Showing papers in "Pmla-publications of The Modern Language Association of America in 1981"

Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women’s Fiction

Abstract: Feminist literary criticism over the past decade has raised the important issue of woman's relationship to the production of prose fiction. Central to the inquiry have been both the desire to identify the specificity of such a “corpus” and the reluctance to define it by inherited notions of sexual difference. Reading Mme de Lafayette's La Princesse de Cleves with George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss in the context of this double agenda suggests the possibility of deciphering a female erotics that structures the plots of women's fiction, plots that reject the narrative logic of the dominant discourse. Traditionally, the critical establishment has condemned these plots as implausible and generally assigned women's novels a marginal position in literary history. Perhaps the grounds of that judgment are less aesthetic than ideological.

The Character in the Veil: Imagery of the Surface in the Gothic Novel

Abstract: Traditional criticism of the Gothic novel, following a topography of the self derived from Freud, has linked sexuality with depth, repression with surface. Gothic convention, however, especially as Ann Radcliffe and M. G. Lewis use it, links surfaces with sexuality and contagion. The Gothic view of character is a social one, and it is concerned with writing and reference. The tracing and retracing of quasi-linguistic markings on surfaces establish personal identity, but only from outside, ex post facto, and through a draining tension between the code and its material support. The repetitious, fixating process of ocular confrontation by which characters recognize themselves and one another is like the process by which readers recognize thematic conventions.

Hendiadys and Hamlet

Abstract: In all his plays Shakespeare uses the Vergilian figure hendiadys some three hundred times, most frequently in his middle plays and most of all in Hamlet. Rare in English speech or other English poetry, hendiadys joins nouns, or sometimes adjectives, in a false or specious union (e.g., “sound and fury” for “furious sound”). Its effect in Hamlet, where it appears perhaps sixty-six times, is often to elevate, estrange, and baffle; and this stylistic use of conjoined terms that are neither parallel nor complementary mirrors the play's deepest themes—especially the suspect character of personal unions and metaphysical connections. Once aware that Shakespeare frequently combines terms this way, we can understand better many puzzling phrases, including some celebrated ones. Three appendixes list instances of hendiadys in Hamlet, tabulate its incidence in all the plays, and discuss some misleading definitions in the OED.

The Logic of Realism: A Hegelian Approach

Abstract: The many facets of the realism debate reflect the complexity of the subject. Realism was an accepted standard of value only during the romantic period; it became more prominent later as it became more problematic. Major senses of “real” in the nineteenth century are (1) universal essence, (2) irregular minute particular, and (3) causal regularity. Realist plotting typically juxtaposes background tableau and foreground coup de theatre; realist style typically consists of multiple silhouettings. Realism is a semiosis by silhouetting. Hegel's analysis of reality in the Science of Logic explains the association of realism with silhouetting, shows the systematic and historical relationships among the various critical positions and the nineteenth-century senses of “real,” and finally locates them with respect to the trope of inversion. The realist or silhouetting style falls between the relational style of the eighteenth century and the dispersive style of the twentieth.

The Rhetoric of Elizabethan Suitors' Letters

Abstract: conduct,"' C. S. Lewis invited us to apply the tools of literary interpretation to human behavior. Thanks in part to his pioneering work, we are aware today of theoretical courtesy books and of literary incarnations such as Spenser's Sir Calidore. But enacted courtesythe matrix of public image for the ruling classstill lies largely unexamined, having fallen out of reach somewhere between "art" and "real life."

Frankenstein: Creation as Catastrophe

Abstract: Much in Frankenstein suggests that the novel and classical psychoanalysis are meant for each other. The creation becomes a significant act, at once paradigmatic and intensely human, when viewed as a repetition of Frankenstein's primal-scene trauma, with the Creature emerging as a representation of the scene and the related oedipal complex. A psychoanalytic interpretation, however, requires a drastic secondary revision of Frankenstein, and not enough insight is purchased by so much blindness. The analyst repeats, yet fails to elucidate, the misreading of world, self, and Creature that renders Frankenstein a tiresome neurotic. But before this personal collapse Frankenstein achieved the sublime. His catastrophe of origination, engendering a creative self that anxiously pursues an impossible desire and an artifact that both represents and eclipses the creator, serves as a paradigm of the genesis of any sublime artwork, any uncanny reanimation project.

Virginia Woolf and Leslie Stephen: History and Literary Revolution

Abstract: Leslie Stephen chose his daughter Virginia Woolf as his literary heir and trained her extensively in history and biography to prepare her for a writing career. Traces of Stephen's training can be found throughout Woolf's work but especially in her literary criticism. Woolf and Stephen share the same assumptions about the nature and aims of literary criticism, assumptions that place them in the tradition of Sainte-Beuve. Further, Stephen and Woolf focus on the same set of forces to describe the birth and evolution of literary genres: both father and daughter say that shifting class structures produce a dominant historical consciousness and that this historical consciousness in turn expresses itself in an appropriate technical form. In the light of this literary historical process, both writers insist, the critic of self-conscious historical vision must be a sympathetic reader of experiments in new literary forms.

Readers in Texts

Abstract: A N INTRIGUING outgrowth of the past decade's awakening fascination with the reception of literary works is the new focus on various types of readers within works. As is often true with such new growths, however, the study of these fictional beings is beginning to look like a tangled mass because of its unruly profuseness. Confronted with studies of readers' roles, ideal readers, fictive readers, intended readers, implied readers, abstract readers, virtual readers, and myriad other terms that often seem to duplicate one another, the novice cannot be blamed for turning with impatience to tried and true approaches to literature. I intend to clear up some of this confusion, present a workable synthetic taxonomy, and, in the process, attempt to bridge a regrettable gap of awareness between Englishand Germanlanguage criticism. Along the way I examine the work of several outstanding theorists, most notably Erwin Wolff, Wolfgang Iser, Walter Ong, Hannelore Link, and Gerald Prince. German-language criticism reserves the term "fictive reader" (fiktiver Leser) for a very restricted phenomenon: an extreme example is one of the hapless victims that Tristram Shandy berates after interrupting the narrative:

Blake, Crane, Whitman, and Modernism: A Poetics of Pure Possibility

Abstract: L'angoisse des modernistes devant le sens d'une perte de la relation avec la tradition. Dans ce contexte, l'"angoisse de l'influence" prend une autre signification: retrouver une relation avec le passe aux depens de l'originalite, reaction defensive qui ne fait que reprimer une angoisse plus profonde de la perte du moment present dans la qualite formelle inevitable de la litterature. Pour sortir de cette impasse, Crane retourne a B. et a W. dont la poesie du "pur possible" ne mediatise pas le present dans un passe durable mais le recouvre comme un present possible.

Mortgaging One's Work to the World: Publication and the Structure of Montaigne's Essais

Abstract: revelation in an otherwise dispassionately analytical essay is itself an instance of mimesis, not in the Auerbachian sense of a written representation of reality, but in the Platonic sense of sympathetic participation in the literary performance of a narrator.' Auerbach imitates the procedure reflected in Montaigne's passage and demonstrates, even as he describes, the contagiousness of a style that embraces every contour of thought so closely that its power is attributed to the urgency of pure spontaneous creativity, "the vitality of the will to expression" (Auerbach, p. 290). At another level, Montaigne's expression (however vital) and Auerbach's response to it are, of course, not spontaneous at all, the scholarly commentator's experience of the Essais having been prescribed for him by contextualizing directives embedded in the writing. Throughout his book, Montaigne painstakingly marshals conventions of artistic unity to lend coherence to his self-image. Determined to sustain his claim of a book and a self in unity, he affirms the congruence of the two by claiming for his text the linguistic and thematic spontaneity of speech: "Je parle au papier comme je parle au premier que je rencontre" 'I speak to my paper as I speak to t e first man I meet' (III, i, 767b).3 But since we know from the balance of Auerbach's essay that Montaigne's style is anything but unstudied, we must view such pronouncements as attempts to press purely literary ideals of unity into the service of self-portraiture and to solicit the reader's acceptance of this transvaluation. The result is the creation of an illusion autobiographique in which Auerbach accepts and plays a part. Nor is he alone: others who attend to the narrative

Assertion and Assumption: Fictional Patterns and the External World

Abstract: Although representational art does not reflect an empirically verifiable world, novels are nevertheless useful as historical documents, because they can reveal the views that authors expect readers to hold. Extracting those views, however, requires distinguishing the beliefs that authors expect in their readers from beliefs that readers pretend to take on for the sake of the fiction (the belief that a person can turn into a bug, in Metamorphosis). Such an analysis is possible because of a basic rule of reading: all fiction, even the most fantastic, is realistic except where it signals its readers to the contrary. This rule implies that what is not said in a text (a text's assumptions) is a surer guide to readers' views than what is (its assertions). The “sudden-reward” pattern (familiar from Cinderella) and its unmasking by Mark Twain in Pudd'nhead Wilson are analyzed to demonstrate how readers' beliefs can be extracted from an apparently unrealistic convention.

The Antigone as Cultural Touchstone: Matthew Arnold, Hegel, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Margaret Drabble

Abstract: Matthew Arnold asserts that because the motivation of the Antigone's heroine is obsolete the play's action no longer interests us. This dismissal contrasts sharply with Hegel's recurring celebratio...

Pushkin’s Saturnine Cupid: The Poetics of Parody in The Tales of Belkin

Abstract: The Tales of Belkin have suggested that they are not what they seem-a cycle of simple, diverting stories. Why Pushkin chooses to filter the telling of the Tales through several narrative voices, wh...

Necessity and the Role of the Hero in Shelley's Prometheus Unbound

Abstract: Critics generally have assumed that the millennial fulfillment Shelley's masterpiece dramatizes takes its origin from the hero's moral recognition and repentence at the opening of the play. Apparen...

Truth and Calliope: Ezra Pound's Malatesta

Abstract: and "fiction," "truth" and "falsehood," has been to our social organization.1 Whether or not critics have tried to identify specific formal features as differentiae, they have insisted that history and poetry are essentially different species of discourse, to be apprehended and judged in quite different ways. The criteria for judging fictions have, of course, varied from age to age; but as Roland Barthes points out, "the relation of historical events is a matter traditionally subject, in our culture, to the prescriptions of historical 'science,' to be judged only by the criteria of conformity to 'what really happened' and by the principles of 'rational' exposition."" In this context the epic-"the tale of the tribe," in the phrase that Ezra Pound borrowed from Kipling to describe his own Cantos-has proved something of a problem. It was Pound who defined an epic as "a poem including history"; yet readers of The Cantos are by no means the first to be troubled by the problematic nature of the relationship that Pound rather cavalierly designates as "including."" When, in "The Poet," Emerson calls for someone to sing the tale of the American tribe, he appears to be calling for a new Homer by claiming that the American story-"banks and tariffs, the newspaper and caucus, Methodism and Unitarianism"-is no different in kind from the matter of the Iliad.4

Repetition and Excess in Tiempo de silencio

Abstract: Luis Martin Santos' Tiempo de silencio displays a peculiar vulnerability to commentary. The novel both invites interpretation and "thematizes" the invitation. In this essay I offer a reading of the novel that explores-and exploits-such vulnerability. More concretely, I offer a reading anchored in two related notions, repetition and excess, for in and through them the work discloses its hermeneutic complexity. Accordingly my discussion moves from substances to events; it moves, that is, from a consideration of how excess is embodied in certain emblematic substances (Secs. 1 and 2) to a consideration of the repetitiveness of the novel's events (Secs. 3 and 4). Such an exercise should not only shed new light on one of the most significant Spanish novels of this century but also, implicitly, raise important questions about the relationship between a commented text and its commentary.

Seeing through Macbeth

Abstract: When we create or interpret a text's meaning and genre, numerous and often conflicting historical concerns mediate our insights. Because of its historical situation, Macbeth imperfectly articulates...

Nabokov’s Invitation: Literature as Execution

Abstract: Although Nabokov enjoyed high acclaim as a serious artist, his work never pretended to the high seriousness of "moral fiction." Yet he obviously intended, through his forbidding forewords and enticing texts, to invite his readers to reflect on the engagement with "reality" that serious fiction encourages. With principled wit, his compositions shatter the durable illusion that "realistic" characters and readers can somehow cocreate the structures that hold them captive. Nabokov's characteristic refusal to finish off his compositions frees both characters and readers to create a posttextual existence. His novel Invitation to a Beheading, although often misunderstood as a transparent allegory, is an opaque parable that resists the complicity of writer and reader, of leader and follower, to execute identities and meanings. Nabokov's modernistic narrative-as much as, if not more than, the conventional moral fictions of mimetic realism-is an ethical form that values the irreducible density of human experience.

Blake, Foucault, and the Classical Episteme

Abstract: The accepted periodization of English literary history, a linear alternation of convention and revolt, has made Blake the ancestral and archetypal romantic. But an examination of the language of his texts, using Michel Foucault's archaeological method, demonstrates the classical structure of his oeuvre, which is a variant of classical discourse as defined and described by Foucault. The deep structure of Blake's discourse is logical, but the logic is not that of general grammar; it is the logic of identity, not the logic of difference. The assimilation of Blake's oeuvre into Foucault's classical episteme enriches and expands Foucault's model of the period; it also offers a model of the transformation from classical to modern that may clarify some of the difficulties of Foucault's scheme of historical change.

Crusoe in Exile

Abstract: Defoe calls Robinson Crusoe a "fugitive" fable, an "allegorical" narrative history that records on many levels the strains of displacement and the powers of reconstitution. Crusoe's experience offers Defoe the fictional opportunity to represent different sequences of narrative action that resemble and sometimes duplicate one another. Island exile for Crusoe substitutes for structurally comparable events-imaginative, psychological, religious, and, in the carefully worked out timing of the adventure, political. The politics of exile are especially significant for Crusoe's several transformative conversions, not merely his turning from place to place but his turning of one place into another. The classical exile, displaced abroad and replaced at home, becomes in Robinson Crusoe doubly situated-Crusoe's island home is literally remote but allegorically familiar. This paradox has narrative, historical, and national implications.

The Poem as Place: Three Modes of Scenic Rendering in the Lyric

Abstract: OETRY THAT describes places in the natural world defies Lessing's contention in Laokoon that poetry, since it cannot paint with natural signs, should confine itself to narrative, to the representation of events in time. In spite of Lessing's objection, the poetry of place has continued to flourish in Germany, as well as in England, and has, indeed, almost entirely usurped the sway of narrative. This triumph can only have come about because natural description is in fact far more versatile than Lessing thought it was; in the ensuing argument I give some account of its several functions. There are essentially three orientations toward landscape description in the lyric: (1) the kind that describes an external place, a locale that is meant to serve as a backdrop, ornament, or illustration for the poet's thinking; (2) the kind that transforms an external scene into a region of the poet's mind; and (3) the kind that claims to be a habitable region in its own right. These three orientations toward scenic rendering can be found in poets as diverse as Brockes and Rilke, and they are proposed in the present argument as a modest, loosely drawn typology of descriptive poetry in general. To arrive inductively at this typology, then, I deliberately choose examples that span three centuries and that, while as diverse as possible, share certain images. My essay concludes with a sustained discussion of one poet's struggle to enter the third type, the poem as place. Within the single stance toward nature that Lessing would have recognized as "landscape description," the stance that roughly constitutes the first of my three types, there is a range from ostensibly pure description with no apparent ulterior design to the sorts of description that obviously refer to some sphere of meaning beyond themselves, like Walt Whitman's "Live-Oak""its looks, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself"-or like Thomas Hardy's view from the coppice gate in "The Darkling Thrush" -"The land's sharp features seemed to be / The Century's corpse outleant." Quite often landscape description modulates from simple rendering to some form of the pathetic fallacy, as in the opening of Gray's "Elegy":

Eliot's “Journey of the Magi”

Abstract: Reply to Harris, Daniel A. “Language, History, and Text in Eliot’s ‘Journey of the Magi.’” PMLA. 1980 Oct; 95(5): 838-56.

Conflicting Names, Conflicting Laws: Zorrilla's Don Juan Tenorio

Abstract: E ACH year on All Souls' Day Spanishspeaking audiences ritually gather together to see Zorrilla's Don Juan Tenorio (1844), the most popular work on the Don Juan theme in the Hispanic world. Many of the spectators know by heart entire passages from the play. Zorrilla wrote Don Juan Tenorio at the age of twenty-seven, in the short span of twenty days, and claimed later in life that he knew of no precedents other than El burlador de Sevilla (1617?) by Tirso de Molina and No hay plazo que no se cumpla ni deuda que no se pague (1744) by Antonio de Zamora.1 There is no doubt that Don Juan Tenorio reveals all the characteristics of a