest in how readers respond to second person. Although the authors' anecdotes that Parker cites suggest that second person narration has the potential to separate the teller from the tale, they do not account completely for how second person positions the speaker relative to the events: once we consider the influence of narrative tense, we also recognize second person's potential to connect the narrator to his/her story.Before I turn to Parker's specific claim about the function of second person, I would like to address a more foundational issue raised in Parker's essay that influences how we relate an author to his or her work. Based on their "own words," the catalyst for using second person is these authors' concern that they will be associated with the events that their narrators tell, a concern that erodes the distinction between author and narrator. Yet, in works of fiction, there exist at least three different layers of ontology: that of the narrator, the implied author, and the flesh-and-blood author. Moreover, in many cases of heterodiegesis, we add a fourth layer, for an extradiegetic narrator and intradiegetic characters will also reside on different planes of existence. If readers and critics do sidestep these ontologies to connect an author to a work, they seem to blur the author/narrator distinction rather than the author/ story distinction (the latter being the concern of the authors whom Parker references), even in homodiegesis. For example, Nabokov wasn't so much accused of being a pedophile as he was accused of telling about pedophilie events with a discomforting zeal; that is, (certain) readers didn't associate Nabokov with Humbert the character as they did with Humbert the narrator. In such instances, the difference between the narrating and experiencing functions is more significant than the fact that they both belong to the same person. Ultimately, the concerns of the authors in Parker's study are much more psychological than narratological, given the extent that the narrative structure buffers authors from their creations.1 In the final analysis, however, the distinction between authors and their narrators, crucial among many critics, might be moot when considering Parker's specific concern: because Parker (prompted by authors themselves) conflates author and narrator, to ask if second person distances the author from the story (Parker's version) is equivalent to asking if second person distances the narrator from the story (my version). The overarching question becomes, does second person narration distance the teller from the tale?The answer is "yes and no"-depending on the tense of second person narration. What we find is that second person written in past tense as well as historical and simultaneous present tense has the potential to distance the narrator from the events and from the "you" narratee (as Parker claims); however, second person written in the future subjunctive mood (what I've elsewhere labeled "How-to narration"), an increasingly popular form, conversely tightens the connection between narrator and events.One of the primary differences between past and present tense second person and subjunctive second person is the level of realness of the narrated events. Second person narration told in the past and present tenses contains "real" events (at least "real" within the ontology of the fiction, a crucial distinction made by Peter Rabinowitz in "Truth in Fiction: A Reexamination of Audience") that have happened or are happening. …

Three "Homes" Which Gerard Manley Hopkins Enjoyed: A Counterbalance to Adrian Grafe's "Hopkins and Home"

Abstract: After leaving his family home to become a Jesuit in 1868, did the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins ever have a “home” again? In his study “Hopkins and Home,” Adrian Grafe examines Hopkins’s poem “In the Valley of the Elwy” and raises the interesting and deeply human question, “what was home for Hopkins?” (56). He then argues that “from the moment he joined the Jesuits, all homes, in the sense of houses in which he resided, were temporary for Hopkins” (55). Most striking, writes Grafe, were the last five years of his life—“In a sense, the home/non-home dialectic lies behind all the poems Hopkins wrote in Ireland”—but all through his life, “Hopkins drew poetic energy from the feelings and the idea of home, just as he did from being away from home,” and “the theme of home [...] remained with Hopkins throughout his writing life” (56, 57). Grafe then studies aspects of “home,” “hospitality,” and “exile” in Hopkins’s life and work, holding that “[p]ermanence is part of the notion of home” (59). Such is the basis for Grafe’s conclusion that, as a Jesuit, Hopkins never really had a “home” here on earth. As for having any “home” at all, Grafe affirms Hopkins’s “feeling-at-home-ness in the universe” as created by God (57), his finding “his home, his ‘place,’ in the Real