Showing papers in "Mln in 1979"

Autobiography as De-facement

Abstract: The theory of autobiography is plagued by a recurrent series of questions and approaches that are not simply false, in the sense that they are far-fetched or aberrant, but that are confining, in that they take for granted assumptions about autobiographical discourse that are in fact highly problematic. They keep therefore being stymied,.with predictable monotony, by sets of problems that are inherent in their own use. One of these problems is the attempt to define and to treat autobiography as if it were a literary genre among others. Since the concept of genre designates an aesthetic as well as a historical function, what is at stake is not only the distance that shelters the author of autobiography from his experience but the possible convergence of aesthetics and of history. The investment in such a convergence, especially when autobiography is concerned, is considerable. By making autobiography into a genre, one elevates it above the literary status of mere reportage, chronicle, or memoir and gives it a place, albeit a modest one, among the canonical hierarchies of the major literary genres. This does not go without some embarrassment, since compared to tragedy, or epic, or lyric poetry, autobiography always looks slightly disreputable and self-indulgent in a way that may be symptomatic of its incompatibility with the monumental dignity of aesthetic values. Whatever the reason may be, autobiography makes matters worse by responding poorly to this elevation in status. Attempts at generic definition seem to founder in questions that are both pointless and unanswerable. Can there be autobiography before the 18th century or is it a specifically pre-romantic and romantic phenomenon? Generic historians tend to think so, which raises at once the ques-

Alejo Carpentier; The Pilgrim at Home

Abstract: * Preface * Preface to the Paperback Edition *1. Preamble: A Post-Carpenterian Reflection *2. Lord, Praised Be Thou *3. Fugitive Island *4. The Parting of the Waters *5. Memories of the Future *6. The Pilgrim's Last Journeys * Bibliography * Select Bibliography of Carpentier's Works * Works Cited * Bibliographical Supplement to the Paperback Edition * Carpentier's Works * Works Cited * Index

Keats and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism

Abstract: Conflicts between formal or stylistic analysis and historical scholarship are a traditional problem in literary studies. In the field of hermeneutics, where the lines of disagreement tend to sharpen, the best commentators-Lionel Trilling, for example-have generally aimed for, and achieved, various pragmatic agreements. Few critics would take seriously any suggestion that Byron's poetry could be adequately interpreted without bringing a fair amount of historical and biographical information to bear.' On the other hand, a textonly approach has been so vigorously promoted during the last thirty-five years that most historical critics have been driven from the field, and have raised the flag of their surrender by yielding the title "critic" to the victor, and accepting the title "scholar" for themselves. This division of labor has produced a fundamentally unstable situation because it is based upon unresolved and, what is worse, unexamined tensions and conflicts. The problems appear, at first, in a purely practical form: for the student needs to know how he is to decide whether (or in what way) historical and biographical information is needed for interpretation. Confronted with a particular text, we cannot always tell at what points (if any) we ought to press for some particular "extrinsic" material or approach.2 Textual problems of these sorts are widespread, nor are they a function of a certain sort of poem (like a topical satire) or a certain type of writer (like, say, Byron). They exist because of general critical assumptions about "the mode of existence of a literary work of art."3 The introductory remarks in Paul deMan's well-known essay on

The Romantic Prison: The French Tradition

Abstract: \"Prison haunts our civilization,\" writes Victor Brombert. \"Object of fear, it is also a subject of poetic reverie.\" Focusing on French literature of the Romantic era, the author probes the manifold significance of imprisonment as symbol and metaphor of the human condition. His thematic exploration draws on a constellation of writers ranging from the Platonic and Christian traditions to the Existentialist generation. Professor Brombert points out that nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature endowed the prison image with unusual prestige, and he examines the historical and social reasons. After considering the influence of Pascal and of the myth of the Bastille, he closely analyzes the work of Borel, Stendhal, Victor Hugo, Nerval, Baudelaire, Huysmans, and Sartre, with excursions into texts by Byron, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Solzhenitsyn, Sade, and others. His approach reflects a concern with the interaction of literature, historiography, and popular myth. This imaginative treatment deepens our understanding of Romanticism and its favored themes. It offers fresh thoughts as well about modern man's dialectical tensions between oppression and inner freedom, fate and revolt, and the awareness of the finite and the longing for infinity. A wide-ranging conclusion speculates about the future of the prison theme in a world that has been threatened by extermination camps.Originally published in 1978.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.

Blake's Composite Art: A Study of the Illuminated Poetry

Abstract: The Description for this book, Blake's Composite Art: A Study of the Illuminated Poetry, will be forthcoming.

Periphrasis on the Origin of Rhetoric

Abstract: How can one speak about the origin of rhetoric? To put it another way, what logic shall be invoked to account for the moment when persuasive technique first entered language? Philological science has always relied upon the logic of history, and so rhetoric's traces have been located as far back as we have texts which speak-that is, to Homer. The earliest of the ancient thinkers preferred the logic of myth, and so rhetoric is said to have originated with heroes and gods (Odysseus and Hermes are favorite choices for each).1 Today, however, the question of rhetoric's origin cannot be separated from the question of its textualization, or from the possibility of adequately representing origins in general. For that reason, I shall first speak of rhetoric's origin as a moment of crisis in the history of writing, a moment whose textualization is made comprehensible by the curious logic of supplementarity and differance. But at the same time I shall locate rhetoric's origin within the context of a historicizable mimetic crisis whose resolution on the threshold of Greece's Classical age produced the innovative political form known as tyranny. Hopefully, my analysis will suggest that the attempt to textualize the first appearance of rhetoric relied on the peculiar coincidence of several logics: that of supplementarity and differance, that of mimetic desire and sacrifice, but also that of political history as it relates to the development of despotism. In later antiquity, the ancients believed they had solved the question of the origin of rhetoric, although they did have some difficulty agreeing on the details. Substantial references to rhetoric's invention in the Sicily of the mid-5th century B.C. have been preserved: for some, Empedocles of Agrigentum, philosopher, magician, poet and physician, invented rhetoric; for others, it was the

Stage as Mirror: Tom Stoppard's Travesties

Abstract: In Tom Stoppard's Travesties, Lenin and Tzara stand opposed, Lenin living at Number 14 Spiegelgasse, Tzara meeting his associates at the Meierei Bar, Number 1.1 The name of the street comments on the two historical figures' thematic and structural relationship in the play. They mirror one another as revolutionaries, but they differ in that one is transforming the world, the other art. This fundamental structure of sameness and difference is essential to the design of the play. It is an imaginative form, not simply conceptual or analytical. It functions as metaphor, and is a metaphorical principle underlying particular images.