Showing papers in "Pmla-publications of The Modern Language Association of America in 1976"

Unity Identity Text Self

Abstract: Understanding the receptivity of literature, how one work admits many readers, begins with an analogy: unity is to text as identity is to self. Unity here means the way all a text’s features can be related through one central theme. Identity describes a person’s sameness within different behaviors as variations on one identity theme (Lichtenstein). To find unity or identity, however, the interpreter himself plays a behavioral variation on his identity theme. In interpreting, his identity re-creates itself as he shapes the text to match his characteristic defenses, fantasies, and coherences. Thus, what a poet says about fictional, political, or scientific texts expresses the same identity theme as the poems he writes. To understand reading, criticism, and any knowing or making in symbols, then, we need to let go the Cartesian craving for objectivity and accept the themes in ourselves with which we construe the world—including literary works.

Objective Image and Act of Mind in Modern Poetry

Abstract: R ECENT CRITICISM has made quite clear the different philosophical and stylistic assumptions that distinguish much of contemporary American poetry from the earlier high modernism of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound. We might summarize these differences as an opposition between the earlier, essentially symbolist poetic concerned primarily with the powers of the imagination to create values and structures for inter-

Surrey's Five Elegies: Rhetoric, Structure, and the Poetry of Praise

Abstract: IN HIS ESSAY on the rhetorical conventions of what he calls the "Renaissance personal elegy," A. L. Bennett cites the Earl of Surrey's Excellent Epitaffe on Sir Thomas Wyatt as the first example of that important subgenre.1 Years earlier W. J. Courthope had called Surrey's lament for the Duke of Richmond, "So crewell prison," "the most pathetic personal elegy in English poetry" (his italics).2 The two statements do not conflict, of course; Bennett's use of the term is historical and structural while Courthope's is impressionistic. The real value of juxtaposing the two comments lies in their implications about the range and variety of Surrey's accomplishments as an elegiac poet, and in what those implications might contribute to a proper assessment of his modern reputation. He wrote three other poems that also must be considered "elegies" :3 a sonnet on Thomas Clere, beginning "Norfolk sprang thee," and two sonnets on Wyatt, "Dyvers thy death" and "In the rude age."4 Two of the five, the Epitaffe ("Wyat resteth here" and "Norfolk sprang thee") exemplify rather clearly the two main types of structure approved for epideictic praise by rhetorical tradition. The other three do not, but their apparent departure from convention can be explained at least in part by both the real and rhetorical situations out of which they grew: unlike the epitaphs on Wyatt and Clere, they are not explicitly public tributes; the two Wyatt sonnets amplify a satiric theme introduced late in the Epitaffe, while the poem on Richmond is perhaps, as Courthope's statement implies, a very private, personal lament. That is not to say that the EpitaJfe and "So crewell prison" demonstrate the difference between cold convention and spontaneous overflow. Anyone at all familiar with Renaissance literary theory and practice is aware of the intimate relationship between apparently "original" sixteenth-century poems and the rhetorical handbooks; the differ-

The Comedy of Swift's Scatological Poems

Abstract: Sur cinq chefs-d'oeuvre comiques: A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed, The Lady's Dressing Room, Strephon and Chloe, Cassinus and Peter et A Panegyrick on the D..n. Place et role de la comedie: perception des ecarts entre l'imagination et le fait reel, la sublimation et la realite, les principes de la romance pastorale ou de la societe policee et le besoin d'evacuer les dechets. S. ironise autour de ceux qui veulent ignorer ou nient ce besoin.

Luther and Literacy

Abstract: M UCH OF THE rationale for literature study arises from the enrichment we think we may offer to our own people through values that some text has preserved from a culture otherwise remote in time or place. The assumption is that humanity remains enough like itself for understanding to be possible even over great distances, yet that human potentials have proved so varied as to leave much to learn from the past and from the distant. One epoch may, of course, seem to another so radically different that a sympathetic reading is precluded. This must have been the case with Luther's writings during the heyday of German scholarship in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Despite the fact that he continued to be recognized as a central figure in the development of German literature, Luther studies were left to theologians and, peripherally, to a few historians. The older Protestant view of Luther as successful reformer of a corrupt tradition, like the now seldom encountered caricature of him as a depraved monk, has over the years been erased by more temperate scholarship. Indeed, Catholic writing, once notorious for the most grievous calumny,' today sometimes seems more sympathetic to Luther than Protestant work.2 The gentler, circumspect approach stems in such large measure from the writings of Joseph Lortz and his pupils that it is fair to quote him as representative of many theologians.3 He concedes that detachment does not yet characterize the world of Luther studies: "We cannot speak of [Luther] with detachment and from a distance... he works on us and makes demands of us today."4 Still dominated by Christians and anti-Christians, the field is graced by very few of that new race for whom Goethe found the happy term nonChristian.5 While non-Christians may find little to interest them in the recondite theological dialogue which supplies the bulk of Luther scholarship, an alternative is offered principally by Marxist zealots, to whom Luther is an outright hypocrite and lackey for aristocratic and capitalist circles.6 Obviously, a balanced perception of European history demands appreciation for profoundly religious motivation.7 At the same time, in Luther studies as in all literary scholarship, disinterest is essential. Because of its theological orientation, Luther scholarship has tended to present his development against the patristic background, scarcely related to or even contrasted with the Renaissance and Humanism. It became possible to inquire, for example, into the influence of Humanism on Luther, because scholars took it for granted that he was certainly no "Humanist." Yet Humanism is understood as a phase in the expansion of modern experience when, first of all, a wealth of ancient literature was reborn, becoming available in modem languages to an immensely larger readership than ever before. The printed word took on unprecedented immediacy.8 Luther played a key role in such changes to an extent not fully appreciated precisely because specializations in church history or in theology (hence in Luther) have insufficient overlap with literature studies.9 Nevertheless, the ancient Hebrew tales had never been received with such intense inner participation as in Luther's version of them for northern Europeans, probably not even by those listening to them when they were recited in Canaan 3,000 years earlier. Preoccupation with the Bible during the German Renaissance, and the debates that attended it, had a dynamic effect on general literacy rates. "Literature" in the sense of the written word actually being read and taken seriously by a significant fraction of a populace was virtually brought into being by the young Wittenberg Doctor in Biblia. It seems therefore ironical that his stature as a literary figure continues to be subordinate to and even contingent on theological or historical-political considerations.'? The present essay can do no more than plead for a secular revision by sampling kinds of approaches to Luther that a literature student might prefer. I will touch on the following topics: (1) literacy rates around 1500; (2) Luther as a popular song816

The Growth of the Soul: Coleridge's Dialectical Method and the Strategy of Emerson's Nature

Abstract: A TURE, as every student of Emerson realizes, has met with mixed reception almost from the moment of publication (1836). If Amos Bronson Alcott thought it was "a gem throughout" and Thomas Carlyle saw in it "the Foundation and Ground-plan" for a whole career, a "true Apocalypse,"' others have found it less than satisfactory. Emerson's first important reviewer, Francis Bowen, attacked the whole Transcendental movement for its "mysticism" and Nature for ideas Bowen found unacceptable: "The effort of perusal is often painful, the thoughts excited are frequently bewildering, and the results to which they lead us, uncertain and obscure."2 The official organ of the New Jerusalem Church in America, offended by Emerson's treatment of Swedenborgian ideas, noted that Nature tended to "confuse the mind," adding that since it pretended to be "the religious philosophy of nature" it "should be recalled and repudiated at the earliest moment."3 These responses are extremely dated. Nevertheless, difficulties with Emerson's first book persist even though the focus of these difficulties rests now upon questions of structure, method, and meaning. Stephen E. Whicher's remarks are typical: "Since Nature is written under several strong and not always harmonious influences---Coleridge, Swedenborg, and various varieties [sic] of Platonism--and since it discusses such an array of elaborately subdivided topics, one cannot always easily penetrate its rapid criss-cross of ideas and see its underlying intention."4 Quite apart from the motley influences Whicher notes, Nature presents a conjunction of internal problems which can be described as compositional. First, Emerson published nothing of significance before 1836, so that Nature seems to emerge full-blown, with no obvious clues to its making. Second, some of the most obvious features of the work are unique to it. For example, the elaborate subdivisions noted by Whicher are dropped in Emerson's next book, Esscays: First Series (1841). Similarly, the kind of exact formulation that has made the "Language" chapters so attractive does not recur in later essays, which tend to develop analogically or associatively rather than according to carefully stated propositions. Third, in his later essays Emerson conceals controversial ideas much more carefully than he does with, for example, the celebrated "noble doubt" (CW, i, 29), which has drawn so much critical debate. Finally, the "innocently absurd" tone, to use Jonathan Bishop's description,6 of the "transparent eye-ball" passage (CW, I, 10)evident too in the sentence, "I expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons" (CW, 1, 35)--is absent from Emerson's later publications.7 Nature stands, therefore, as Emerson's most uncharacteristic work, a fact emphasized by his return to the lecture-essay form in his subsequent books. Yet, atypical as it may be, Nature is Emerson's most important book and the central document of the Transcendental movement of the 1830's. Its few flaws, rather than consigning the book to oblivion, have contributed to its notoriety, if only by stretching the critical debate. In terms of the form, opinions have been varied. Most commentators have noted the resemblance between its numbered topics and sections and the use of this method in the traditional sermon. Emerson had absorbed this method as an oratorical strategy from Hugh Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783) and observed it in sermon collections read while he was at Harvard; later he utilized the method, on an irregular basis, in his own sermons.8 F. O. Matthiessen, however, suggested that Nature shared a kinship with the seventeenth-century prose meditation exemplified in Vaughan and Traherne9-a connection more persuasively argued in recent discussions of Emerson's poetry.l Finally, Richard Lee Francis, in an essay full of valuable suggestions, has

Hierogamy versus Wedlock: Types of Marriage Plots and Their Relationship to Genres of Prose Fiction

Abstract: Dr; ON'T YOU really want to get marJ|) ried?" Gudrun Brangwen asks her sister at the beginning of Women in Love. "I don't know," is Ursula's considered reply: "It depends how you mean." "Well," is Gudrun's sardonic rejoinder, "it usually means one thing!"1 Though Gudrun may strike us as simply "unliberated" and extremely narrow in her concept of what marriage means, her basic premise is correct, epitomizing an attitude that has far-reaching implications for literary criticism and, specifically, for the generic classification of works like Women in Love. When we speak of marriage we do not usually stop to qualify the term but rather proceed on the assumption that it has by definition a specific and clear-cut meaning. Because this is the case, when we encounter "marriage" as a dominant motif, or as a central episode or thematic concern in a work of prose fiction, we also have rather definite expectations: namely, that the work in question will have novelistic propensities. We are accustomed to regard marriage as a social and legal institution with moral overtones or as a conjugal relationship which, if not always ratified by society, nevertheless takes place within a social frame of reference; hence, we are disposed to see it as a subject practically indigenous to the novel, that genre of prose fiction that above all others is characterized by its concern with the depiction of human relationships and moral issues in a social and historical context. To this effect F. R. Leavis, for example, seizes upon Lawrence's introduction of marriage as his theme in Women in Love as conclusive evidence that "he is a novelist," while E. M. Forster goes so far as to suggest that if "you think of a novel in the vague you think of a love interest-of a man and woman who want to be united and perhaps succeed."2 In the mainstream of our critical tradition, then, marriage virtually has come to be regarded as one of the distinguishing aspects of the novel; and thus the opening of Pride and Prejudice, to use a classic example of the genre, is as famous for its enunciation in socially critical terms of the marriage theme as the entire work is exemplary of the conventions of the novelistic tradition. If it is "a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife,"3 it is an assumption usually validated that a work of prose fiction concerned with marriage must be in want of novelistic classification. Marriage-as Gudrun says-usually does mean one thing. Yet one need only turn to that other classic of its kind, Wuthering Heights, to realize the importance of Ursula's qualification: "It depends how you mean." Wuthering Heights is equally concerned with marriage, but few critics would dispute F. R. Leavis' exclusion of the work from the "Great Tradition."4 More positively, Northrop Frye, protesting against the sloppy and critically dangerous habit of subsuming all prose fiction into the category of the novel, specifically uses Wuthering Heights in contrast to Pride and Prejudice to delineate the difference between what he calls the romance and prose fiction that is rightly categorized as novel: "In novels that we think of as typical, like those of Jane Austen, plot and dialogue are closely linked to the conventions of the comedy of manners. The conventions of Wuthering Heights are linked rather with the tale and ballad. They seem to have more affinity with tragedy, and the tragic emotions of passion and fury, which would shatter the balance of tone in Jane Austen, can be safely accommodated here. So can the supernatural, or the suggestion of it, which is difficult to get into a novel. . . . Conventions so different justify us in regardi g Wuthering Heights as a different form of prose fiction from the novel, a form which we shall here call the romance."5

Doris Lessing and R. D. Laing: Psychopolitics and Prophecy

Abstract: T HERE WOULD seem to be only two basic ways to attack a social problem-from the outside or the inside, by reforming the structure of society or by revolutionizing the consciousness of man. While the two processes cannot be completely dissociated, the crucial question is which concern must be placed first. To George Orwell, in his famous essay on Dickens in 1939, the Marxist solution seemed the most basic approach to the problem of injustice. Orwell showed that Dickens' commitment to social change was superficial, based on his feeling that those entrenched in positions of power should have kind hearts. Radicals in the first half of this century shared Orwell's belief in the preeminence of structural change, but radicals in the latter half are showing signs of a swing in the opposite direction. If we look at the novels of Doris Lessing with this fundamental question in mind, we can see a gradual movement away from Orwell's position toward a new kind of belief in the possibility of affecting the inner man. As a Communist writer, Lessing in her first phase-the novels written before 1960-sympathizes with the Orwellian view. The Grass Is Singing, Retreat to Innocence, and, to a great extent, the first four volumes of the Children of Violence series are marked with the stamp of historical determinism, and the Martha Quest of these early volumes-a heroine portrayed with striking realism-is personally committed to political action. However, even in these early novels, Lessing is consciously concerned not with promulgating an idea like Orwell's of the proper solution to social evil but with understanding the gap between the public and private conscience. As she says, Children of Violence "is a study of the individual conscience in its relations with the collective," and she believes that the hope of man lies in the resting point between his private and social selves. In the early sixties, with The Golden Notebook, Lessing continues her search for this crucial resting point, but from a changing political perspective. The heroine of The Notebook, Anna Wulf, is a writer in her early thirties who lives alone with her daughter Janet, has written one successful novel, and does volunteer work for the Communist Party. Through Anna's personal experience with the Party and Anna's view of the Western world in the middle to late fifties, Lessing conscientiously and carefully reexamines the Marxist solution and rejects it as unviable. For, during the fifties, radicals like Anna and her friends become disillusioned with established Communism, suffer the effective repression of independent leftist activism, and witness the development of Cold War phobias into terrifying facts. With the collapse of hope in the political answer to human misery, the struggle for a viable existence becomes again the onus of the individual self and its capacities for creativity and moral development. But the self in The Notebook struggles with conscious weakness under its burden. Anna suffers not only from political disillusionment, but from failures in human relationships and the inability to overcome her recent "writer's block," to adjust her esthetic capacities to a new and realistic vision of a doomed world. Unable to bear up under the pressure of failure and despair, the self finally collapses into madness. However, here-in the selfs descent into madness-can be found whatever small hope is offered by The Notebook. With her male counterpart, Saul Green, an American expatriate, fellow Communist, and fellow writer, Anna discovers new truths about her own nature and her relation to the world, and she emerges from insanity to a tentative but fresh state of balance, self-respect, and independence. Lessing' idea of madness as revelation and cure, initiated in The Notebook, is later fully explored in The Four-Gated City, the last volume of The Chile early sixties, with The Golden Notebook, i g continues her search for this crucial restoint, but from a changing political perspec. he heroine of The Notebook, Anna Wulf, is iter in her early thirties who lives alone with aughter Janet, has written one successful

Mesmerism in Die Jungfrau von Orleans

Abstract: T HE ELEMENT of the supernatural and marvelous has long been a stumbling block for interpreters of Schiller's Die Jungfrau von Orleans. It is usually considered to be nothing more than medieval local color or at most an approach on Schiller's part to the world of the Romantics, hence the subtitle Eine romantische Tragodie. But these views are simply restatements of the fact that there is a marvelous element in the play, and hardly an explanation for it. One popular approach is that Schiller, having chosen a subject from the Middle Ages, was constrained to adopt the medieval world view, including the direct intervention of God in human affairs, the existence of witches, etc. The implication is that, freed from this historical straitjacket, Schiller would have avoided the supernatural completely.' Assuming this to be the case, how is one to explain the fact that Schiller, in his one radical break with history, increased the supernatural element by replacing Joan's all-too-natural death at the stake with an apotheosis worthy of the most credulous hagiographer? It is my contention that Schiller, far from regarding the story of Joan as a web of medieval superstition, found a rational explanation for the peculiar behavior of his heroine in one of the most debated scientific doctrines of the late eighteenth century, Franz Anton Mesmer's theory of animal magnetism. And that this in turn served as a symbolic representation of Schiller's view of the political and historical process. It is difficult to prove that Schiller was familiar with the techniques and the often amazing effects of mesmerism. The whole thing had a strong odor of quackery about it, and serious persons might well have been hesitant about laying their intelligence open to question by a too great interest or credulity concerning such matters. Nevertheless, it is possible to show that Schiller was aware of the phenomenon and that he at one point took it quite seriously indeed. Schiller's doctoral dissertation, Versuch iiber den Zusammenhang der tierischen Natur des Menschen mit seiner geistigen (1780), had dealt with the influence of the body on the mind and vice versa. His interest in such matters, even if purely academic, would certainly have been kept alive by the contemporary fascination with practitioners of the power of mind over matter such as the Count of St. Germain and Cagliostro. That he kept abreast of such fads is shown by his choice of subject for his only novel, the fragmentary Der Geisterseher (1786-89).2 The dividing line, often hazy, between scientific investigation and pseudoscientific speculation was almost nonexistent in the latter part of the eighteenth century.3 The methods of charlatans such as Cagliostro and those of serious men of science such as Mesmer were often indistinguishable. The conjuration scene in Der Geisterseher is a case in point. The Sicilian4 has agreed to conjure up the ghost of a dead friend of the Prince. The preparations include taking off shoes and outer clothing, drawing a magic circle on the floor, burning incense, and dimming the lights. The participants in the seance join hands and two of them cross their swords over the magician's head. The magician then goes into convulsions, and when two participants grab him by the hair, all present receive a strong electric shock.5 In a description of an earlier conjuration, the Sicilian mentioned the use of a strange musical instrument, identified as a glass harmonica, to heighten the atmosphere of mystery (SW, v, 86). Compare this to the following description of a mesmerist session in Paris in the early 1780's:

Pleberio's World

Abstract: His "act of historical interpretation" at the conclusion of the DeJence extends (as Bruns says of Ruskin's a d Pater's thinking) "beyond history into the realm of value and personal visio ": "Poets are . .. t e tru pets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves." The concluding passage of Shelley's DeJence was lifted essentially without change from his unfinished and unpublished A Philosophical View of Reform, written in 1819. In that work, the passage composes the bulk of the next-to-last paragraph of Chapter i, which traces the history of European despotism from the decline and fall of the Roman Empire to the French Revolution with glances at the Americas, India, and the Turkish Near East. In this work the famous passage which closes the DeJence is firmly and obviously tied to history. I am mindful of Wendell Harris' appropriately questioning "the authority to be given to unpublished material and thus the limits of its legitimate use" (Modern Philology, 1970). Shelley wrote to Hunt, 26 May 1820: "Do you know any bookseller who would publish for me an octavo volume entitled A Philosophical View of Reform ?" More significantly, Shelley uses history repeatedly in his dramatic and narrative poetry. In Queen Mab, "lanthe's Soul" is rewarded with a historical review"the past shall rise"-and profits from the experience: "I know / The past, and thence I will essay to glean / A warning for the future, so that man / May profit by his errors, and derive / Experience from his folly." In The Revolt of Islam, the "Woman," in explaining the fight between the eagle and the serpent, begins with "the earliest dweller of the world." She knows "the dark tale which history doth unfold." Better known are the two historical spectacles used to torture Prometheus in Act I: the crucified Christ and France after the Revolution ("the disenchanted nation"). From the early Queen Mab to the late and incomplete The Triumph of Lie?, Shelley characteristically uses historical imagination both in his search for meaning-"what is life?"and in his validation of meaning-"'Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." The major thrust of Shelley's thinking is characterized by "movement, process, and transformation." Like Arnold's, his concern "is a study of perfection, and of harmonious perfection, general perfection, and perfection which consists in becoming something rather than in having something" (Culture and Anarchy). And like Ruskin in Modern Painters, Shelley finds meaning and intelligibility in what has been, the web ordered by time. His writing "requires therefore an act of historical imagination." I encourage Bruns to extend his article to book Prumn

Disorientation, Style, and Consciousness in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Abstract: T O A CERTAIN DEGREE nearly every narrative of any sophistication entertains us or holds our attention by first setting up and then subverting or denying certain expectations on our part. There are narratives, however, that indulge in this practice to a suspicious extent. As a result, we are constantly made aware of our presuppositions. We are forced to question our own perception. It is this process of disorientation that I wish to examine in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. That a late medieval poem should lead us to such reconsideration is not surprising. Indeed, given the profoundly Christian character of that age, all medieval art forms might be expected to lead us to the contemplation of a reality that lies beyond the phenomena of the earthly world. Yet the genre of romance is not one to which we ordinarily turn for this sort of literary experience, though of course the boundaries of that "genre" are peculiarly slippery and difficult to define. My purpose is not to refute the wonderful entertainment value and joyous comic mood that recent criticism has seen in the poem, but to point out that this entertainment experience is at one with the moral emphasis of Sir Gawain. Some of the most interesting recent criticism of Sir Gawain has in fact noticed that the narrator of this poem is not always as candid with his audience as he pretends to be. Obviously we do not know that Bercilak and the Green Knight are the same person until the end of the poem. But there are other ramifications. As Donald Howard has pointed out, "as the Green Knight plays a game with the court, the author plays games with the reader. He goes on hinting that it is all a joke and implying that the reader knows some things which Arthur and his court do not. In part this is so: it is all preposterous, and we know perfectly well there is a catch to it somewhere. At the same time the author withholds from us just what it is and keeps us guessing."1 More generally, A. C. Spearing suggests that there are unresolved ambiguities in the poem, for "the poet has given us a richly suggestive concretion of material. That material does not fall of itself into a single pattern of organization and significance, but into a number of alternative patterns. The choice and the adjustment are ours."2 Other critics have made similar observations about crucial junctures in the poem. Yet it has not been sufficiently emphasized how the style of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in both its largest and minutest aspects, contributes to a process of disorientation.

Swift's Explorations of Slavery in Houyhnhnmland and Ireland

Abstract: En meme temps qu'il travaillait sur Gulliver's Travels S. se trouvait engage dans une bataille litteraire a propos de l'independance economique de l'Irlande. C'est a dessein que S. utilise le mot "esclavage" pour decrire a la fois l'oppression en Irlande et au Houyhnhnmland. L'importance de ce concept dans le LivreIV, et l'impact philosophique et moral sur les lecteurs de l'epoque.

“Reading” in Great Expectations

Abstract: The theme of education pervades nineteenth-century novels, often particularized in the theme of learning to read and write. Great Expectations reveals the complex metaphorical nature of the terms “reading” and “reader,” deepening our sense of how Pip's moral perceptions are related to his literal education. The novel begins with several scenes in which Pip learns to read and then goes on to show a wide range of characters reading rightly or wrongly, dramatically or narrowly, with self-deception or with charity. Dickens' own reader comes to see that the stages of Pip's expectations correspond to the growth in his powers of interpretation.

Nineteenth-Century American Humor: Easygoing Males, Anxious Ladies, and Penelope Lapham

Abstract: There is a reason for our apparent lack of humor. ... Women do not find it politic to cultivate or express their wit. No man likes to have his story capped by a better and fresher from a lady's lips. What woman does not risk being called sarcastic and hateful if she throws back the merry dart, or indulges in a little sharpshooting. No, no, it's dangerous-if not fatal. "Though you're bright, and though you're pretty, They'll not love you if you're witty."2

Talking in James

Abstract: O4 (\ F COURSE what's so awfully unutterable is just what we most notice," observes Nanda Brookenham, the disconcertingly precocious heroine of The Awkward Age (ix, 389).' She speaks as a moral critic rather than a literary one, but Nanda's pronouncement about her mother's evasive friends might well stand as a commentary on all late Jamesian fiction. For whenever the characters in James's late novels talk, the "awfully unutterable" makes itself insistently felt, a hidden pressure which the reader feels so intensely just because it is hidden. Adultery, theft, deception, betrayal, even the fact of mortality itself-all go unspoken and unnamed. And for the critic the temptation is strong to make these the crucial subjects of the novels; in proportion as the characters refuse to speak of such things, he longs to do so. In order to talk sanely about the late fiction, we must indeed make explicit much that James's characters so carefully conceal from one another. Yet any such summary of what has "really" been said-whether in the abridgments made by the reader's memory or in the critic's elaborate exegesis--creates a fictional world radically different from James's own. Translating their strange dialect into his own language, the critic rewrites the novels, makes of them fictions with which he can be both morally and esthetically more comfortable. But neither talking in James nor reading that talk is a comfortable activity. For while James's characters speak, we must continually shift not only our moral and emotional allegiance, but the very assumptions of our epistemology. To read late Jamesian dialogue is to find ourselves troubled by a host of unanswered questions-questions of motive, of ethical judgment, even of fact itself: What does little Bilham intend when he calls Chad's liaison with Madame de Vionnet a "virtuous attachment"? How must we judge a Kate Croy or a Charlotte Stant? What does Adam Verver really "know"? With whom are our sympathies meant to lie after we have read The Golden Bowl? More disturbing yet, a close reading of the dialogue suggests that in the world of James's late fiction, such ordinary human questions may finally prove unanswerable. As most readers sense, talking in the late James is a highly stylized act. But to juxtapose a conversation from James's late fiction with one from an early novel is to realize how idiosyncratic the late style in fact is, and how different its rendering of human verbal relations:

Rosebud, Dead or Alive: Narrative and Symbolic Structure in Citizen Kane

Abstract: hood left a permanent scar; ever after, Charles Foster Kane was to be incapable of loving, or even of dispensing simple humanity. Had the film labored two full hours with a gigantic mountain of a man all to give forth such a tame little mouse? The audible reactions have all but disappeared now that Citizen Kane has become critically entrenched as one of the great films. But not all of the problems represented by Rosebud have been explained away. The childhood meaning of Rosebud is the most blatant amateur psychology. Its effect, as writer John Howard Lawson says, is to "reduce Kane's life to a Freudian epigram." To accept it as the film's principal insight into Kane, as many people have, is to turn Citizen Kane-for all its flashy gimmickry and technical sophistication-into just another piece of Hollywood oversimplification. There have been numerous denials, to be sure, that the psychological interpretation is the whole story, and a few brief efforts have been made to undermine such an interpretation. But most of these end up substituting an equally serious critical dilemma for the original one. Rosebud is still the object of all the fuss and bother. If it's just a gimmick that leads to a trick ending, that makes Citizen Kane something worse than just melodrama-melodrama that poses as tragedy until the last reel. Rarely has any genuinely positive thing been said on behalf of Rosebud, and so far as I can determine no full-fledged effort to justify or account for Rosebud on solid dramatic grounds has ever been made. Perhaps there is an unspoken fear that Citizen Kane might not stand up under the critical scrutiny works of other kinds are subjected to as a matter of course. In any event, so long as there is no fully defensible dramatic justification for Rosebud, the news that Citizen Kane is generally regarded as one of the greatest films ever made will continue to strike many as surest proof of the inadequacy of film criticism, if not of film.

Swift's Scatological Poems

Abstract: because I felt that the results would not justify the space necessary for a full discussion. Norris is concerned not with teeth but with Greed-the title, as George Kurman (Western Illinois Univ.) aptly pointed out, that Erich von Stroheim gave to his film adaptation of the novel. McTeague, a slow-witted giant with no degree in dentistry, is utterly incapable of psychodontic or sociodontic ruminations of the sort that characterize his more sophisticated spiritual descendants of the sixties. However, the chorus of indignation soon made it clear that I had touched a raw nerve in the teeth of many Americanists. I committed at least a tactical error in failing to mention this classic of American naturalism and to justify my omission. William Stone's thoughtful analysis, moreover, has persuaded me that the great gold tooth in Norris' novel has deeper symbolic roots than I had originally suspected. I would like to take this occasion to thank all those colleagues who were sufficiently amused and persuaded by my article to take the trouble to write. I have learned much from their comments, and I am encouraged by the fact that they regard their examples as an affirmation of my basic argument. Verily, they have given me an aye for an aye, a tooth for a tooth.

An Anchorage of Thought: Defining the Role of Aphorism in Wallace Stevens' Poetry

Abstract: R ECENT WORK on Wallace Stevens occasionally remarks on his use of "aphorism." Sometimes the term is used as little more than a passing description of a line in the early poems or plays or in an essay of the middle period of his career. At other times it is used pejoratively to describe what is believed to be Stevens' tendency toward didacticism in his later long poems. Only rarely is the term used purposefully in the analysis of Stevens' wide variety of styles and formats.1 Even in these instances there are differences in opinion as to what constitutes aphoristic expression. Daniel Tomkins pinpoints the basis for such disagreements. He contends that it is difficult to say when Stevens' "aphoristic bent" became most intense and attributes this difficulty to the fact that "defining and locating aphorism is a delicate business."2 It will be the purpose of this essay to define aphorism as precisely as possible and in so doing to allow for the fullest interpretation of its occurrence and function in Stevens'

Emerson and the Dialectics of History

Abstract: A LTHOUGH SCHOLARS have long recognized the dialectical character of Emerson's thought,' they have inadequately explored the significance of dialectic for his view of history. Like many of his contemporaries, Emerson extended the role of dialectic from logic to metaphysics. The Romantics, as everyone knows, attempted to bridge the chasm separating the two worlds of Descartes by "rehumanizing" the world outside the self, by creatively transforming the universe into an expression of the self. They reasserted the primacy of the res cogitans and made the res extensa conform to it. For many Romantic thinkers, thought and reality became identical. Extending the realm of the mind into nature and history, they introduced the laws of thought into nature and history. Whereas dialectic had long been a useful tool for analyzing extramental reality, it now became a principle pervading mind-created reality. All reality was "logical." The greatest exponent of the "new dialectic" was Hegel, but Hegel was far from being alone. As Friedrich Meinecke and W. H. Bruford have

Suffering and Calm in Wordsworth's Early Poetry

Abstract: R EADERS OF Wordsworth have often thought that the ending of The Ruined Cottage evades the poem's emotional and philosophical consequences. The relentless depiction of Margaret's disintegration has seemed incongruous with the sense of calm pervading the closing lines. The tendency has been, with F. R. Leavis, to view this tranquillity as elegiac sleightof-hand, in which the Pedlar's "consummate poetic skill" effects "a disciplined limiting of contemplation to the endurable, and, consequently, a withdrawal to a reassuring environment." Thus, Herbert Lindenberger has compared the poem's ending to Tate's desecration of King Lear; David Perkins has characterized it as a "retreat from 'uneasy thoughts' "; and E. E. Bostetter has said that "in affixing such a conclusion, Wordsworth has in effect repudiated the story as he has told it."'' According to this view, Wordsworth, like a mere sorcerer's apprentice, became frightened at the emotions unleashed by his conjuration and desperately attempted to deny them; we have Wordsworth as existentialist manque, retreating from the abyss of universal evil and despair. Such a reading, whatever its attractiveness, ignores Wordsworth's real fascination with suffering. The early poetry, after all, is virtually a parade of victims; the insane, the miserable, the diseased, decrepit, dying, and dead populate the landscape to the virtual exclusion of the healthy and the normal. The movement of such a mind from the depiction of suffering to a sense of calm surely has a more adequate explanation than a sudden need for decorum or repression; indeed, "calm" or "tranquillity" represents a central Wordsworthian response to the fictional representation of human misery. Paradoxically, the place to begin in talking about the tranquil conclusion of The Ruined Cottage2 is the poem's opening. Here we find a landscape completely unlike that through which the Pedlar and the young man "chearfully pursue" their "evening way" :3 the narrator wanders alone across a hot and desolate plain; the summer sun beats down and the "uplands" show a peculiar hostility as they "feebly glare" at him "through a pale steam"; he toils "with languid feet" baffled by "the slipp'ry ground," and finally

Some Contexts for Bede's Death-Song

Abstract: When read in the contexts of psychology, theology, and Old English poetry, Bede’s Death-Song can be confidently valued as a fine poem, and not merely as venerable wisdom. The design of this eighth-century poem shows substantial correlations with the design of the Epistola Cuthberti, in which it appears. The letter appears to combine eyewitness report with hagiographic conventions. Ambivalence at meeting one’s Judge is expressed both in its narrative and the poem; troubled feelings are balanced by a certain faith. Scriptural echoes reveal Cuthbert’s conscious intention to present the Bede of the letter as an imitator of Christ. Comparison with other Old English poetic treatments of Bede’s theme shows that the poem fully exploits the artistic potential of the vernacular tradition.