Showing papers in "Style in 1996"

Life Stories: The Creation of Coherence

Abstract: Charlotte Linde. Life Stories: The Creation of Coherence. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. xiv and 242 pp. $49.95 cloth. This book takes a broadly sociolinguistic approach to the life story, which the author characterizes as a discourse unit crucial for the presentation of self in everyday life. Life Stories is a richly innovative study, packed with insights into the way we use stories to create and maintain an identity over time. Like other groundbreaking works, the book outlines problems that warrant further investigation, sometimes raising as many questions as it resolves. Describing the life story as a social unit exchanged between people, an oral unit that can be contrasted with written autobiographies, and a discontinuous unit shaped through a series of tellings over an extended duration (4), Charlotte Linde goes on to offer a more precise definition of life stories: A life story consists of all the stories and associated discourse units, such as explanations and chronicles, and the connections between them, told by an individual during the course of his/her lifetime that satisfy the following two criteria: 1. The stories and associated discourse units contained in the life story have as their primary evaluation a point about the speaker, not a general point about the way the world is. 2. The stories and associated discourse units have extended reportability; that is, they are tellable and are told and retold over the course of a long period of time. (21) Linde's study focuses on life stories in which issues of profession play a preeminent role (53-57), but her more particular concern is the creation of coherence by tellers as well as listeners of such stories. For Linde, coherence is not only a property of texts, deriving from the way the parts of the text relate to the whole and from the way the text relates to other texts of its type, but also a "cooperative achievement" of the speaker and the addressee (12). In her account of how we build up coherent discourse units in telling the story of our lives, the author draws on a number of subfields within (socio)linguistics, including discourse analysis, the lexicogrammatical study of discourse cohesion initiated by M. A. K. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan, and the ethnomethodological school of conversation analysis. As Life Stories proceeds, the book displays a special indebtedness to the method of narrative analysis developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s by William Labov and Joshua Waletzky. Following an overview of the problems connected with the life story in chapter 1, chapter 2 ("What is a Life Story") spells out the technical definition of life stories quoted above and contrasts this discourse unit with other modes of self-presentation in other research contexts, including autobiography and biography, journals and diaries, and the life history in psychology and anthropology (37-50). In discussing extended reportability as a criterion for the life story, Linde makes the point that The reportability of a given event or sequence of events is not fixed; it depends not only on the nature of the events, but on the relation of the speaker and addressee(s), the amount of time that has passed between the event and the telling of the story, and the personal skills of the speaker as narrator. (22) Hence the life story is at once structurally and interpretively open; it is subject to expansion and contraction by the addition of new stories and the loss of old ones, and furthermore the reinterpretation of old stories continually produces new evaluations of self (31). Such considerations prompt Linde to pose a question that may already have occurred to the reader at this stage of the analysis: namely, "whether it is meaningful to treat as a unit an entity that is so fluid, and so subject to constant reinterpretation and revision, that it can never be completed" (35-36). Unfortunately, Linde fails to address this problem adequately here, using only the analogy of a cloud of butterflies to suggest that the life story, too, is a sort of composite entity (36). …

Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford

Abstract: Linda Dowling. Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994. xvi + 173. $25.95 cloth. During Oscar Wilde's prosecution for "acts of gross indecency with another male," the evidence brought against him included several of his own letters, among them a sensuously figured encomium to Lord Alfred Douglas and his "red rose-leaf lips": "I know Hyacinthus, whom Apollo loved so madly, was you in Greek days" (Letters 326). In that florid conjunction of red lips and Greek days, we tend to see but another late-Victorian instance of a homosexual desire seeking expression under the aegis of Ancient Greece, with all its cultural prestige. But as the interpretation of homosexual desire itself becomes ever more complex in our time, it is well to note that Wilde would later recall with dismay the judicial and popular interpretations of that letter, protesting that "every construction but the right one is put on it" (Letters 441). It is at least as problematic today as ever before, what a "right" construction might after all be in such a case. Linda Dowling provides some compelling suggestions with her Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford, an engaging and elegantly presented discussion of the rise of Oxonian homosexual discourse. As the first scholarly book to focus entirely on the Victorian intrication of things Greek with things "homosexual," Dowling's study advances a welcome convergence of contemporary historical and New Historical procedures. Following studies by Richard Jenkyns and Frank Turner in the early 1980s, a growing body of historical scholarship has clarified the privileged role that Ancient Greece played in the imaginations of many Victorians. And in a largely independent critical vein over the last decade or so, appropriations of Michel Foucault's ideas into English-language scholarship have profoundly enriched and complicated our awareness of the construction of male homosexual subjectivity in the late Victorian era. Dowling draws from both these critical directions in tracing the development of Oxford Greek studies into what she calls a "homosexual code." Dowling begins by arguing that crises in English political and religious consciousness made Greece appear appealing on grounds quite other than an incipiently homosexual sympathy. When it comes to diagnosing the anxieties of the Victorians, cultural flux is of course the usual suspect, and Dowling ably details the manifold political and religious transformations that were to prepare the way for Victorians to find in Ancient Greece a saving alternative. At a time when a worrisomely scientistic and materialistic culture was rendering theological orthodoxies increasingly untenable, the Greek philosophers (Plato, at least) seemed to provide an alternative ground for transcendental value. And in an England made anxious by French Jacobinism and creeping political fragmentation, the sane vitalism of Greece seemed to offer a salutary vehicle for negotiation between the Scylla of anarchic radicalism and the Charybdis of entropic political stagnation. Tenets of this sort are in fact common to most recent studies of Greece and the Victorians, so Dowling's distinctive achievement here emerges in the particular range and quality of reference she vitalizes relative to these topics, and in the suggestive force with which she charts the translation of this Greek investment into a specifically homosocial/homosexual apologetic. Like Alan Sinfield in his recent The Wilde Century, Dowling takes up the concept of effeminacy and charts the term's use in a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century "classical republican discourse" that would continue to show its influence into the Victorian period. In this classical republicanism, "effeminacy" signified, not a failure of male heterosexual inclination, but rather a failure of martial propensity and valor, a failure of the civic virtus. In such a civic discourse, claims Dowling, male effeminacy posed a threat to the precarious sense of security available to a polis worried about military invasion. …

Metaphor and mind style in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Abstract: A number of different studies of narrative fiction have highlighted the role played by lexical, syntactic and transitivity patterns in the creation of what Fowler has called mind style: "any distinctive linguistic presentation of an individual mental self" (Fowler, Linguistics and the Novel 103). Although it has received scant attention in studies of mind style, metaphor can also contribute to the projection of characteristic and possibly deviant ways of perceiving and conceptualising the world. The theory of metaphor developed by Lakoff, Johnson and Turner (Lakoff and Johnson, Lakoff and Turner) has important implications for a theory of mind style, since it can be used to account for the cognitive implications of consistent metaphorical patterns in texts. On the other hand, the notion of mind style is highly relevant to the cognitive approach to metaphor, since it highlights the way in which Lakoff and Johnson's claims concerning the connections between conventional metaphors and culture can be applied to the connections between non-conventional uses of metaphor and individual world views. A detailed analysis of the language of Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest shows how metaphorical patterns are used to create the idiosyncratic mind style of the novel's first person narrator and to chart his development throughout the novel.

Windows of Focalization: Deconstructing and Reconstructing a Narratological Concept

Abstract: In general, focalization theory addresses the options and ranges of orientational restrictions of narrative presentation. Gerard Genette first associated focalization with a "focal character" and the questions who sees? and who perceives? Following Mieke Bal, however, many narratologists now believe that focalization covers a much wider scope than either vision or perception and that the narrator is a potential "focalizer," too. First-generation narratologists like Genette and Seymour Chatman view this expanded scope with considerable skepticisms, and despite such convincing recent applications as William Edmiston's Hindsight and Insight, focalization theory at present is caught in a dilemma of conflicting approaches. My attempt to sort out these various approaches begins by reviving the original field-of-vision conception as the basis for defining a general framework and key concepts of focalization. Section 2 deconstructs the major axioms of focalization expounded by Genette. Section 3 traces the theme of "seeing" in fiction to Henry James's "house of fiction" and its million windows: drawing from George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's treatment of natural metaphors, Ray Jackendoff's theory of cognitive interfaces, and Werner Wolf's concept of aesthetic illusion, I reclaim James's window metaphor as a core model of focalization, defined on the basis of cognition and reception. Finally, section 4 considers Chatman's argument against focalizing narrators and the problem of "embedded" focalization. Throughout, my aim is to argue for an interdisciplinary, integrative, and non-dichotomous approach towards focalization. 1. FOCUS-1 AND FOCUS-2 Let me begin with a few simple vision-related questions. How do we define our "field of vision?" Does it have a specific shape? Does it support the notion of an "angle of vision?" Where in this field does one place oneself, the observer? Does this field have a "horizon," a "point of view?" Does it allow us to "focus on" certain objects and to leave other objects "unfocused?" How does it relate to "the world?" The answers to these questions may elicit a model that looks (more or less) like (1), below:(1) In (1), the field of vision (V) is represented as having a conical shape like that of the area lit by a torch. It is taken in by an eye and its shape determined by an angle of vision. The eye, represented more technically, is a convex lens (L) that collects rays by refraction - a kind of controlled distortion - in a "burning point" or focus (F1), referred to hereafter as focus-1. Like a photographic lens, the eye is adjustable, allowing it to pick out and concentrate on a subsection of the visual field, also commonly called focus or area in focus (F2), henceforth focus-2 or focus of interest or focus of attention. If focus-1 stands metonymically for the eye's owner, then focus-1 and focus-2 are alternate terms for what Bal, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Marjet Berendsen, Ansgar Nunning, Edmiston, and others call, respectively, the subject and the object of focalization. Finally, the field-of-vision area in figure (1) covers a part of "the world" (W), represented simplistically as a circle. At this point it must of course be acknowledged that (1), like all models, is an idealized and reductive abstraction; in fact, I might as well admit that it contains a number of inaccuracies.(2) But although it says little about the actual mechanisms of seeing, it will, I hope, say much about how we think we see things. And although the model depicts V, F2, and W as if they were sets in a Venn diagram - inviting one to play around with objects that are visible or invisible, seen centrally or peripherally, close up or far off, and so on - my aim is not to make a philosophical statement either about the nature of these objects or about what philosophers call the "veridicality" of their perception. Rather, (1) is an attempt to construct a mental model of vision (Johnson-Laird), detailing "a set of notions about [one's] own inner structures" (Hofstadter 282). …

Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time

Abstract: Gary Saul Morson. Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994. xvi + 331 pp. $30.00 cloth. In Narrative and Freedom, Gary Saul Morson continues his ambitious critical project for redefining the temporal boundaries and ethical dimensions of narratology-a critical inquiry posited previously by the author in the pages of several important volumes, including such works as Boundaries of Genre, Hidden in Plain View, and, with Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin. In his latest study, Morson explores the manner in which elements of temporality-including such issues as contingency, chance, rumor, and the viability of omens, among a host of other topics-inform narratives and the ways in which readers experience them. Drawing upon sources as diverse as Sophocles, George Eliot, network television, It's a Wonderful Life, and the dissident work of Mikhail Bulgakov, Morson attempts to map the "doctrines of inevitability" that mark a variety of fictive modes and their concomitant renderings of time and the illusion-generating nature of the future. Morson accents his study with a number of insightful and innovative features, particularly evinced by his valuable and refreshingly unself-conscious examination of sporting events and the qualities of narrative contingency that problematize their subsequent viewings. In addition to the flexible manner in which Morson traverses the scholarship of other disciplines-including discussion of the diverging, often extraliterary arguments of such thinkers as Mikhail Bakhtin, Stephen Jay Gould, and William James-Narrative and Freedom finds its greatest strength in Morson's prescient interest in the historical narratives of the present, a feature of his text evidenced most notably through his reflection upon the recent passing of the Soviet regime. Such moments, Morson argues, affirm the openness of time and its uncanny knack for mitigating the perceived inevitability of the future. Following the sudden demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, for example, "the future was no longer guaranteed. After decades of certainty, the possibility of possibility was reborn" (1). Morson applies a similar approach to the elasticity of time in his narratological analyses and reveals the broad range of consequences that writers (and readers) confront when they commit themselves to a specific set of temporal requirements. Drawing upon the theoretical insights of Bakhtin regarding narrative and its temporal foundations, Morson proffers a useful terminology for elucidating the directionality of time and its significance to literary study. By demonstrating the manner in which elements of both possibility and determinism impinge upon history, Morson extends his argument profitably from the shores of popular culture-including the aforementioned sporting events, television shows, and movies-to literary classics from Oedipus Rex to Crime and Punishment. In this way, Morson underscores the value of interpreting what he calls the "human dimension of time" and its application across genres, while also providing convincing testimony regarding the revelatory power of time as a force that shapes both our affinity for and our expectations of narratives. Originally developed through his association with Michael Andre Bernstein (whose Foregone Conclusion published simultaneously, complements Narrative and Freedom), the concept of "sideshadowing" undergirds much of the narratological theory of Morson's study. In addition to denoting the realm of possibilities and alternatives that pertain to a series of actual events-literary, historical, or otherwise-sideshadowing refers to an openended sense of temporality and offers dynamic implications for the way in which we read both narratives and our lives. Unlike foreshadowing, which connotes a kind of authorial predestination and prefiguration, narrative sideshadowing allows readers to dispatch with traditionally fixed notions of temporality and perceive instead the anisotropic-or multidirectionalqualities of time that narratives attempt to replicate. …

Theories of Metamorphosis: From Metatrope to Textual Revision

Abstract: The theorization of the literary or artistic representation of metamorphosis is a rather recent phenomenon. The first sustained theoretical conceptualizations, though not yet full-length studies, of literary examples of metamorphosis were undertaken in the late 1930s by Gaston Bachelard, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Roman Jakobson. During the last few decades, however, literary and artistic metamorphosis has been more widely theorized, and full-length studies have now been dedicated to this subject. Some critics apply various conceptual frames, while others map out the corpus of literary metamorphosis more generally, and still others conduct period studies of the topos or the motif of literary metamorphosis. It is worth asking why it is that we are witnessing a proliferation or even, to use the term of Jennifer Waelti-Walters, an "epidemic," not just in metamorphic imagery in literature but also in the theoretical popularity of the metamorphosis subject (505). The increased interest cannot simply be a result of the increased volume in recent years of published literary criticism; more likely, certain predominant theoretical questions and practices in current Western intellectual cultures make this subject an attractive field of inquiry in scholarly work. One central concern shared by many of the recent theoretical approaches is that metamorphosis usually happens to someone, to a subject, and that linguistic or human being is often, in the metamorphic process, juxtaposed or interlinked with something that is not only "other" but often nonlinguistic as well. Dating at least as far back as Homer's Circe episode, the transformation of Lot's wife into a pillar of salt, and King Nebuchadnezzar's ordeal as a beast of prey in the Old Testament, metamorphosis has frequently been used to represent a punishment involving a nonlinguistic state of being. As such, and as is argued in many treatises on the topic regardless of their theoretical frames, literary metamorphosis provokes complicated questions concerning subject and language as well as perception, knowledge, and textuality. It is now quite commonly accepted that literary metamorphosis tests the limits of a "character" and thus of representing a subject in writing. The important question for reading is: what characteristics must the protagonist maintain in order to be conceived as a single subject? But if metamorphosis problematizes the boundaries between the subject and its other or between language and nonlanguage, it also challenges the limits of conception. Thus, many studies of metamorphosis underscore epistemological and ontological questions concerning the subject's relationship to the world and to others as well as the subject's knowledge of itself and the world. Metamorphosis as a tropological problem is another subject addressed in many recent studies. Most readings of literary metamorphosis - whether based, for example, on a historical, thematic, motif, or genre (such as fantasy)(1) approach - involve presuppositions of metamorphosis as a trope. One of the most common claims about the tropological status of metamorphosis is that it draws from various categories of tropes, especially metaphor and metonymy, and yet, as a representation of a striking alteration and somehow miraculous change, that it is also capable of playing with the distinction between the literal and the figurative. The paradoxical status of metamorphosis as a trope further complicates the problems concerning subjectivity and its depiction in a literary character as well as the relationship between knowledge and textuality. I shall now review discussions of metamorphosis as a trope in order to examine more comprehensively whether it is possible that various tropological structures, fusions of tropes, and metatropological functions of metamorphosis - and not just the seemingly infinite thematic possibilities of metamorphosis - are responsible for making it such a viable image for representing change. …

Reader, Text, and Subjectivity: Toni Morrison's 'Beloved' as Lacan's Gaze Qua Object

Abstract: In her introduction to the 1995 PMLA issue on "Colonialism and the Postcolonial Condition," Linda Hutcheon proposes that in place of a unitary subject, definitions of postcolonial should yield a "'multiplication' of identities and the intersection of nation, gender, sexuality, class, and race, as well as history, religion, caste, and language" She concludes that "race, class, gender, and sexuality all participate in the complex politics of representation," and therefore suggests "multiple constituencies of postcolonial theory and practice" (11-12) Homi Bhabha concurs that these multiple subject positions "inhabit any claim to identity in the modern world" (Location 1) The act of reading, that is, the interaction between reader and text (what Wendy Harding and Jacky Martin call the "interface between cultures in conflict" [6]), further reflects the role of intersubjectivity in identity formation The following discussion explores how the text of Toni Morrison's Beloved illustrates how identity components intersect in the maintenance of subjectivity(1) A multiplication of identities occurs on several levels: within the text, character identity alters according to changing interactions with others; simultaneously, the reader's subject position fades, then reinscribes itself as a result of encountering the text My interest in this reader-text interaction emerged as a result of reading Beloved I was captivated by Morrison's texts in the same way that I was with Faulkner's novels (the subject of my doctoral dissertation) What was it about Morrison's work that recreated my experience with Faulkner's, and how were these experiences similar or different? Both authors use a circular, open-ended, evocative, "feminine" style, both emphasize the power of memory, and both reenact and resist racism Yet Morrison's world registers as much more distressing and alarming than Faulkner's I wondered how my multiple constituencies - female, Jewish, white, middle class, American - interact with Morrison's text In other words, when and how does the reader, who begins the text in a subject position, become the object of the gaze of the narrative? To address this question, I would like to consider what Slavoj Zizek refers to as the "gaze qua object" in Morrison's Beloved, with brief introductory comments about Faulkner's texts In Seminar XI, Lacan describes the paradoxical relationship between the gaze and the eye: "In the scopic field, everything is articulated between two terms that act in an antinomic way - on the side of things, there is the gaze, that is to say, things look at me, and yet I see them" (Four Fundamental 109) Zizek explains that "the eye viewing the object is on the side of the subject, while the gaze is on the side of the object When I look at an object [text], the object is always already gazing at me, and from a point at which I cannot see it" (109) Readers, like observers of a painting, become the object of the text at the moment that some "phallic" spot, some "paradoxical point undermines our position as 'neutral,"objective' observer This is the point at which the observer is already included, inscribed in the observed scene - in a way, it is the point from which the picture [text] itself looks back at us" (Zizek 91) Zizek suggests that in nostalgic works, as through the naive and innocent gaze of a child, the reader or viewer sees "in the object (in the image it views) its own gaze 'sees itself seeing' [providing] the very illusion of perfect self-mirroring" (114) But, as Zizek explains, Lacan proposes an irreducible discord between the gaze qua object and the subject's eye Far from being the point of self-sufficient self-mirroring, the gaze qua object functions like a blot that blurs the transparency of the viewed image [T]he function of the nostalgic object is precisely to conceal the antinomy between eye and gaze - ie the traumatic impact of the gaze qua object …

Relational Reconsiderations: Reliability, Heterosexuality, and Narrative Authority in 'Villette.'

Abstract: Contemporary narrative theorists have come far in their understanding of "person" since Wayne C. Booth, in his Afterword to The Rhetoric of Fiction, conceded that this category was - contrary to his earlier claim - "radically underworked" (412). Yet remaining curiously absent from our discussions about the workings of person is a sustained analysis of un/reliability in homodiegesis.(1) Calling "a narrator reliable when he speaks or acts in accordance with the norms of the work (which is to say, the implied author's norms), unreliable when he does not," Booth created these categories to explain how dramatic irony creates a disparity between implied author, narrator, and reader, a distance that functions rhetorically to engage the reader along a different ethical axis than the narrator, thereby complicating a narrative's logic. Booth's rhetorics, of both Fiction and Irony, acknowledge two types of unreliability: those of ethical norms and those of narrative fact (see esp. ch. 7, RoF, and ch. 3, A Rhetoric of Irony). Booth's definitions have provided stable foundations for rhetorical analyses that others have refined over time. For example, Susan Lanser suggests looking at a narrator's reliability in terms of a continuum in which a narrator can be seen as "developing . . . through the course of a text" (The Narrative Act 172); James Phelan reconsiders a key assumption behind both factual and ethical reliability, that of a "continuity between narrator and character," and concludes that "the possibility of divergence between the character's functions and the narrator's function" exists (Narrative as Rhetoric 11012).(2) Neither Lanser's nor Phelan's work is inimical to Booth's; rather, their modifications and extensions reflect the resilience of these rhetorical categories. Some interpretive practices, however, have at times misused Booth's typology, embracing an "either/or" logic to validate a particular reading, even one at odds with a text's narrative dynamics. As a result, these interpretations tend to emphasize either unreliability of ethics or unreliability of facts and/or to characterize a narrator as either reliable or unreliable at any given moment in the narrative progression (even when s/he develops through the course of the progression).(3) Such has been the case with interpretations of Charlotte Bronte's Villette, especially those written during the 1980s. II The 1980s were a time when many feminist agendas, especially those of some Americans, sought to promote readings that empowered women (as authors, literary characters, and readers).(4) Villette lent itself perfectly to such a critical enterprise because of the myriad ways in which the text foregrounds female authority and autonomy. When we look at this body of criticism, two related patterns emerge: (1) the tendency to separate narrative events, be they of story or of discourse, into two types, those that reaffirm and those that subvert traditional power structures; and (2) the ritualistic invocation of the categories of un/reliability as a method to privilege the discourse over the story.(5) The first trend relates to ideological concerns about narrative authority. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Karen Lawrence, Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, and Brenda S. Silver all share a methodology that locates two distinct narrative tracks - that of story-events (progression toward heterosexual union) and that of discourse events (progression toward narrative authority) - and then places them in a binary opposition, privileging the track that might subvert patriarchal power (authority) over the one that could reaffirm traditional power structures (union).(6) These critics, despite their differences in focus, share the conclusion that the death of M. Paul Emanuel at the end of Villette signifies a rejection of both the cultural construction of heterosexual marriage and the aesthetic convention of the happy ending. In this view, Bronte's narrative ultimately privileges female autonomy and narrative authority. …

No Country to Call Home: A Study of Castillo's 'Mixquiahuala Letters.' (Ana Castillo)

Abstract: I cannot say I am a citizen of the world as Virginia Woolf, speaking as an Anglo woman born to economic means, declared herself; nor can I make the same claim to U.S. citizenship as Adrienne Rich does despite her universal feeling for humanity. As a mestiza born to the lower strata, I am treated at best, as a second class citizen, at worst, as a non-entity. I am commonly perceived as a foreigner everywhere I go, including in the United States and in Mexico. Ana Castillo, Massacre of the Dreamers In Ana Castillo's The Mixquiahuala Letters, the narrator struggles with the problem that Castillo describes as being without a home, the problem of having no clearly defined identity to call one's own. As a result, the narrator not only reflects upon her self in the novel, but also, ultimately, recognizes the constructedness of her self. The Mixquiahuala Letters is made up of letters written by a young mestiza woman, Teresa, to her friend Alicia, concerning Teresa's and Alicia's friendship and the forces that work upon both women during their travels in Mexico and the United States. Some features of Castillo's novel are notably postmodern, for example, its particular form of epistolary narrative, the structure of which may only be determined by the reader, and the narrator's reference to herself as "i." The letters that make up the novel are numbered, but Castillo suggests that their arrangement is arbitrary and that the reader's own preference for the novel's outcome should determine their order. In giving such a flexible structure to the novel, Castillo creates a text that cannot be defined by any unified ideology. Similarly, her choice of "i" as pronoun for her self undermines the notion of the authorial "I" in that it refuses to indicate the authority representing dominant discourses. Yet in saying "i," Teresa, through her letters, can voice a self, a fragmented self that resists ideological definition. Teresa is, from the outset, aware of the conflicting identities encompassed by her self. As a mestiza, she is U.S. American (from Chicago), Mexican, and Native-American, or "Indian."(1) Further, she is Catholic, a religion that includes not only Christian superstition but also that of her Native-American heritage, much of which has been absorbed by the Catholic tradition in the mestiza culture; and she is intellectual, a quality that requires her to disregard her superstitions. In addition, to complicate the relationships among these identities, she is a woman. Teresa writes her letters roughly between the ages of twenty and thirty, as a way to "make sense" of both her own and Alicia's experiences. By writing the letters, she is able to gain some distance from both her experiences and her feelings, as she expresses here: i doubt if what i'm going to recall for both our sakes in the following pages will coincide one hundred percent with your recollections, but as you make use of my determination to attempt a record of some sort, to stir your memory, try not to look for flaws or inaccuracies. Rather, keep the detachment you've strived for since knowing, if you kept it close, it would go on hurting. This isn't a tale of our experiences, but of two women. (53) The act of writing these letters is often disturbing for Teresa, and once having written them, she is not necessarily any more at peace than she was before. As she notes in letter 16, "when one is confronted by the mirror, the spirit trembles" (55). Yet, there is a need to write. Although what Teresa learns by looking in the mirror/writing her letters is not comforting, it allows her a new sense of agency. This agency comes primarily from her observation that reality is constructed, that is, the act of writing gives her a medium, first for deconstructing oppressive ideologies, and then for constructing her own reality, including her self. The constructedness of things is emphasized by the structural play Castillo sets up in the text itself, demanding the reader's recognition of its nature as a construct and participation in the construction of her/his own reality. …

Stop the World, I Want to Get off! Identity and Circularity in Gertrude Stein's the World Is Round

Abstract: In his biography of Margaret Wise Brown, Awakened by the Moon, Leonard Marcus explains that Gertrude Stein wrote her first children's book, The World is Round, at Brown's suggestion (2).(1) Having found immense personal satisfaction with her own work in the picture book genre, Brown sensed that, given some nudging, other writers might also find the field of children's literature rewarding. Thus, during the summer of 1938, Brown - then editor of Scott publishing company - sent letters to Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and John Steinbeck, inviting them to write children's books for the firm. Gertrude Stein replied to Brown's offer with "an enthusiastic affirmative" (Marcus 99). When the finished manuscript of Stein's story arrived from France that November, Brown and several friends from Scott gathered at her apartment. Marcus describes the event: In the happy confusion, everyone forgot about supper and Margaret had not thought to pick up refreshments. The only food in the house was an amusing cake in the shape of a boat, which she had ordered for a friend's going-away party and which the two now appropriated in the name of experimental literature. They sat around the kitchen table and took turns reading the manuscript aloud: "Once upon a time the world was round and you could go on it around and around." (100) This giddy occasion - in which dinner was dessert and dessert was a cake and the cake was a boat - provided a peculiarly appropriate incident for a first reading of a book that humorously yet relentlessly asserts Stein's belief that identity is neither stable nor useful. In her lecture "What are Master-Pieces and why are there so few of them," Stein asserts that a sense of personal identity brings creation to a halt because it sets in motion a process of abstraction: quips Stein, "I am I because my little dog knows me but, creatively speaking the little dog knowing that you are you and your recognising that he knows, that is what destroys creation" (146-47). James E. Breslin explains that for Stein, identity is merely an "artificial construct," a means of "familiarizing the strangeness, the mysterious being, of others" (150). In accordance with her interest in the effervescent being that shimmers outside the boundaries of identity, Stein's The World is Round depicts the abounding mystery of existence in a round world as it chronicles the frustrated attempts made by nine-year-old Rose to construct a personal identity, to familiarize the strangeness of her own existence on a spinning planet. Having learned at school that the world, the sun, the moon, and the stars are all round and "that they were all going around and around," Rose wonders, "Oh dear oh dear was everything just to be round and go around and round" (21). Rose's question suggests that the essence of her distress with roundness is that it devours individuality: in a world where "everything" is "just to be round and go around and round," boundaries that mark the beginnings and endings of years, of places - even of "you" and "me" - become hopelessly blurred. In a round world, Richard Bridgman observes, "the individual self loses meaning, its uniqueness swallowed in a sea of eternal return" (300). Rose finds that the swirling sea of language is particularly devouring of personal identity, for as she searches for a secure sense of self, she cannot help wondering if "she [would] have been Rose if her name had not been Rose." Seeking herself along such fretfully circuitous semantic byways, Rose is unable to penetrate this existential dilemma; instead, words tend only to draw her into circle dances of more words like "Rose is a Rose is a Rose" (77).(2) On one level, then, The World is Round portrays Rose's struggle with circularity in the world around her; on another level, it dramatizes her struggle to define herself within the treacherously slippery medium of language itself. While Rose attempts to master the turning worlds within and around her, a parallel tussle occurs between linear and circular elements in the story's style. …

Reading Forster's Style: Face Actions and Social Scripts in Maurice

Abstract: I. INTRODUCTION In his recent article in Style on Gricean perspectives in Finnegans Wake, David Herman demonstrates how current pragmatic theories, notably those of Paul Grice, John Searle, and such conversational analysts as Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schlegloff, Gail Jefferson, Deirdre Burton, and Deborah Schiffrin, among others, can be used as tools for interpreting literary texts. He also emphasizes the importance of using literary dialogues as "models for hypothetical discourse situations" (219), products that help us to rethink and evaluate the linguistic presumptions that operate in our construction of the meaning and cohesion of discourse.(1) Herman points out that "[l]iterary dialogues ... stage the principles and mechanisms of dialogue in general, forcing us to reflect on our canons for conversational coherence" (219). The cooperative principle, speech-act theory, and principles of conversational analysis, as Herman illustrates, all seek to explain the abstract sociolinguistic mechanisms that enable us to relate context to sentential meaning and arrive at inferential pragmatic meaning in discourse. Currently, linguists are investigating another powerful sociolinguistic principle not addressed by Herman, an abstract-principle that also operates in our construction of conversational cohesion: Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson's politeness theory, which provides an account of linguistic phenomena that range far beyond simple notions of prescribed etiquette.(2) The theory posits that a subconscious sociolinguistic principle operates on conversation and functions as a social gauge, one that constrains and directs the social climate of the ever-changing turn-taking context. The theory relies heavily on Emile Durkheim's view of social interaction as ceremonial rite and, consequently, on Erving Golfman's theory that individual acts at the local level of conversation are manifestations of "face" ritual behavior, conventional behavior that as societal members we continually perform during interaction with others in order to protect and maintain our public self value as well as that of others.(3) In addition to Brown and Levinson's theory, schema theory provides another account of how we arrive at inferential meaning in discourse. In schema theory, various internalized world-knowledge information and storage structures account for the way we process both new and familiar information encountered in discourse (Bower, Black, and Turner; Minsky; Schank). Schema theory proposes that we assimilate and interpret new information in terms of preexisting background knowledge structures such as frames and scripts that represent our conceptual organization of past experience. In other words, the process of interpreting discourse activates an interlinked network of data structures storing information based on world experiences; either so-called slots in the skeletal structure are modified in order to accommodate the new information or new mental representations are constructed to give some order to it. Schema theory posits that new experiences are interpreted in light of preexisting expectations. Schemes of everyday, routine, common experiences and other structures that organize knowledge provide a frame of reference through which we attempt to understand new material. These structures explain how we are able, in some cases, to make the appropriate assumptions or inferences about information not explicitly stated (Halasz 28). Such internalized mental structures provide yet another framework for explaining how coherence is imposed on the discourse of conversation. My purpose in this essay is to demonstrate how an understanding of these linguistic presumptions allows us to unveil a process for constructing meaning that unfolds when we encounter a piece of literary dialogue. A detailed discourse analysis not only reveals the variety of stylistic effects that form an integral part of the dialogue's texture; it also explains the process of contextual delimitation that emerges through our reading as we negotiate the linguistic form with our linguistic presumptions and with the always changing context of the local discourse situation. …

Linguistic Incantation and Parody in Women in Love

Abstract: She knew, as well as he knew, that words themselves do not convey meaning, that they are but a gesture we make, a dumb show like any other Lawrence, Women in Love Words belong to nobody, and in themselves they evaluate nothing But they can serve any speaker and be used for the most varied and directly contradictory evaluations Bakhtin, Speech Genres The spoken word is a gesture, and its meaning, a world Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception Through the polyphonic use of language, D H Lawrence shapes dialogues, actions, and movements of consciousness that constitute character in Women in Love Language is the medium in which being, with its conative and intuitive impulses, is most intimately disclosed Through a self-testing, dialogic style, Lawrence attempts to overcome the inertia of the written word Critics who look closely at the novel's discourse from a Bakhtinian or Heideggerian perspective find in it a complexity of cross-references, contextualization, and semantic shading Rather than simply looking through the text at sensational or visual scenes, such critics open the intricacy of Lawrence's verbal operations to view Lawrence himself speaks of a "trembling instability of the balance" in the novel ("Morality" 528), and Bakhtin's work affords a clearer sense of how Lawrence's experimental Prufungsroman or Entwicklungsroman(1) generates meaning from a multiplicity of interacting "voices" while subjecting knowing and being to constant testing Pioneering studies of Lawrence's language and discourse - Michael Ragussis's "The New Vocabulary of Women in Love: Speech and Art-Speech," Avrom Fleishman's "He Do the Polis in Different Voices: Lawrence's Later Style," David Lodge's "Lawrence, Dostoevsky, Bakhtin," Michael Bell's D H Lawrence: Language and Being, and Michael Squires's "D H Lawrence's Narrators, Sources of Knowledge, and the Problem of Coherence" - demonstrate that "an utterance can only be understood in context, a context that is partly non-verbal and involves the status of and relations between speaker, addressee, and the object of reference" (Lodge 58) Lawrence's novels also reveal a "comic, ironic or parodic" stylization that Bakhtin describes as double-voiced discourse, in which the narrator's discourse is "refracted" through the character's, "internally dialogiz[ing]" it (Dialogic 324) In Women in Love, Lawrence foregrounds language in the characters' speech, exposing the distance between speech and action, word and world and giving the reader a sense of the autonomous momentum of language and ideas "In every successful work," writes Merleau-Ponty, "the significance carried into the reader's mind exceeds language and thought as already constituted and is magically thrown into relief during the linguistic incantation" (401; my emphasis) Language achieves a kind of "presence" through repetition, incantation, and refraction, evoking for the reader more meaning than is actually conveyed in the text While acknowledging that "fault is often found with the continual, slightly modified repetition" in his style (Foreword 486), Lawrence says that he uses such repetition to show how biorhythmic impulses are sublimated in thought or language What I am interested in here, however, are subtler forms of repetition involving single words (go/do/use/will) or chanted phrases, often in a variety of languages, mimicry (skaz), caricatural echoes of a character's words or concepts in the speech of another, and the double- (or treble-) voiced discourse of parody, in which language is doubly refracted in the written text of one character and the mocking incantation of another In various ways, Lawrence puts words to work to point beyond words, for example, by juggling with a few monosyllabic key words that are voiced, repeated, pondered, traded, and played on in dialogic contexts (such as those in the chapters "Diver," "Carpeting," and "Rabbit") …

'Who Didn't Kill Blake's Fly: Moral Law and the Rule of Grammar in "Songs of Experience"'

Abstract: Who Didn't Kill Blake's Fly: Moral Law and the Rule of Grammar in "Songs of Experience"* There is some critical consensus that Blake's "The Fly" has an ironic sting in its tail. A rough sampling of the criticism indicates a large range of such irony: Pagliaro's reading finds a merely conditional "visionary defeat" for the poem's narrator; Bloom reads a more destructive critique of the pious consolations of an orthodox Christianity; and Wagenknecht proposes a nihilistic final stanza that critically parodies syllogistic reasoning by demonstrating its effects as a heap of bodies at the end of the poem. But I shall argue instead that it is we who are in danger in any encounter with the poem and that this danger originates not in the poem but in ourselves. I shall also propose, however, that the grammar of the poem, along with its formal identity as part of a chapbook, can enable us to recognize our destructive and ultimately self-destructive complicity in the text. It is in my emphasis on the agency of a reader, invoked by the poem, that the difference between my argument and the previous criticism consists. I. There is, perhaps expectedly, more critical agreement about the poem's plot than there is about the consequences and significance of its "events": the fly always gets to die, and in the rest of the poem it is understood that the narrator's attempt to identify with his victim is variously complicated according to the degree of irony thus read into it. It is, however, this very stability, constituted by a critical consensus about the plot, that I shall challenge by the version of reader-response criticism that follows. While virtually all critics of the poem have stabilized its plot by declining to consider their own agency in this project, I shall develop the notion of "affective stylistics," formulated by Stanley Fish, to reflect on both my own reading agency and on that of a critical consensus concerned to deny, or at least to ignore, its own complicity in the drama of this poem. My working notion of an affective stylistics will, however, differ from Fish's version by sidestepping the fairly received objection that Fish's reader never learns from his or her own experience. Jolted into self-recrimination by a disruption of its syntactic expectations, Fish's reader then approaches the next sentence, and then the next, and so on, without any suspicion that the moral lesson of the preceding sentence is about to be taught again. Since I focus here on a single lyric rather than the large narratives that Fish analyzes, I do not face the problem of an incredibly sustained credulity. But even if my reading practice were applied to the whole corpus of Blake's Songs, the problem would still not occur, both because this collection is considerably shorter than, say, Paradise Lost and because each lyric, unlike each sentence in Milton's epic, presents a different dramatic situation. Differently situated in each poem, my reader is taught a lesson that is contextually distinct. Since this lesson, staged chiefly by the genre of the chapbook, entails an exercise in reading just as much as it enjoins the exertion of moral discrimination, Blake's Songs seems proleptically to invite a version of such criticism. Despite the supposed stability of this poem's plot, the death of the fly and hence the narrator's culpability for it are highly contingent upon how we read the first stanza. What the narrator admits is that he has "brushed away" the fly's "summer's play."2 Either this admission is a soothing circumlocution for an act of destruction or it is an innocent account of how the narrator merely repelled, accidentally or otherwise, the fly's activity. To convict the narrator on the basis of his self-incrimination, we must first undergo a little jury selection. Virtually all the critics of this poem have established the murder by supplying the body themselves. But did they really get it from the text when the text itself does not definitively state that a death in fact occurred? …

Negotiating Community in Augustus Baldwin Longstreet's Georgia Scenes

Abstract: Commonly considered to be the first work of Southwestern humor, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet's Georgia Scenes (1835) has long been exiled to the margins of antebellum Southern literature, which, in turn, occupies a marginal position of its own. In his 1993 Yeoman versus Cavalier, Richie Devon Watson banishes Southwestern humor to a subliterary "generic cordon sanitaire" isolated from the more central plantation tradition (57-58). Besides being misleading on its own terms, Watson's assertion that in their own time "southwest humorists were simply not considered legitimate writers" (57) has tended, as a general critical view, to legitimate the dismissal of Longstreet and his fellow Southwestern humorists as literary dabblers whose ideological work is crudely simplistic and easily apprehended.(1) Much of this neglect can be traced to the highly reductive critical lens through which Georgia Scenes (and, indeed, Southwestern humor as a genre) has been viewed: Kenneth Lynn's theory of the cordon sanitaire, a paradigm that pits gentleman narrators against bumbling and sometimes sinister yokels in a relentlessly repetitive and monological justification of class privilege. But a reconsideration of Longstreet's symbolic organization of collective experience, paying particular attention to a network of tropes - of economy, nature, representation, and language games - implicates Longstreet in a complex negotiation of class roles. Exploring the response of Longstreet's primary narrator, Lyman Hall, to the dialogic imperative of the lower class and tracing the development of what I will call his socionarrative style (by which I mean a social style reflected in narrative stylistics), I shall demonstrate how Longstreet legitimates the social relationships presumed to exist in the ideal (and even utopian) Georgia community. Since his stated explanation of his narrative project focused exclusively on issues of preservation and realism, Longstreet himself would probably have been skeptical of such a project. He wrote of Georgia Scenes that "the aim of the author was to supply a chasm in history which has always been overlooked - the manners, customs, amusements, wit, dialect, as they appear in all grades of society to an ear and eye witness of them" (qtd. in Fitzgerald 164). In his preface to Georgia Scenes, he claimed to have used "some little art" only to "recommend [the sketches] to the readers of my own times" in the hope that their initial popularity would increase "the chance of their surviving the author" until a day "when time would give them an interest" (1).(2) Critics such as Kimball King have justly praised Longstreet for his work as a social historian (137-40), and James E. Kibler has argued for Georgia Scenes as a seminal work in the development of American realism (viii-xiii). Nevertheless, few critics have questioned the general position argued by Robert L. Phillips, Jr., who claims that Longstreet's "realism" is at least complicated by the narrative values implicit, and sometimes quite explicit, in the tales themselves (28-53, 137-50). The concept of a realistic narrative - in the sense of narrative being somehow objective or value-neutral - has, of course, been discredited at least since Wayne Booth's Rhetoric of Fiction, and even had it not, such a concept has little relevance for Georgia Scenes, a work in which social valuation is perhaps the fundamental textual activity. On a formal level, however, Georgia Scenes fulfills Roman Jakobson's criterion that metonymy provide the symbolic substructure of realist narrative. Longstreet's description of his sketches as "fanciful combinations of real incidents and characters" points to a deep structure in which contiguity is privileged over similarity as the dominant organizing principle of his narrative, which, following Jakobson's formulation, "metonymically digresses from the plot to the atmosphere and from the characters to the setting in space and time" (255). More significantly, this formal metonymic structure is replicated on the level of social interaction. …

Who Didn't Kill Blake's Fly: Moral Law and the Rule of Grammar in 'Songs of Experience.' (William Blake)(Rhetoric and Poetics)

Abstract: There is some critical consensus that Blake's "The Fly" has an ironic sting in its tail. A rough sampling of the criticism indicates a large range of such irony: Pagliaro's reading finds a merely conditional "visionary defeat" for the poem's narrator; Bloom reads a more destructive critique of the pious consolations of an orthodox Christianity; and Wagenknecht proposes a nihilistic final stanza that critically parodies syllogistic reasoning by demonstrating its effects as a heap of bodies at the end of the poem.(1) But I shall argue instead that it is we who are in danger in any encounter with the poem and that this danger originates not in the poem but in ourselves. I shall also propose, however, that the grammar of the poem, along with its formal identity as part of a chapbook, can enable us to recognize our destructive and ultimately self-destructive complicity in the text. It is in my emphasis on the agency of a reader, invoked by the poem, that the difference between my argument and the previous criticism consists. I. There is, perhaps expectedly, more critical agreement about the poem's plot than there is about the consequences and significance of its "events": the fly always gets to die, and in the rest of the poem it is understood that the narrator's attempt to identify with his victim is variously complicated according to the degree of irony thus read into it. It is, however, this very stability, constituted by a critical consensus about the plot, that I shall challenge by the version of reader-response criticism that follows. While virtually all critics of the poem have stabilized its plot by declining to consider their own agency in this project, I shall develop the notion of "affective stylistics," formulated by Stanley Fish, to reflect on both my own reading agency and on that of a critical consensus concerned to deny, or at least to ignore, its own complicity in the drama of this poem. My working notion of an affective stylistics will, however, differ from Fish's version by sidestepping the fairly received objection that Fish's reader never learns from his or her own experience. Jolted into self-recrimination by a disruption of its syntactic expectations, Fish's reader then approaches the next sentence, and then the next, and so on, without any suspicion that the moral lesson of the preceding sentence is about to be taught again. Since I focus here on a single lyric rather than the large narratives that Fish analyzes, I do not face the problem of an incredibly sustained credulity. But even if my reading practice were applied to the whole corpus of Blake's Songs, the problem would still not occur, both because this collection is considerably shorter than, say, Paradise Lost and because each lyric, unlike each sentence in Milton's epic, presents a different dramatic situation. Differently situated in each poem, my reader is taught a lesson that is contextually distinct. Since this lesson, staged chiefly by the genre of the chapbook, entails an exercise in reading just as much as it enjoins the exertion of moral discrimination, Blake's Songs seems proleptically to invite a version of such criticism. Despite the supposed stability of this poem's plot, the death of the fly and hence the narrator's culpability for it are highly contingent upon how we read the first stanza. What the narrator admits is that he has "brushed away" the fly's "summer's play."(2) Either this admission is a soothing circumlocution for an act of destruction or it is an innocent account of how the narrator merely repelled, accidentally or otherwise, the fly's activity. To convict the narrator on the basis of his self-incrimination, we must first undergo a little jury selection. Virtually all the critics of this poem have established the murder by supplying the body themselves. But did they really get it from the text when the text itself does not definitively state that a death in fact occurred? In order to answer this question about whether the narrator or the reader is the dominant agent in this first stanza, we must, since the extent of the narrator's malefaction is suddenly at issue here, decide how much agency the narrator and the fly possess relative to one another. …

Rhyme, the Icons of Sound, and the Middle English 'Pearl.'(Rhetoric and Poetics)

Abstract: Rhyme, the Icons of Sound, and the Middle English Pearl* Since Socrates's dialogue with Cratylus, thinkers about language have rejected mimetic theories of language meaning that dictate a consistent relationship between sounds and verbal sense. While such ideas have continued to appear in various guises,1 Ferdinand de Saussure definitively demonstrated that discursive meaning in language is produced not by phonetic qualities but by an intricate network of phonologic contrasts.2 In consequence, Jacques Derrida observed that meaning is found not in the signs themselves but in the gaps between the signs, and, on the basis of Saussure's proof, he defined "grammatology," a science of the arbitrariness of the sign, which "Saussure saw without seeing" (43).3 But neither Saussure nor Derrida is much concerned with an important question posed by their demonstrations: if the verbal sense does not reside in, and in fact little regards, the fascinating intrinsic qualities of the sounds that are so elaborately produced and processed by the complex mechanisms of speech and hearing, do these qualities lack determinate semiotic value? Poetry supplies one answer; as has often been stated, it employs sound qualities in ways that ordinary language does not. That should not be taken to mean, however, that in verse the sounds themselves directly and systematically serve the verbal sense. The continuing assumption that in literature sound always subserves sense, expressed most influentially with regard to rhyme by William K. Wimsatt, Jr. and by Jurij Lotman (esp. 36, 120),4 fails to acknowledge the noncontingent richness of the patterned sound continuum. The value of sound in poetry is much more than its imitative support of the verbal sense, and it does not lie in a mysterious fusion of sound with meaning in an objective icon. Nor do the prosodic patterns simply provide a bass undertone to the verbal sense produced by the sounds; instead, they organize a separate semiotic system with independent sign value. An obvious objection is that the reader or hearer of poetry processes the values of a sign at one time; they are conveyed simultaneously, so all must serve under one banner, which in the case of language must be the verbal sense. But the semiotic theory of C. S. Peirce makes clear that, while the interpretant, the third member of the triadic sign that he postulates (sign, object, interpretant), indeed will unify sign values, the objective values do not coalesce.5 A corporation logo, for example, can offer verbal identification of a company-in Peirce's terms a symbol-together with an identifying design-an icon.6 The company intends the interpretant to translate the sign values of name (symbol) and design (icon) into a single agreeable experience uniting the artistic image and its associations with company recognition, but the two remain objectively distinct. Comparably, the experience of a poem will produce an interpretant that joins the symbolic sense of the words (produced by phonologic contrasts) with the iconic pattern of the sound (produced by phonetic qualities). An associated objection is that verbal sound alone has no independent value. Wimsatt states that "[t]he music of spoken words in itself is meager, so meager in comparison to the music of song or instrument, as to be hardly worth discussion. It has become a platitude of criticism to point out that verses composed of meaningless words afford no pleasure of any kind and can scarcely be called rhythmical-let them even be rhymed" (165). The argument I present in response to Wimsatt in a recent article is, put briefly, that we may grant that the sounds of poetry cannot exist independently of verbal sense without saying that they are wholly in the service of that sense. Poems without sound would be about as poor as poems without verbal meaning. As I asserted, "the sound patterns of poetry and the verbal meaning have a symbiotic relationship of mutual dependence and independent semiotic value" ("Rhyme/Reason" 24). …

The Art of Appropriation: The Rhetoric of Sexuality in D. H. Lawrence

Abstract: In his celebrated essay "Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbance," Roman Jakobson divides language along two major rhetorical axes: in the metaphoric mode, words substitute for one another on the basis of similarity; in the metonymic one, contiguity is the basis for substitution. In verbal narratives, as Jakobson emphasizes, either of these "gravitational poles" may predominate: symbolic prose, for example, privileges the metaphoric mode since the law of similarity prevails; realistic prose, by contrast, favors metonymy since contiguity motivates the connection (109-12). Metaphor and metonymy function less as particular tropes than as grand binary orderings, large-scale modes of relation. Selection through similarity - the attraction of likes - or combination through contiguity - the attraction of closeness-to-hand - shapes the structure and style of narratives. Though Jakobson surveys different types of verbal art, he does not include erotic narratives. Yet here, too, his binary model has an interesting application: it has much to say about the way rhetorical codes compose and position sexual ones. At its simplest, metaphor and metonymy project two distinct approaches to sexual choice: the selection of partners is motivated either by similarity or contiguity, their availability for the sexual act. The mode of selection in turn determines both the type of sexual practice involved and the disposition of roles within the sexual act. These gender implications of Jakobson's binary rhetoric - their construction of masculinity and femininity in erotic narratives - are the special concern of this essay. In her exploration of how cultural myths position women in language, Margaret Homans shows how traditional thematics of gender identify women with the literal level of narrative, which is then labeled feminine. By contrast, that thematics identifies with the masculine: the language of tropes takes the literal sense as its base and then transcends it. Culture constructs masculinity through its association with the more highly valued figurative level (4-5). But since the figurative itself is bipolar, each of its poles (metaphor and metonymy) configures a different dynamic role for desire: each organizes the phallic drive in its own special way. Each reads phallic desire with the kind of sharp gender bias that we shall later explore. In locating the phallus as the symbolic agent of eros, both metonymy and metaphor empower the male, relegating the female to a subservient role. To explore these intersections I have chosen the work of D. H. Lawrence, not only because of its importance to 20th-century discourses on sexuality, but also because, in his essays, Lawrence develops his own theories about the dynamics of the sexual exchange, theories that reverberate in his-narratives. In displaying, in a peculiarly transparent way, the workings of phallic desire, Lawrence's narratives show how the two major tropes serve this desire. Although they both dispose of the female as merely the object of male aspirations and goals, each trope locates her within a specific male plot of appropriation: each tells the story of her subjection with its own special emphasis. While in theory Lawrence sometimes celebrates the perfect polarization (or balance) of sexual roles, his narratives in fact project the male as the source of the erotic power that transfigures the female. Although it moves well beyond the limits of Jakobson's particular theories, this essay engages in readings of phallic desire in Lawrence by means of those two rhetorical codes. I shall first link some contemporary interpretations of the dyad of metaphor and metonymy that display a marked phallic bias to a rhetoric of sexuality as it unfolds in Lawrence's own essays. 1 Most theorists of language agree that metaphor involves a transfer of meaning, a crossing from one semantic domain to another: ideas associated with the vehicle (the metaphorical term) are projected onto the tenor (the principal idea), where they produce new meaning relations. …

Translating Caradoc Evans's Welsh English

Abstract: Though the Welsh writer Caradoc Evans has not achieved the same worldwide recognition as his Irish contemporary James Joyce, he is a writer who resembles his more famous counterpart in a number of ways. Like Joyce he wrote a first book about his own nation that caused much offense and public controversy, making its author immediately notorious. Like Joyce he drew on naturalist techniques to create a highly critical portrait of his own people in the first decade of the twentieth century. Like Joyce he published a collection of linked short stories that seemed intended to represent in a hostile way the nation of their author. Where Joyce wrote about the citizens of Dublin, Evans wrote about the values of a fictional village called Manteg. An association was made between the two writers by a reviewer of Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, who called Joyce "an Irish edition of Mr. Caradoc Evans" (qtd. in Deming 85; discussed in Hopkins, "James Joyce" 23-26). Clearly, Evans's fame (and indeed the comparison to Joyce) has now faded outside Wales itself, so that he needs some introduction before the extremely interesting variety of English that he invented can be discussed. Evans was born in the village of Rhydlewis in an agricultural area of Cardiganshire in West Wales in 1877. In 1891, at the age of 14, he went to work as a draper's apprentice in the shop of a distant relation in the comparatively large town of Carmarthen. He remained a draper (or rather a draper's assistant) for the next fifteen years, working in shops in Barry Docks, Cardiff, and, finally, London. In London he attended evening classes at The Working Men's College at St. Pancras, and by 1906 he had changed his trade from that of draper to the more congenial one of journalist. He worked first as an editor (on papers owned by Northcliffe) and then as a writer for a popular weekly journal called Ideas. He published his first book-length work, My People, in 1915, and instantly became famous. In England the book was generally favorably reviewed, but in Wales Evans was referred to as a "renegade" and his narratives were said to be "a farrago of filth and debased verbal coinage" and "the literature of the sewer" (Harris 38). The virulence of this reception had very much to do with Wales's self-image. Evans's stories suggested little of value in the national culture; moreover, they criticized the national religion of Wales, Non-Conformity, as well as Welsh mores in general. The portrayal of Welsh-speaking peasants as morally vicious people and religious hypocrites was particularly likely to cause offense since, as Irish authors like J. M. Synge similarly found, most Welsh people regarded peasant culture as the last bastion of a true Welshness unpolluted by English, urban influence. John Harris suggests that some of the points made by Evans had already been made in Welsh language periodicals (though in safer discursive forms), and that Evans's most offensive act was to write his stories in English and thus expose Wales to English ridicule (44-45). Evans himself characteristically shows an awareness of this possibility in a letter to the leading Welsh newspaper, The Western Mail. In it he claims that "the leaders of Welsh Nonconformity are uneasy that word of their tyranny will get into England" (William 153). It is notable that in Evans's version, the English are identified with the "truth," which transcends mere questions of national pride. Additionally, it might be said that even to "translate" these Welsh speakers into English is an act of betrayal, since it implies an (superior) English-speaking viewpoint on them. It is the English that Evans uses in My People that is the subject of this article. Though it is an invented rather than an "actual" variety of English, it is produced from a particular language situation that is of interest in its own right, and it reflects interestingly on how narratives and their readers can use varieties of "non-standard English. …

Writing outside the Self: The Disembodied Narrators of W. S. Merwin

Abstract: The search for an original, natural world - or origin - is perhaps the single most distinct topic to be found in the poetry of W S Merwin since the The Carrier of Ladders (1970) To achieve the participation in nature that they desire, Merwin's narrators betray little or no personal identity and often seem as if they are voices speaking free of the body These "disembodied" narrators lack a particular self so that they may make their quests without the burdens of the ego In the vast majority of Merwin's poems, their actions remain part of a journey or process, far from restoration of origin But this is not to say that their efforts are futile Disembodiment aids them in avoiding realities that are restrictive; that is, it helps them to make steps toward origin and it translates the experience more readily to the reader All of this corresponds to psychoanalytic discussion of symbolic death and rebirth in the landscape; however, "death" and "rebirth" need not always signify regression toward a primal parent but, rather, may indicate exploratory steps toward plenitude Charles Molesworth notes Merwin's prevalent use of a disembodied narrative agent and believes that the disembodiment typically appears figuratively or as a desire toward such a state because the speaker sees the world as "irremediably fallen, so that to be entangled in materiality is synonymous with evil" (152) Molesworth also sees this technique as a method of gaining knowledge metaphysically, a knowledge not available to those in the body Though I disagree with Molesworth's estimation that a "kind of rarified second-degree allegory" unsuccessfully runs through Merwin's work, he nevertheless brings up a valuable point when he notes Merwin's attempts to remove himself from a physical circumstance that is imperfect (148) One short poem from The Carrier of Ladders, "Lark," presents a speaker who wants to get out of the body, who wants to relieve himself of his humanity in his desire for a more integrated being and understanding Merwin begins the poem by addressing the lark, but by the second stanza the subject of the wished-for transformation has become the narrator: In the hour that has no friends above it you become yourself voice black star burning in cold heaven speaking well of it as it falls from you upward Fire by day with no country where and at what height can it begin I the shadow singing I the light (38) The speaker disembodies himself by taking himself out of charted time and into "the hour that has no friends" and by taking himself out of the world and into the "cold heaven," which is no traditional heaven but merely another uncharted realm "with no country" Merwin's scheme is to remove the body from spatial and temporal restrictions in order to liberate the spirit Though many critics see Merwin's disembodied voice as yet another manifestation of his occasional gloom, here and in many other poems the loss of self works toward a spiritual fulfillment But the desired spirituality also reflects Merwin's usual paradoxical mode: it must be both "shadow" and "light" When the speaker ends this future journey out of the self and into a more direct contact with the universe, we are not quite sure where he is Our best prediction may be to say that he will be in no place and in no time The loss of the body, the plunge to the essential self, is part of a process, a continually ongoing effort that seldom finds its end Through disembodiment, Merwin tears away from his narrators nearly everything that would allow us to identify them Lacking outward identity, the narrators are subsequently liberated to express their desire to join the self with the universal Yet, as in "Lark," the universal that Merwin seeks to attain is experienced through only a few elements at any one moment, as opposed to the universe for which Whitman reaches, one that contains as much as the poet can enumerate Merwin attempts his encounters with spareness and concentration; in this, similarities may be drawn to Thoreau and, oddly, to Dickinson …

Melville's Chaotic Style and the Use of Generative Models: An Essay in Method

Abstract: "Ourselves are Fate" So ends chapter 75, "'Sink, Burn, and Destroy' - Printed Admiralty orders in time of war," of Melville's White-Jacket (321) This strangely constructed sentence does not seem to have troubled any of the editors, typesetters, or others involved in preparing the original editions and copies on which the Northwestern-Newberry edition of Melville's works is based, nor does it seem possible for a hyphen to have been dropped On this sentence, moreover, the Northwestern-Newberry editorial appendices are silent Readers of Melville know, of course, that silences are often dizzyingly vocal, even multivoiced And so this one The strangeness of the construction may become more apparent if we replace plural with singular forms: "Myself is fate [I am fate?] Herself is fate Yourself is [you are?] fate" Melville was far from being a careful proofreader of his own work; perhaps he simply meant to write "Our selves [our personalities] create our fate" - a fairly straightforward rendition of the "character is destiny" motif On the other hand, the original might be taken as an elliptical construction: "Our selves are the result of the operation of fate," or more succinctly, "Our selves are fated," or with a twist, "We ourselves are fated" This reading fits the context established by the preceding paragraph but not the one in which "Ourselves are Fate" occurs, which insists that "in our own hearts we fashion our own gods" (320) Nor does the immediately preceding sentence provide much help: "In two senses, we are precisely what we worship" (321) - the "two senses" are left unspecified and cannot be inferred from the immediate context "Ourselves are Fate" is a small example of what I shall refer to as Melville's chaotic style: strings of words that are punctuated as sentences but are flawed either semantically or syntactically or both, that command no single parsing, and that occupy positions of rhetorical emphasis This style, which can be found in other significant passages but has not been considered by Melville specialists, is my main theme, and it can be usefully discussed with the help of the generative model of deterministic chaos I will describe two ways in which to apply this model, one mathematical, the working out of which is beyond my scope here, and the other metaphorical, using several features of deterministic chaos to generate new observations about Melville's problem sentences Both applications follow accepted procedures for using models to understand a problematic domain (in this case, Melville's style); hence they differ from the way in which scholars in the humanities and human sciences have used chaos theory in the past few years It is because of this difference, I will argue, that the promise of chaos theory as both an analytical tool and a generative model has not yet been fulfilled THE CHAOTIC STYLE: EXAMPLES Punctuated sentences that are both flawed and indeterminate appear in passages frequently cited in discussions of Melville (By "punctuated sentence" I mean any string of words that begins with an upper-case letter and ends with a mark of end punctuation, whether or not that string forms a grammatically complete sentence Hereafter when I use "sentence" alone I mean "punctuated sentence") The three final paragraphs of Moby-Dick's infamous chapter 42, "The Whiteness of the Whale," for instance, contain a number of such sentences (194-95) For the sake of readability, I have numbered sentences and commented on each individually 1 "Though neither [the colt nor Ishmael] knows where lie the nameless things of which the mystic sign gives forth such hints; yet with me, as with the colt, somewhere those things must exist" The use of "with" implies both "for" and "within" - a straightforward case of double meaning, which, however, may cause a reader to strain just a bit 2 "Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright …

The Method Is Unsound: The Aesthetic Dissonance of Colonial Justification in Kipling, Conrad, and Greene

Abstract: In his 1970 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures published as Sincerity and Authenticity, Lionel Trilling contends of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness: Today it is scarcely possible to read Marlow's celebration of England without irony; to many, especially among the English themselves, it is bound to seem patently absurd The present state of opinion does not countenance the making of discriminations among imperialisms, present or past, and the idea that more virtue might be claimed for one nation than another is given scant credence But this was not always the case Having the choice to make, Conrad himself elected to become English exactly because he believed England to be a good nation (110) Trilling's notion that one can discriminate among imperialisms, claiming virtue for some and not for others, is a perfect starting point for a discussion of the imperial justifications of Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, and Graham Greene, all of whom saw in Britain's empire a justifiable endeavor In their three fictions, Kipling's Plain Tales From the Hills, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and Greene's The Heart of the Matter, these authors discriminate among possible motivations for the colonial project, critiquing their predecessors' justifications and offering their own Further, having inherited a fictional tradition from Kipling, Conrad and Greene also link what they consider to be of value in the colonies to what they consider to be of value in their predecessors' texts, believing as well that more virtue might be claimed for some fictional techniques than for others In this essay, I will present Kipling's, Conrad's, and Greene's valuations, both cultural and aesthetic, as they are presented in these colonial fictions Plain Tales from the Hills, Kipling's first collection of stories, brought colonial India home to England: those individuals who went out to India were for the British reading public suddenly endowed with faces, vices, virtues, and love affairs and disappointments, their administrative, military, and patriotic roles constituted as full lives At one stroke, Kipling created for the English reading public the culture of Anglo-India: what the British in India do for leisure; what they value; where the best and where the worst posts are; how love and friendship differ in Anglo-India as compared to at home(1) Though introducing a new culture is no small task, for the Victorians it could never be a solitary one True to his Victorian fellows, Kipling sought, in capturing that culture, to justify its existence as well Faced with such a task, where better to turn than Matthew Arnold, who had done the same for England itself nearly 20 years earlier Thus Kipling invokes the famous Arnoldian binary from Culture and Anarchy: We may regard this energy driving at practice, this paramount sense of the obligation of duty, self-control, and work, this earnestness in going manfully with the best light we have, as one force And we may regard the intelligence driving at those ideas which are, after all, the basis of right practice, the ardent sense for all the new and changing combinations of them which man's development brings with it, the indomitable impulse to know and adjust them perfectly, as another force And these two forces we may regard as in some sense rivals (107) Between the "intelligence driving at ideas" and "the obligation of duty," Kipling situates Indian colonial culture Not content with Arnold's pendulum swinging back and forth between the two, however, he adds to the binary a middle term In the last story of his collection, Kipling brings Arnold's two forces together in the figure of McIntosh Jellaludin(2) Mcintosh is a Hellenist: He was, when sober, a scholar and a gentleman When drunk, he was rather more of the first than the second On those occasions the native woman tended him while he raved in all tongues except his own One day, indeed, he began reciting Atalanta in Calydon, and went through it to the end, beating time to the swing of the verse with a bedstead-leg …

Representing Experience and Reasserting Identity: The Rhetoric of Combat in British Literature of World War I

Abstract: No matter what theoretical systems or prejudices critics bring to their readings of the literature of the First World War, most inevitably remark upon the military's manipulation of the new recruit during its endeavors to mold him into a nameless, faceless, subservient subject. In one such recent study, a thoughtful exploration of how different institutional languages influenced Wilfred Owen's poetic voice, Douglas Kerr pauses momentarily to note how "[t]he army took away a man's power while it increased his strength.... The dream of the army's training manual was of a totally controlled, totally efficient society, in which each soldierly body performed the tasks for which it had been moulded, so reliable an instrument that ideally the whole thing could still function ... without supervision" (156). Many soldier-authors tended thus to highlight that feature of anonymity, both in life, when they are portrayed as unnamed individuals swept up in a futile contest, and in death, when corpses are indistinguishable from one another not only because of their massive numbers but because the filthy, rotting condition of many bodies made identification difficult.(1) This trend emerged in diverse forms, like Charles Hamilton Sorley's "When you see millions of the mouthless dead" and "A hundred thousand million mites we go" or Isaac Rosenberg's chilling "Dead Man's Dump," where the wheels of the army's vehicles lurch "over sprawled dead / But pained them not, though their bones crunched, / Their shut mouths made no moan" (7-9).(2) In each case, the poet emphasizes the victim's lack of voice and resultant silence, broken only by the sound, in Rosenberg's version, of crunching bones. It becomes the writer's task to reinvigorate the departed soldiers by speaking for them and to pay homage to the fallen comrades by documenting the conditions of battle both for inexperienced civilian readers back home as well as for posterity. But the writer also engages in another enterprise, that of empowering the living combatant by furnishing him a much-needed voice. While it has become commonplace to remark upon the photographic tendency of Great War literature and to view its ultimate audience as the uninformed noncombatants who need to be "educated,"(3) readers have been less aware of the notion that many soldier-writers might have employed language for themselves, not only to assist in reasserting their individuality but more importantly as a device to help them subvert the two powerful frameworks - the army and the war itself - that engulfed them. Since assertion of individual identity hinders the army's efforts to fold a pliant young recruit into the war-machine - for, as Kerr points out, its discourse "belongs among those speech genres classed by Bakhtin as the least conducive to reflecting individuality in language" (159-60) - utilizing nonmilitary speech, specifically for that task, became a risky and even traitorous proposition. If one doubts the army's nervousness over free expression by its soldiers, he or she need only recall the government's massive propaganda campaign or the military's blanket censorship of most forms of written expression, realized most thoroughly in the Field Service Post Card.(4) This essay, then, proposes a psycholexicological model that ties the way language emerges in consciously literary treatments(5) of the war to both the taxing psychological atmosphere of the fighting and to the soldier-writer's concomitant need to ground the self, gain control, and finally assert power, however temporary and tenuous that power might be. In fact, somewhat like oppressed groups that use linguistic strategies such as slang and other forms of coded language to create a self-contained community, protect themselves from the oppressor, and finally subvert that authority, many British writers of the Great War embraced what I call a "rhetoric of combat" that allowed them to express their frustrations, doubts, and fears covertly without overtly challenging the supremacy of the military system and risking the dire consequences that usually followed such a challenge. …

'Watt': Logic, Insanity, Aphasia

Abstract: Watt: Logic, Insanity, Aphasia* The shadow of Holderlin hangs over Samuel Beckett's Watt: the speech of a madman, focus on the Oedipus myth, and direct allusions to the poet. Among the poetry fragments quoted in German in the novel, we find, "von Klippe zu Klippe geworfen/Endlos in . . . hinab." This is a slight modification of Hyperion's "Song of Fate" (Wie Wasser von Klippel Zu Klippe geworfen/ Jahrlang ins Ungewisse hinab : "Like water flung down/ From cliff to cliff,/ Yearlong into uncertainty"). The poem "Dieppe" that Beckett wrote directly in French in 1937 is strongly influenced by "Der Spaziergang." In addition to its literary appeal, Holderlin's work may have interested Beckett because of the role that madness played in the work and life of the German poet. Watt is to the domain of logic what Holderlin is to poetry. Imagination and thought serve only to connect us directly to what is beyond madness. Holderlin, a schizophrenic, questions Sophocles's Oedipus Rex, and finds a man on a quest for impossible knowledge. This foreshadows Watt and his obsessive concern with rationalization. Oedipus goes beyond the limits. He penetrates the secret of the Sun God Apollo and is punished. This transgression corresponds to the behavior of a madman. No wonder that he meets with failure in his desire to become a "limitless creature" and that this failure ends in an "infinite separation" (grenzenloses Scheiden ). His interpretation of the oracle gives the clue to his excess, and inescapably brings about the change from rationality into irrationality, which Holderlin describes in Empedocles's case as "the moment when the organic impinges upon me" ("Grund zum Empedokles" [1799], Werke 4: 159). In terms of his passionate interrogation of truth, Watt resembles that other metaphysician par excellence, Sophocles's Oedipus. At once investigator and object of investigation, Watt relies on ontological and epistemological knowledge to cross the uncertain ground of his own self-doubt. Despite the scant success of his efforts, his very approach moves us from the one who "knows" (ioda) to the one who has "swollen feet" (oidein), to mention two of the more common etymologies of the name Oedipus. As the investigation continues, his misadventures reveal a state of psychological crisis comparable to that of his Greek predecessor. Among the Addenda of the novel, we find, for example, the phrase "Watt's Davus complex (morbid dread of sphinxes)" (251). The allusion here is to Davus sum, non Oedipus; in other words "I am not a genius like Oedipus." In fact, Beckett seems to have been partly inspired by the symbolism and myths associated with the king of Thebes, just as Alain Robbe-Grillet, giving us a Wallas Oedipus in Les Gommes, emphasized the parallel between the first detective and a contemporary inspector.' According to a quite persistent tradition, Oedipus's blindness is due to the intervention of the Sun God Apollo who thereby punishes the person who has sinned against the light. As it happens, Watt evokes the god on several occasions. In the beginning of the novel, we find an allusion to Daphne's metamorphosis into a laurel tree (44). This goddess, who is a symbol of truth for the Greeks, and whose sacred tree appeared in oracular rites and Apollonian divinations, finds her rightful place in a novel centered around the quest for knowledge. Besides, the laurel appears again, even more obviously, in the Addenda where Arthur relates that an old man has identified an "extraordinary plant" as a hardy laurel. By way of gloss, he notes in his own journal, "Thanked God for a small mercy. Made merry with the hardy laurel" (252-53). The humor contaminates the myth: a divine metamorphosis of a woman into a tree gives away to a reverse metamorphosis of a tree into a woman, and finally, with the topic of immortality as a pretext, Daphne is superseded by the two uncontested masters of Hollywood vaudeville, Laurel and Hardy. Apollo avenged himself on Oedipus, Daphne, and the Lycians; these are three known cases of summary punishment. …

Playing It by Ear: Literary Essays and Reviews

Abstract: William H. Pritchard. Playing It by Ear: Literary Essays and Reviews. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994. xii + 270 pp. $16.95 paper. In Playing It by Ear, William Pritchard, Henry Clay Folger Professor of English at Amherst and author of Seeing Through Everything: Studies of English Writers, Lives of the Modern Poets (studies of Hardy, Yeats, Robinson, Frost, Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Crane, and Williams), Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered (still the necessary corrective to Lawrance Thompson's massive but frequently unsympathetic biography), Wyndham Lewis, and Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life, reminds us that there still exists, and that it is still possible to write, a type of literary criticism that is both instructive and enjoyable to read. Indeed, this book is more than just its individual critical judgments; it constitutes an exemplum of a kind of critical practice that has become scarce in current American literary circles. What is radical about Pritchard's critical practice is that it is so very un-radical, as things go these days. It amounts to the individual critic paying close attention to the text; carefully reading it, "listening" to the "voice" in the poem or novel ("ear training" as Pritchard calls it, hence the title of the book), relating the particular work to the author's life and other writings, and placing author and work in their literary context. If one were to charge Pritchard with being a New Critic, it is doubtful that he would resent it overly much. If Pritchard's work does show many of the traits of New Criticism, it might be said to exemplify a more flexible, a more open-minded, a more humanistic (perhaps even a "kinder, gentler") version of New Criticism. In itself, this is worth considering. Playing It by Ear contains thirty-three reviews and essays selected by the author from the work of the last twenty-tive years. lne essays are grouped in the following manner: "Credo" ("Ear Training"); "Poets" (Frost, Eliot, MacLeish, Spender, Robert Lowell, Larkin, Kingsley Amis, Hughes, Plath, Ashbery and Updike); "Novelists" (Trollope, Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford, Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, Faulkner, Elizabeth Taylor, Gore Vidal); "Critics" (Saintsbury, Santayana, Mencken, F. R. Leavis, B. H. Haggin, Empson, Helen Vendler); "Polemics" (Geoffrey Hartman and Harold Bloom, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Peter Gay); and "Personal Disclosures" (meetings with Frost, soap-opera watching, "nasty" reviews). Even a quick scanning of the subjects covered makes it clear that, with a couple of exceptions, Pritchard's interests are directed towards modern American and British literature, fields in which he is clearly comfortable. This critical vein may not be as wide as those worked by some of Pritchard's colleagues, but it is substantial enough. Despite the various nature of these pieces, there is a distinct sense of kinship and coherence amongst them, the result of a thoroughgoing knowledge on Pritchard's part of the writers and their milieu. Pritchard designates "Ear Training," the lead essay of the volume, as his "credo" (1). In it, he acknowledges the influence of his Amherst professors, especially Reuben Brower, a student of F. R. Leavis and a colleague of I. A. Richards, one of the most influential New Critics. Brower "took words off the page" says Pritchard "and brought them to life through the speaking voice" (4). From those teachers and from the example of Robert Frost, Pritchard came to understand that "the poem needed to be heard" (4, original emphasis). Prose, Pritchard observes, also needs to be heard to be properly understood and appreciated. This requires close attention to the language of the work: how the writer says something as much as what is said. This early "training in ear reading" helped shape the author's approach to reading and interpreting literature (5). It has also influenced Pritchard's own classroom practice. Pritchard is unusual among literary critics, the vast majority of whom are academics (if not teachers), in acknowledging the importance of the classroom in the development of critical sensibility (of both teacher and student). …

Part of the Way with Verbal Play: The Ludic Mode in Scholarly Titling

Abstract: Umberto Eco, in Postscript to The Name of the Rose, argues that good titles must "muddle the reader's ideas, not regiment them," and he explains that he decided on The Name of the Rose because of the polysemy of the word "rose" in our culture: readers would be "disoriented," they would be "unable to choose just one interpretation," and for most of them the latin verse that ends the book ("Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus") would not "clarify the text retrospectively" (3). The critics who have studied titles from a descriptive standpoint generally have reached similar conclusions. Memorable titles, they have argued, do not just "identify the book" and "inform about its content" (Hoek 17); they also appeal to the prospective audience, and they often do so by achieving a "sort of blend and compromise between the said and the non-said" (Duchet 71). Titles like Stendhal's Le Rouge et le Noir [The Red and the Black] and Zola's La Bete humaine [The Human Beast], for example, tell prospective readers that the novel whose front page they are contemplating will present a conflict. But such labels also leave out key information, as they conceal - among other things - the exact meaning of the opposition "red-black" (Serge Bokobza devotes a whole book to disentangling this issue), or the identity of the group that displays at once the features "animality" and "humanity" (Zola's story in fact is about railroad workers in nineteenth-century France). Like Eco's, Duchet's, and Bokobza's, most studies of titles thus far have concerned literary discourse, or such specialized domains as painting (Fisher), advertising (Calbris), and newspapers articles (Dubois). Titles in scholarly discourse have not been scrutinized to the same extent, however. Academics, in this area, have mostly limited their contribution to normative comments, advising students and colleagues to use titles that do not "muddle" readers, but tell with accuracy about the subject of the ensuing paper, essay, or dissertation. Wayne C. Booth, Gregory C. Colomb, and Joseph M. Williams, for instance, caution in their manual against using "a vague title"; titles should introduce "key concepts," "key terms that readers can watch for" as they proceed through the text (212). Similarly, Ellen Strenski and Madge Manfred remind students that "the primary purpose of a title is to inform"; do not "be so cute or so funny," they enjoin their audience, "that you confuse your reader" (22). Jacques Barzun and Henry F. Graff make similar recommendations to more advanced researchers. Accepting that titles now are "tags" as well as "descriptions," they allow authors and publishers to use some "allusiveness" in order to make their product "stand out from the mass of printed books." But they warn that "fashions" come with allusiveness, and that scholars who follow them run the risk of being embarrassed "a dozen years later." "In titles as elsewhere," they insist, "the "greatest virtue" is "simplicity," as "the last thing one wants from a title is a glimpse of the author striking a pose" (396-97). Antoinette M. Wilkinson gives even more stringent instructions in her handbook about scientific papers and dissertations. Research scientists, she notes, are "sometimes tempted to write a scintillating title in imitation of titles in general magazines," and that temptation leads them to using "questions, figures of speech, literary illusion, humor, or emotive language" (372).(1) Yet such devices, according to Wilkinson, are likely to produce titles that are "neither adequate nor accurate because of the rhetorical language" (372). The best titles in scientific writing, she maintains, combine "brevity, comprehensiveness, and specificity," as their objective is "maximum content with minimum wordage" (370).(2) While textbooks instruct scholars to be prudent in matters of titling, recent catalogues from academic publishers tell a different story. Indeed, those catalogues show that researchers now seem to favor titles that come closer to The Name of the Rose than to the plain, denotative labels advocated in manuals. …

Imaging Social Languages in Marvell's the Last Instructions

Abstract: While the political themes and the painterly genre of Marvell's The Last Instructions to a Painter have been well understood by attentive critics, the question of the poem's style still lingers.(1) I hope to add another dimension to considerations of its style by suggesting that in The Last Instructions Marvell frequently exposes the faults of the powerful of his society not only through direct satire, but also through indirect satire by creating images of the various languages that they speak. To the extent that these linguistic images absorb his interest, Marvell's poem may be approached by means of the analytical methods that Bakhtin has developed for the novel.(2) In this essay, I shall first adopt Bakhtinian discourse categories to investigate the techniques that Marvell uses to create linguistic images. I shall then speculate on the importance of imaging languages for an assessment of Marvell's achievement in the poem. Two Bakhtinian ideas provide the foundation for this investigation. First, Bakhtin broadens the definition of "language" to include social dialects, characteristic group behavior, professional jargons, generic languages, languages of generations and age groups, tendentious languages, languages of the authorities, of various circles and of passing fashions, languages that serve the specific sociopolitical purposes of the day, even of the hour. (262-63) As we shall see, in The Last Instructions Marvell demonstrates an acute ear. At various points throughout the poem he conveys professional jargons, generic languages, languages of various circles, and even languages of the hour. He incorporates so many languages into the work, in fact, that perhaps its most impressive feature is their pleasing co-existence. But simply to include many languages in a literary work is not to image them. The second idea to be drawn from Bakhtin is that for a language to receive an image it must confront another language so that its own strengths and weaknesses may be revealed. To organize this confrontation, an author must work with two languages within the same passage. Usually, both languages are clearly visible in the text, though occasionally the imaging language remains hidden and merely accents the imaged language from the outside. Moreover, the two languages must be attributable to two different linguistic consciousnesses, two voices holding different ideological positions. The incorporation of these two voices can take multiple forms: the persona can include the words of others within his or her own descriptions; the persona can be placed sufficiently far from the author so that his or her language can confront that of the author; the quoted words of characters can play off against each other and against the words of the persona; or the characteristic languages of inserted genres can interact either with each other or with the contemporary language of the persona. However such images are constructed, at stake is not only a double-voiced, double-languaged style, but also a contest between the ideologies that these social languages carry. In The Last Instructions Marvell almost never permits the voice of his persona to disappear: that is, with a handful of minor exceptions, he never directly quotes a character nor uses a generic language without letting the persona give it his own accent. Furthermore, the speaker of the poem - the persona - does not stray from Marvell's own ideological position. Consequently, all of the linguistic images in The Last Instructions mix two languages within the persona's own utterances. Bakhtin has identified five ways in which this type of mixing can be done: hybridization, parodic stylization, parody, stylization, and variation.(3) My first goal is to explore Marvell's construction of the ideological conflicts of his time in terms of these categories. II. According to Bakhtin, hybridization involves the intersection of two voices - that of the persona and that of a character or a group in society - within one utterance. …

Souls and Apples, All in One: Bosnia as the Cultural Nexis in Nenad Velickovic's Konacari

Abstract: Maimed bodies and ruined villages are obvious casualties of dirty wars. Maimed culture-including crucial frameworks of knowledge -and ruined social institutions are not as visible, but they are equally powerful realities and their destruction may have a much more enduring and serious impact than the more obvious gruesome casualties of war. (Nordstrom 261) Nenad Velickovic (b. 1962) belongs to a group of agile young Bosnian writers whose fiction reveals a new perspective on the Bosnian tradition and history.' Unlike many Bosnian writers and artists who left Sarajevo during the war, Velickovic stayed and survived the siege. As a consequence, his texts, written mainly during the siege of the city, are ruled primarily by the rapidly and radically shifting cultural and political dominant. Konacari (1995), his first novel, portrays the wide array of various ethnic and cultural influences that shaped the identity of Sarajevo and the rupture within its identity caused by the war. The most intriguing aspect of his text, however, is a sophisticated intertextual treatment of the intrinsic difference between Western (European and American) notions about multiculturalism, on the one hand, and the history of multiethnicity and multiculturalism in Bosnia, on the other, all the more so because Western culture has played a decisive role in the shaping of the Bosnian cultural identity. Following Velickovic's double cultural perspective, my analysis will focus on two intertextual practices discernible within the novel, both directly related to the shifting cultural and political dominant. First, in describing intertextuality and, consequently, interculturality, I will link Konacari with the canonical sources of the Western tradition and trace their shift from the core of the pre-war Sarajevo identity towards edges and surfaces defined in terms of both the text and its geography. The Western tradition, that is, is still identifiable in Velickovic's intertextual strategies, but now primarily as a textual and territorial concept quite literally beyond the pale. Second, I will show that the Bosnian war, as a lived experience surpassing representation, necessitated textual strategies relying on a specifically Bosnian multicultural condition, thus making it possible for Velickovic to cope, however metaphorically, with silence as the only fully appropriate and ethical rendering of the Bosnian war experience. At the same time, I hope that Western readers of my text will find it a means to cross the pale and the moat, and hear, however vaguely, the horrible silence at the heart of Velickovic's bailey. Even a highly superficial precis of Konacari, essential for a further analysis of the text, reveals its double intertextual structuring. On the one hand, a reader is almost forced to recognize and acknowledge the prominence given to the stock-motifs summing up the poetics of the great novels of both European and American postmodernism: Book, Text, Museum, Fact and Fiction, History, Media. On the other hand, however, all these stock-motifs are at the same time invested with a specific, local, almost untranslatable meaning, each one functioning as an intertextual borrowing from the Bosnian culture, tradition and experience, but pointing sharply to the unbridgeable cultural, semiotic gap between them. Because no existing genre, however postmodern and permissive, matches the requirements of the real war story, the very first glance at Velickovic's text implies thus an impossibility to talk about the war in Bosnia. The text is structured as an I-narration of a teenage girl, Maja, aware of an inner need to write about her war experiences, but uncertain whether to tell it as a novel or a diary. Novel is the genre she would like to adopt, although she is aware that a novel requires a clear-cut or at least meaningful division between its beginning and ending, a requirement that the war situation rules impossible. Diary, thus, seems to be not only the logical but the only choice: a genre defined precisely by an account of daily private events, it provides no signifying tension between a beginning and an end. …