Showing papers in "Style in 1997"

The Stylistics Reader: From Roman Jakobson to the Present

Abstract: Jean Jacques Weber ed The Stylistics Reader: From Roman Jakobson to the Present London and New York: Arnold, 1996 vi + 312 pp $4995 cloth; $1995 paper This reader, like all anthologies, "constructs a version of history" (7) Two key questions which suggest themselves when reviewing any version of the history of a discipline or domain of enquiry are: how representative and comprehensive is this version in terms of the selections offered? what do the articles or book excerpts gathered in the anthology tell us collectively about what has remained constant and what has changed in the discipline during the relevant time period? As regards the first question, one notes that, despite its generic title, this is exclusively an anthology of literary stylistics in Australia, the UK, and the US (with major emphasis on the UK) between 1960 and 1992 It excludes furthermore empirical and experimental approaches-where the interaction of lay readers with literary texts is described and analyzed-and represents only such interaction and response on the part of professional readers or academics But this is by no means a criticism The field covered is rich, diverse, and complex enough as it is The anthology opens with Roman Jakobson's classical formulation of formal, structuralist stylistics, followed by sections on functionalist, pragmatic, contextualist, and cognitive stylistics The order of selections thus reflects the order in which these approaches have emerged The pieces contained in each section consist mostly of theoretical claims and their applications (either central or by way of illustration) to one or more literary texts or text fragments But since stylistics in the period covered has been anything but a settled, uniform field with a generally accepted paradigm, each of the selections also contains a metatheoretical or methodological component meant to warrant the approach adopted and display its advantages over other available ones Some pieces are entirely metatheoretical: Derek Attridge's poignant expose of the shortcomings of Jakobson's argument, Talbot J Taylor and Michael Toolan's succinct but penetrating formulation of the difficulties inherent in any functionalist stylistic project, Stanley Fish's all-out attack on stylistics (or at least on its formal and functionalist varieties), and Toolan's response reasserting the validity of these two approaches The anthology is preceded by the editor's introduction which, in seven brief pages, provides an excellent panoramic view of the basic tenets of each approach and the internal logic of the shift from one to the next And now to the second question, and first the constants Underlying all the approaches represented is a view of LIS (= Literary Stylistics) as a discipline or subdiscipline engaged in the study of language in use and action as manifested in written texts, first and foremost in those recognized in the culture as literary In such texts certain small-scale, surface elements, from phonological to logicosemantic (see below), are singled out and their features (characteristics), patterns, and mechanisms described in terms of some theoretical linguistic vocabulary The units or elements are singled out initially on the basis of one of the following: their saliency (prominence, predominance, foregrounding) in the text in question; significant accumulation of them in the text; the fact that they represent a consistent singular choice from among all the options available in some underlying system (linguistic, textual, discursive); or the fact that they constitute a marked deviation from the norms of such an underlying system Up to this point, LIS is indistinct from literary linguistics in general But everybody will agree, I believe, that metrical analysis or syntactic description per se, both respectable activities within literary linguistics, are not yet stylistic analysis The crux of the matter comes at the next stage where such elements, having been properly described, are functionalized …

A Community of One: Masculine Autobiography and Autonomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain / Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture

Abstract: Danahay, Martin A. A Community of One: Masculine Autobiography and Autonomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Albany: SUNY Press, 1993. x + 232 pp. $64.50 cloth; $21.95 paper. Kincaid, James R. Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992; 2nd ed., 1994. xi + 413 pp. $35.00 cloth; $16.95 paper. There is underway a refreshing revision of Victorian literary and cultural studies. This is evidenced by two books in particular, published since the late autumn of 1992. The two, Child-Loving and A Community of One, by James R. Kincaid and Martin A. Danahay, respectively, offer significant contributions to nineteenth-century scholarship in their differing fields. Although the diversity, of both subject matter and approach, can only be warmly praised and unequivocally welcomed, in certain cases the arguments may well elicit knee-jerk responses. Indeed, with regard to Kincaid's book, this has already been the case in Great Britain, and not confined to academic circles. Still, if we come to these books with the open minds and the flexibility of thought they require, we will be rewarded by freshness without modish fashionability, theoretical sophistication, subtlety of reading, and complexity of conceptualization. It is always a pleasant surprise to acquire new knowledge. It is equally a surprise, though not necessarily a pleasant one, to have one's beliefs, views, and dogmas challenged in ways that, if one is honest, force one to re-evaluate one's own position. To find that one's knowledge is merely a kind of cultural "knowingness," a form of received and critically unchallenged social wisdom that is used to contain society in its current form, can be a shock. The shock to a particular world-view can be such that one might not wish to read, but, instead, have that which offends banned, censored. James Kincaid's Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture has already evinced such a response, from one British reviewer, the critic John Carey, in the national newspaper, The Sunday Times. Carey's review provides the most obvious of responses to Kincaid's book. It veers between ad hominem diatribe and thinly veiled accusations that Kincaid was suggesting we all undress little children and enjoy them at our own leisure. Yes, the book does deal with the uncomfortable subject of pedophilia and the cultural construction of pedophiles as monsters in our society, as distinct from other more "hidden" forms of child abuse, as though identifying the pedophile meant letting the child abuser in the home off the hook. But Kincaid's position, pace John Carey, is not the same as advocating pedophilia as a "socially acceptable" practice. Carey's review does not seem so much to get steamed up about, although it does typify, both in the Britain and the United States, a certain formal response to a socially sensitive subject, to which conservative critics on both sides of the Atlantic overreact. The veneer of reasoned thinking on which "quality journalism" relies (as distinct from the more obvious excesses of its "yellow" cousin), whether in British newspapers such as the London Times, or The New York Times or The New York Review of Books, soon becomes peeled off at a moment of ideological tenderness (if you recall the "furore" over Paul de Man and, by extension "deconstruction" in American popular criticism, you should have a sense of what I am describing). What is particularly wrong about overreaction, whatever its ideological positioning, is, as we all know from personal experience, the plain wrong-headedness of the reviewer. Carey's review, as the example of this, gave one the sense that he just had not read the book carefully enough, so incensed had he become by certain phrases and terms in the introduction. In Britain at the time of ChildLoving's initial publication the negative response went further, bringing about rabid responses in certain areas of tabloid journalism (of the kind thankfully absent in the United States), which demanded that the department of the Police force responsible for inquiries into matters relating to vice be called in to investigate, while a Conservative politician allegedly raised the question of the book's propriety in the House of Commons. …

Family Systems Psychotherapy, Literary Character, and Literature: An Introduction

Abstract: The grammar of narrative is . . . fraught with the same ambiguities - arising from the same social ambivalences - that distinguish the biogrammar itself. Male versus female, self versus kin, kin versus non-kin, group versus group - these gene-bred antagonisms are embedded in a social life that is always demanding (through gene-bred imperatives) their resolution. Robert Storey I no longer believe in individuals; rather, I think of scapegoats, sent out by their families-of-origin to do battle with their new spouse over whose family they will recreate. Carl Whitaker I Psychological literary criticism has sent out generations of scholars to do battle with recalcitrant imaginative texts, armed most often with the psychological tools of an early twentieth-century intrapsychic psychology that no longer answers all the interesting questions posed by those standing on the brink of the twenty-first (Livingston 93; Storey, Review 354; Mimesis 207). While classic psychoanalysis and its variations are all widely used in literature departments these days for the analysis of character, and have been for several generations (Almond and Almond, 1996; Bleich, 1996; Skura, 1981, 1992; Wright, 1984), most practitioners of real-world therapy have long since moved on to many other theoretical models (Corsini et al., 1989). Even very recent psychoanalytic literary models that seek to incorporate contemporary psychological thinking - including recent versions of ego psychology (Kohut, 1984), language-oriented Lacanian theory (Gallup, 1985), and narrative (Brooks, 1994; Bowie, 1993) - are still tied to many classic and, in my opinion, no longer tenable Freudian ideas such as the Oedipus complex, the (singular) unconscious, and drive-reduction versions of mental processes (Eysenck and Wilson, 1973; Grunbaum, 1984, Validation 64-65, 178-79, 204-28; Masson, Assault 113; Morson and Emerson 28-30; Spence 112-17). One of the more widely used therapeutic models in the "real world"family systems therapy (hence, fst) - has barely made a ripple in the ocean of literary criticism from which most of us try to keep from drowning (Bump, 1991, 1993; Cohen, 1991; Knapp 1983, 1996; Womack, 1996). Indeed, why this is so - why the discipline of literary criticism has virtually ignored the contemporary social sciences while at the same time deifying one pseudoscientific model from the nineteenth century - remains somewhat of a mystery to this day (even though there has appeared in recent years a certain restlessness with the status quo) (Morrison, 1968).(1) Elsewhere I have asked this same question and tried to give some answers (Knapp, Striking, chapter 2), but, beyond attributing such a massive cultural lag to the negative reasons associated with cognitive authority (hero worship), sheer inertia, and careerism, as well as the more positive one of loyalty to an ideational system one finds personally congenial, I have not been able to fully resolve this question in my own mind even though others besides me have tried (Holzner and Marx 109-10; Crews 55; Storey, Mimesis 37-38; Murray 93). Hence, the reader will have to proceed without an imprimatur from what Robert Pirsig might call the contemporary psycho-critical Church of Reason, and to explore actively some hitherto unfamiliar yet highly interesting new territory.(2) Since literary characters are endlessly fascinating anyway, one may well profit, when thinking about them, by looking at this most ancient of literary conventions (or codes) with newer spectacles (Milowicki and Wilson 219; Margolin 105). However, the issue before us here is less to finish certain old and perhaps unresolvable matters but to pose new and fascinating questions. What would happen to our understanding of many literary characters in/and imaginative texts if critics were to analyze them using the intellectual tools and insights from family systems theory (fst)? What shifts in thinking would be required, especially if one grants that psychoanalysis and almost all of contemporary literary criticism are one and the same? …

"Anaconda Love": Parental Enmeshment in Toni Morrison's 'Song of Solomon.'(Family Systems Psychotherapy and Literature/Literary Criticism)

Abstract: I think that if people put so much emphasis on family and children, it is because they live in great isolation; they have no friends, no love, no affection, nobody. They are alone; therefore they have children in order to have somebody. Simone de Beauvoir Like Simone de Beauvoir, Toni Morrison criticizes parents who enmesh themselves in their children. De Beauvoir condemns the contemporary family as an inadequate solution for "the problems generated by an evil society" (15), but Morrison's view of family relations depicted in her novels is considerably more textured, since she is interested in the etiology and the consequences of enmeshment. By emphasizing the contextual dimensions of her family dramas, the interpersonal family patterns that develop intergenerationally, Morrison extends her sympathies to all her characters, even the most seemingly undeserving ones. Yet the family as interpersonal system has been largely neglected in studies of Morrison, even in Song of Solomon, perhaps her most ambitious multigenerational text.1 From the perspective of psychological criticism, the dominant critical discourse has been resolutely Freudian. As Eleanor Branch writes, "There is no question . . . that Milkman's story is, in part, centered on the resolution of Oedipal issues" (70; see also Rushdy 311-16 and Hirsch 82-92). The psychoanalytic critic's attention is most often directed to Milkman's antagonism toward his father, or his obsessive relationship with his mother, or his apparent inability to love another woman. But too exclusive a focus on "Oedipal issues" leads invariably both to an oversimplification of the complex generational relationships within the family and to a diminution of the reader's sympathies that Morrison attempts to evoke for her characters. If a character's behavior is conceived of in solely intrapsychic terms-of unconscious properties and drives residing exclusively in the self-critical discussion leads to unequivocal moral judgments for or against characters. The clinical tension between the self and the family is intensified by an exclusive focus on either the individual (i.e., intrapsychic clinical theory) or the family (interpsychic theory). The Oedipal Complex as a theoretical orientation, as Knapp suggests, oversimplifies because it does not address the self-in-family (59-69). Without mapping systemic operations of the families depicted in the novel, it is therefore inevitable for the critic (such as Heinze 85), to choose sides in the novel's Family Feud, creating simplified dichotomies of villain and victim, good living and bad living, "Northern" and "Southern" personalities, and materialistic versus "aesthetic" families. If the critical focus shifts emphasis from the intrapsychic to the interpersonal or social dynamic, we discover that Song of Solomon is a portrait of enmeshment-the suffocating bond parents occasionally create with their children that Morrison calls "anaconda love" (137).2 Song dramatizes a variety of relational constructs that lead to parental enmeshment. The novel contrasts Macon Dead's and Ruth Foster's families of origin to reveal why they overinvolve themselves in Milkman's life, as they attempt to recapitulate childhood patterns in their own family. Morrison, however, does not privilege Pilate's unconventional, matriarchal, marginalized family unit over Macon and Ruth's conventional, patriarchal, bourgeois nuclear family, as critics often claim. Neither Pilate's nor Macon's family is functional; both sets of parents seek to fuse with their offspring to satisfy their own emotional cravings. Understanding the web of family dysfunctionality increases an appreciation of each character's complexity and of the novel's ambitious thematic design. A "Nice" Place: Lincoln's Heaven as Macon's Lost Governor The Dead family is organized by brutality and violence, most notably Macon Dead's wife-beating and his abuse of his children. Macon is easy for the reader to despise, for he seems created to elicit distaste and contempt. …

Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph

Abstract: H. Porter Abbott. Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996. xii + 196 pp. $32.SO, cloth. Despite the ostensibly interminable commentary that scholars of recent decades have produced on the writings of Samuel Beckett, his work remains elusive. Just as we feel prepared to close in on this French-writing Irishman and place a classification on him so that we may neatly tuck him away in an academic category, he slips from our intellectual grasp. Perhaps more than any other major writer of this century, Beckett resists categorization, interpretation, and understanding. Yet we sense that there is something in Beckett's perspective that is worth scrutinizing and so we continue to return to his fluid, slippery world. In his latest contribution to Beckett studies, Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph, H. Porter Abbott (who has previously published The Fiction of Samuel Beckett: Form and Effect [1973] and numerous articles on Beckett) does not profess that he has the definitive word on Beckett, a writer whose texts he finds "littered everywhere with the barest fragments of narrative irrelevancy which lead nowhere" (9). While Abbott does not attempt to explicate a design or purpose for these narrative fragments (it is unlikely that anyone ever will), he does provide, despite a theoretical slant that is less than convincing, some informative, interesting, and thoughtful readings of late Beckett texts. Abbott maintains that through Proust and Joyce, Beckett achieved an attitude of extraordinary intimacy with art, and sought to make his work a total ("uncompletable") oeuvre (41). In exploring Beckett's work in synthesis with his professional life, Abbott constructs Beckett paradoxically as the mystical questor, impatient with surface truth, at once plagued and riveted by the idea of a hidden, unimaginable, possibly interior, possibly nonexistent, originary force of being. On the other hand, there is the artist of a thousand details, devoting himself with loving attention to the physical and verbal articulation of his work as finished art. (57) Within this paradox Beckett contemplates (to give two of Abbott's more forceful cases of explication as examples) his horror of fatherhood (Company) and his need for "onwardness" (Krapp's Last Tape). Beckett is always the artistic perfectionist, yet his work shows the frustration of one who wants to move onward. Abbott is also convincing in his contention that Beckett's later works are both beautiful and unjustly neglected. He shows us that in this period Beckett follows the Romantic tradition, creating art that "accentuates his difference" as he finds something "at once beautiful and wise, coherent and deep" (91). This is displayed particularly well in the second half of Abbott's book where, again making use of Beckett's biography as well as his texts, he shows the writing methods employed late in Beckett's career to establish a progression from The Unnameable to Texts For Nothing and How It Is; to create a displacement of personal scripts by dramatic scripts in his move to theater; and to explore, among other concepts, prisoners of technology (Krapp's Last Tape), the social distribution of power (Waiting For Godot), and the reinvention of the Utopian form (Endgame and many others). In Abbott's final chapter he aspires to show "the role we play" in Beckett's works (165). To display the significance of perception in Beckett's writing, he maintains that each of the late plays has a perceiver in the dramatis personae, including Ohio Impromptu, which literally brings readers on to the stage. …

Trading the "Knotte" for Loose Ends: The Squire's Tale and the Poetics of Chaucerian Fragments

Abstract: The Squire's Tale belongs to that perverse realm of literature that offers critical asylum to contentious and antithetical interpretations. On the one hand, Chaucerians such as Alfred David, Jennifer R. Goodman, and David Lawton regard it as the poet's genuine attempt at romance; on the other hand, writers like Robert S. Haller, Stanley J. Kahrl, Robert P. Miller, and Joyce E. Peterson view the tale as the poet's ironic critique of inadequate social or aesthetic sensibilities represented by the Squire's flawed narration. Such contrasting assessments of the poet's tone constitute an especially formidable obstacle to critical dialogue, since the disagreement over tone is also a controversy about what genre the tale represents: is it romance, for example, or burlesque of romance? Undoubtedly the tale's incomplete state renders the argument still more difficult to resolve, as is true of debates over other Chaucerian fragments, and perhaps the controversy will remain irreconcilable. Nevertheless, such conflicting readings of the tale often share two important points of consensus that may lead to a better understanding of the tale as a fragmentary form and of Chaucerian fragments more generally - an understanding that circumvents the impasse created by critical polarities. First, a number of critics on either side of the issue concur that Chaucer left the tale intentionally incomplete (e.g., Goodman, Haller and Peterson).(1) In any case, no one has satisfactorily explained how so massive a narrative, if it were finished as the Squire projects it in his final lines, could have been embedded in its entirety into the Canterbury Tales.(2) Second, many who have written on the Squire's Tale assume, at least implicitly, that the tale has an aesthetic value as it stands, that it is in effect a successful fragment.(3) Both points of consensus reflect a common assumption about the viability of literary fragments, and that assumption at least partly explains why the Squire's Tale, as Lawton (106-29) and Donald Baker (3, 59-74) attest, has enjoyed until recently a largely favorable reception over six centuries. The same may be said of the Chaucerian corpus, the bulk of which is in a fragmentary state. But the reception of the Squire's Tale is particularly remarkable because, as internal evidence indicates, the narrative is truncated farther from its point of textual closure than is any other Chaucerian work. Even the very brief Cook's Tale, at best a beginning, appears to leave less untold. In addition, the Squire's Tale is replete with internal fragmentation and everywhere emphasizes its incomplete nature. For these reasons, it offers enlightening perspectives for studying, more generally, the fragments of a poet who had a habit of leaving things successfully undone. Using the Squire's Tale as a representative Chaucerian fragment and as a point of focus, this essay attempts to define those perspectives as well as some of the more significant features of the poetics of Chaucerian fragments. It is not intended to offer a reading that settles standing arguments about the Squire's Tale; if anything, it rather suggests why such arguments persist. More extensively, but without formidable theorizing, it suggests the importance of an audience-oriented perspective in approaching Chaucerian fragments whether we are studying features common to literary fragments in general, features reflecting the medieval literary milieu, or those features specific to Chaucer. As Marjorie Levinson so aptly observes in her study of Romantic fragments, "The object of the [fragment] is . . . the substitution of a reading for a writing" (26). I The Squire's Tale is not only a fragment within a fragment (V [F]) within a fragment (the Canterbury Tales); it is also internally fragmentary in many ways. To a large extent, its internal incompleteness results from the Squire's heavy use of rhetorical devices, like the modesty topos and occupatio, which have received much critical attention (e. …

Ways of Personifying

Abstract: Over the centuries, rhetoricians and critics have offered numerous definitions of personification, some inclusive, others restrictive. Since inclusive definitions tend to blur distinctions and restrictive ones to push aside problematic instances in their pursuit of clarity, I shall use this essay to construct a typology of practices that have either been bundled roughly together or forced into the cold out of a failure to acknowledge their kinship with mainstream personification. This typology will be structured by the ways in which the device mediates between the divine and the ordinary, the typical and the specific. Quintilian's distinction between personification the trope and personification the figure, which separates a whole group of personifications better classified as metaphors, serves as a useful point from which to begin a tidying exercise: "Effects of extraordinary sublimity are produced when the theme is exalted by bold and almost hazardous metaphor and inanimate objects are given life and action" (Sonnino 54). Because tropes differ from schemes in causing semantic disruption, tropic conformatio (personification) manifests itself in a derangement and blending of categories pivotal to metaphor: hence Quintilian's stress on the boldness and hazardousness of the enterprise. But while tropic personification transfers human properties to nonhuman objects, it does not, on the whole, create the complete mental image of a person. Because a metaphoric frame encloses the transference, the imagination focuses only on the specified attributes. Tropic conformatio, in other words, has an in-built metonymy. Take the following lines from Paradise Lost: "Sky low'r'd, and muttering Thunder, some sad drops / Wept at completing of the mortal Sin" (401). At first glance we might construe the drops as tears and immediately shift to the idea of an unlocalized cosmic grief. Because the lines are out of context, "Sky" registers as the subject and tears as the object of the sentence, but we nonetheless reject the mental image of a sky with eyes: the personification cuts off when visual and other proprieties are about to be violated. If, however, we relocate the lines in Milton's poem, a different reading becomes possible: Earth trembl'd from her entrails, as again In pangs, and Nature gave a second groan, Sky low'r'd, and muttering Thunder, some sad drops Wept at completing of the mortal Sin Original; (401) Because no classical tradition exists for a god-sky (as opposed to a sky-god), the image of a sky personified (and eyed) is not easily entertained, and the mind automatically restricts the scope of the conformatio. We could, however, take "Nature" rather than "Sky" as the subject of "wept" and "Sky" as the object she lowers in grief before weeping at Adam's sin. Such a reading, which brings us closer to personification that projects a human figure in its entirety, could also claim the support of a well-established history of deification, as in Edmund's "Thou, Nature, art my goddess" (King Lear 24). Even so, the idea remains problematic because in this instance the sheer scale of the personification defies the imagination. Milton has personified Earth in its corporate entirety, not as a figure made manageable by human incarnation: a woman whose very bowels are commensurate with the planet's mass ("trembl'd from her entrails"). And that image, of course, leads us into the province of the sublime, of entities finally inconceivable in their vastness. Steven Knapp, taking Kant's definition of the phenomenon as his starting point, has argued that "[i]f personification knows anything at all, it knows itself, with a symmetrical purity unmatched by anything in empirical consciousness" (4). Knapp here offers a subtle view of the topic, but I am worried by the claim that a personification knows only itself, the more so because to my mind the definition applies chiefly to what Knapp calls "the semipersonified metaphors that energize Johnson's prose" (6). …

Figuring Subjectivity in 'Piers Plowman C' and 'The Parson's Tale' and 'Retraction': Authorial Insertion and Identity Poetics

Abstract: For some time, scholars and readers of Chaucer have pondered his knowledge about one of the major poets of his day: William Langland. Readers may typically find statements in scholarly discourse such as "We can now scarcely avoid considering the probability of Chaucer's having actually seen a copy of Piers Plowman in the interval between its first publication (c. 1370) and the beginnings of the Tales at least ten years later" (Bennett 321). Given internal evidence in the fifth passus of the C text - if we are willing to accept any connection between Langland's "autobiographical" confession/apologia and the writer - and documentary evidence of the historical Chaucer, we must assume that each poet was in London for at least a short time. Hypotheses about Chaucer's reading have always been at the forefront of scholarly debate. No one, however, has been about to demonstrate absolutely that Chaucer had knowledge of Piers Plowman. In her closing remarks at the 1994 New Chaucer Society meeting in Dublin, Ireland, Anne Middleton challenged those present to "trouble Chaucer's silences." The present attempt to "trouble the silence" relates to the growth and development of major poetic projects: the C text of Piers Plowman (likely written in the 1380s) and the "final" shape of the Canterbury Tales. Nevill Coghill notes that "Chaucer's debt to Langland is almost entirely a debt of idea and not of phrase" (90). And there are indeed several similar ideas and postures. That the Canterbury project most likely took shape after the last version of Piers was circulating, that both poets were interested in the actions of people within a social body, that both writers questioned the "validity of the work's enterprise" (Lawton 17), and that both included in their visions of pilgrimage a restoration of society through spiritual forces beginning with a person may be in part coincidence or perhaps pan of shock waves of the growing apocalyptic doom in the last decades of the fourteenth century. Both poets inscribe something about their identities into their texts through subjectivity. What has not been fully appreciated is that the inscription is a product in both cases of the penitential tradition whose focus is the generation of an oral text. Whether or not Chaucer knew the C text of Piers, which includes the "autobiographical" fifth passus, cannot be established with any certainty. It is just as possible he might have seen an earlier version, or perhaps one of the manuscript splices, which contains parts of the A, B, and C texts without any real rationale or distinction. Yet when we examine Piers C and the Parson's Tale and Retraction, we note several characteristics which Chaucer could most certainly have learned from the earlier work of Langland. Without pressing the "sources and influences" approach beyond a responsible level, we can see that the more somber sense of Langlandian voice can be discovered in the Chaucerian text, particularly in the voices of the religious. The present essay asserts that the Chaucerian gaps and silences in the Parson's Tale and Retraction find voice in Langland's text. In both cases, the writers have presented us with highly complex statements, generated .by the confessional and having ambiguous voices, whether those of the authors or narrators. To establish a frame for looking at Langland's and Chaucer's texts, we need to examine the implications of the confessional and the notion of self that it attempted to produce and control. I Penance was an established part of the Christian tradition from the earliest days, but it was only with the mandate of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 that it became a yearly requirement. The decree required confession before a parish priest before the person could receive the eucharist at Easter. Failure to conform to the decree would result in excommunication and even keep a person from the rites of burial. Mary Flowers Braswell and Michel Foucault, working from different perspectives, see the canonical requirement as one of hegemonic control, hence the manifestation of one particular kind of power. …

Nature as Destiny in 'Troilus and Criseyde.'

Abstract: (1) Introduction The interpretation of Chaucer's Troilus has always been bedeviled by the fact that it is a work of the late fourteenth century, a period whose intellectual complications baffle the modern student of literature. It is an age when the same person can appear to us to be an arch-conservative and a radical at the same time. Thomas Bradwardine, that major English thinker, affirmed the power of God's providence in the strongest Augustinian terms against contemporary "neo-Pelagians" like Gabriel Biel while cheerfully dismantling Aristotle's physics to make way for the modern science of mechanics.(1) Because Chaucer was an exceptionally well-informed writer, whose reading and travels gave him access to a wide range of old and new ideas, many of these debates found their way into his poetry. To his readers belongs the task of assessing those ideas as they appear in his works. Yet often our perspective is so far from that of Chaucer's day that we have difficulty weighing the evidence. The familiar is much easier to grasp than the unknown. The modern reader can only with great effort avoid recreating Chaucer in his or her own image, as a modern, liberal thinker - rational, scientific, and tolerant. As sophisticated critics, on the other hand, aware of the "otherness of the past," and as medievalists alert to the foibles of humanist propaganda, we tend to overcompensate in favor of what we perceive to be the moral values of the medieval church, a much misunderstood institution too often divided against itself. In the process Troilus, continually reinterpreted, is jerked "up and down like boket in a welle," in a manner most appropriate to a Chaucerian lover. The solution to this puzzle lies in a better understanding of the fourteenth-century mind. Surrounded by conflicting views, new and traditional, the fourteenth-century thinker had no idea which were going to win out. He made up his own mind as best he could. In the process he might well embrace ideas from more than one school of thought. The same thinker might agree with the liberals on free will and with the conservatives on the physics of motion, as I think Chaucer did. He might oppose the Lollards and the rise of parliaments, and favor equality in marriage, or the reverse. When trying to get a sense of where Chaucer stands, we need to cultivate a certain flexibility, and not assume that certain groups of ideas necessarily belong together, or that they lead logically to their historical conclusions. Whether we consider Chaucer a humanist, an early modern scientist, a feminist or male chauvinist, or a proto-Puritan predestinarian moralist, we misinterpret him by pulling him too far in our direction. The first step to understanding the history of the ideas of Chaucer's time, and Chaucer's own thinking, may be to recognize that he and his contemporaries had the freedom to choose among the notions of their own day like a painter choosing colors from a palette. They were not locked into systems of thinking like totalitarian regimes or political parties. They were in this respect much freer thinkers than many of us are now. In particular, to my mind, the solution to Troilus lies in a greater respect for tradition and continuity in the intellectual life of Chaucer's day. The now unfamiliar tradition of Aristotelian physics, with its emphasis on natural motion and natural place, underlies the structure of Troilus and explains the movement and interaction of the main characters. In particular, it explains Troilus's baffling soliloquy on predestination and the even more baffling happy ending with which Chaucer closes his "tragedye." Chaucer is sometimes thought of as a "modern" because he was interested in scientific instruments. But if we consider why, he suddenly becomes less so, for his main interest was judicial astrology, not astronomical observation in anticipation of Galileo. His use of astrology in Troilus and elsewhere demonstrates that Chaucer viewed the stars as a key to the understanding of human character, as an aid to medical practice, and as a way of predicting the future - making predictions that might range from warnings of impending global or personal catastrophe to forecasts of when it is going to rain. …

Graham Greene's Thrillers and the 1930s

Abstract: Brian Diemert Graham Greene's Thrillers and the 1930s. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1996. x + 237 pp. $44.95 cloth; 16.95 paper. It did not seem fair to Conder that the products of his brain should be condemned to the same cycle as his body. Something should be left His body must decay, but some permanent echo should remain of the defective bathroom, the child with whooping cough. He began to write .... Graham Greene, It's a Battlefield (1934) Some seven years after the death of the man so often hailed as "our greatest living writer," Graham Greene's place in literary history and, more specifically, in the literary canon remains unsettled. Whether his work will attain that exalted immortality for which the journalist Conder hungers, or whether it will come to share that liminal position of semicanonization held by such other writers of the 1930s generation as George Orwell and John Dos Passos, has not, as yet, been decided. Moreover, the question of which works from his formidable corpus will continue to be studied, taught, and deemed worthy of critical response remains an open one. For Greene scholarship, now is the time when such issues are open to resolution, when the canonical future of Greene, and of his individual works, may be determined. In this critical context, Brian Diemert's study of Greene's early use of the thriller format, with its explicit concern for "the twin concepts of canon formation and critical authority, of privileging certain types of literary texts . . . over others" (5), is both an apposite and exciting addition to Greene criticism. Certainly Diemert's treatment of Greene's early novels and thrillersRumour at Nightfall (1931) through The Ministry of Fear (1943)-is a timely one, for as he points out, these texts have been largely ignored by critics of Greene's work. Indeed, besides Diemert's analysis, there exists only one other book-length study of Greene's many "entertainments," namely Peter Wolfe's Graham Greene, The Entertainer, published in 1972. Yet Wolfe's study approaches these texts not as thrillers or detective fiction, but as further evidence of Greene's status as a Catholic novelist; thus these are, for him, all tales of "the potential saviour[,] not only a man with a mission[, but] also a man on the run" (9). Apart from this book, which thus largely elides the generic specificity of these texts, critics have, as Diemert observes, largely dismissed these novels as inferior, "genre" fictions (7-9). This, indeed, is a trend which continues in other recent attempts-for example, Peter Mudford's 1996 Graham Greene and Cedric Watts's 1997 Preface to Greene-to secure Greene's canonical status. In these studies, Greene's thrillers of the 1930s are either simply ignored, as in Mudford, or dismissed, as in Watts, as "blithely preposterous" or "strained and implausible" (45, 50), as inferior study pieces for the "serious" work to follow. The stage has then been set by both past and contemporary scholarship for the exclusion of these novels from any critically sanctioned Greene corpus, and Diemert's work is thus valuable, if only in that it pauses, at this decisive juncture in Greene's reception-history, to reconsider the merits and complexities, and the due claim to canonical status, of these largely overlooked works. Yet the value of Diemert's study is not strictly the esoteric one of attending to the forgotten text. His book is also laudable both for the rigor with which it theorizes Greene's use of popular literary forms and for its thorough situation of this use in the context of the political and cultural debates of the 1930s. Diemert's impressive first chapter convincingly places Greene and his literary concerns in the crisis-laden milieu of this decade and reads his embrace of "genre" fiction "as part of a widespread response to the literature and criticism of high modernism . . . and to the political, socio-economic, and military crises of the 1930s" (5). …

"Terrible Simplicity": Emerson's Metaleptic Style

Abstract: Emerson's Nature (1836) is electric, the "transparent eyeball" its shocking core.(1) What Longinus writes of sublime oratory is true of Nature's most rhetorically charged passage. The effect of the "eyeball" passage "is not persuasion but transport," bringing "power and irresistible might to bear, and reign supreme over every hearer," "flashing forth" to scatter "everything before it like a thunderbolt" (43). Examining Emerson's rhetoric of the sublime in Nature, I demonstrate that he learned his stylistic practices from nature. Like Francis Bacon, but with the new scientific information of his period, he located revelation in the book of nature rather than scripture. I argue that metalepsis is Nature's master trope, for it describes linguistic sites that compress numerous revisionary allusions, tropes, and figures. In compressing many currents of signification, metalepsis is the eye of sublime thunderstorms, charging readers with lightning. Emerson always wanted a highly charged writing style. Whether he was speaking from written notes gathered from his journals or writing essays for publication, he believed that strong language should be active, palpable, electric. The speech of the great orator, he writes, "is not to be distinguished from action. It is the electricity of action" (W 8:115).(2) This powerful orator is "agitated," his words revealing "electricity" charging "from the cloud" and shining "from one part of heaven to the other" (JMN 7:224-25). He wrote to Carlyle in 1838 that his sentences were like electricity, for they were comprised of "infinitely repellent particle[s]" (CEC 185). Eloquence fulfills man's "want of electricity to vitalize" his life (W 8:70); poetry emerges electromagnetically through the "magnetic tenaciousness of an image" (W 8:27), and "shall thrill and agitate mankind" (W 8:73).(3) Indeed, Emerson desired that his words be as dynamic as nature. He wrote in 1831 that "[i]n good writing words become one with things" (JMN 3:271). Nature, he repeatedly noted, is a book, "a language and every new fact we learn is a new word" (EL 1:26). As Michael Faraday taught Emerson, "'A grain of water is known to have electric relations equivalent to a very powerful flash of lightning'" (W 10:60). So also, a book is to be written in a charged, condensed style, each word/thing a compression of force: "The whole force of the Creation is concentrated upon every point. What agencies of electricity, gravity, light, affinity, combine to make every plant what it is" (EL 1:72). Grounding his poetics in nature, Emerson believed that the "virtue of rhetoric is compression" (W 12:290): the writer should compose "dense," contracted sentences resembling the human face, "where in a square space of a few inches is found room for every possible variety of expression" (W 12:348). In good writing, "[w]ords are also actions, and actions are a kind of words" (CW 3:6). Nature's writing inspires man, who is "born to write," to record nature in a "new and finer form of the original," in a recording that "is alive, as that [nature] which is recorded is alive" (CW 4:151-52). The live words of this writing of nature are, like nature itself, "waves" that cannot be chained by "hard pedantry" (CW 4:68), "one thing and the other thing, in the same moment," not to be "orbed" in a single thought (CW 3:139). Emerson's tropes are the conductors. In "The Poet," he declares that "[a]n imaginative book renders us more service at first, by stimulating us through its tropes" (CW 3:18-19). "The value of a trope," he writes in "Poetry and Imagination," "is that the hearer is one: and indeed Nature itself is a vast trope, and all particular natures are tropes. As the bird alights on the bough, then plunges into the air again, so the thoughts of God pause but for a moment in any form" (W 8:15). Tropes are actions. They turn univocal words into multivalent sites. Just as nature is constantly troping as it proceeds in "perpetual inchoation" and "rapid metamorphosis" (CW 1:124), converting "every sensuous fact" into a "double," "quadruple," "centuple," or "much more manifold meaning" (CW 3:3-4), so Emerson's tropes, aspiring to be one with things, "flow" like nature and are "fluxional," "vehicular and transitive," expressions of "manifold" meanings (CW 3:20). …

Beyond the Brain of Katherine Mansfield: The Radical Potentials and Recuperations of Second-Person Narrative

Abstract: In the concluding paragraph of a recent special issue in Style on the topic of second-person narrative fiction, Monika Fludernik takes a moment to insist that we acknowledge the complexity and diversity of second-person narration and suggests that its analysis may enable "us to stand in a crossroads of narratological pathways leading to vistas we are barely glimpsing at the moment" ("Test Case" 472). Fludernik draws together in that special issue many of the major strands of argument about the second person. Two questions in particular have remained central to discussions about it since the earliest by Leiris, Morrissette, and others in the fifties and sixties.(2) These two questions ask why readers experience some of the second person's instances as (1) both forcefully compelling and alienating, and, addressing a problem that is closely linked, (2) why it should be described as a discreet point of view. After all, as the critic Helmut Bonheim asks, why would one tell a story to a person who was clearly on the scene at the time and who must already know perfectly well, forgetfulness notwithstanding, what transpired (Bonheim 76)? But the appeal to a notion of unconventionality doesn't sufficiently explain responses to second-person narrative, nor does the uncanniness of feeling oneself being directly addressed from within a text, coerced into reading about one's own fictional, inexplicable self. Tellingly, what such an answer does achieve is the naturalization of an anthropomorphism that has remained more or less implicit within notions of narrative person and the tradition of analysis of point of view since its development by Percy Lubbock and others early this century. What follows is in part my response to that anthropomorphism, but, following the recent summation in Style of "the story so far," it is also intended as a foreshadowing of where literary theory might go next in its exploration of the second person. I assume that such a discussion will have important implications for the ways in which contemporary criticism and theory conceive narrative person as functioning. To be useful, such discussion will require a clarification not only of the concept of the category of person, but also of the very way in which literary criticism approaches it. 1. RECUPERATIONS But some preliminaries first. Before I argue that the second person has a potential to radicalize narrative discourse (and more), I should look at how that potential is contained, for, certainly, not all texts that employ a second-person narrative modality realize any such promise. Stories that continually refer to a "you" can seem quite baffling, even unnatural. So, in order to make these outlandish narratives understandable - knowable and stable - we bring to bear on them in our habits of reading whatever hermeneutic frames, whatever interpretive keys, come to hand. I could invoke here any number of notions about naturalization or framing or intertextuality or the vraisemblable, among which I include Bakhtin's speech-genre. Moreover, I might include a large number of unexceptional forms of discourse that employ the second-person pronoun, and so help us interpret any particular passage of second-person narrative. These forms include letter writing and internal dialogue (i.e., talking to oneself), the language of the courtroom, the travelogue, the maxim, and the like. And, of course, there are the interpretive keys provided by the literary notion of genre. For instance, the first two chapters of Bill Manhire's book The Brain of Katherine Mansfield immediately suggest a particular generic interpretive approach. It draws on a genre that has found its niche in fiction for young adults: the "choose-your-own-adventure" story. You, Gentle Reader, are to find your own pathway through the text from the alternatives offered at the end of each chapter. But one typical feature of this genre is the way the hero or heroine will be designated by the second-person pronoun. …

"To Whom Shul We Compleyn?": The Poetics of Agency in Chaucer's Complaints

Abstract: Few literary kinds appeal less to modern readers than the complaint. We associate real complaining with self-absorbed disgruntlement, and many critics find medieval poetic complaints so stylized and conventional as to lack even the force of genuine discontent (e.g., Norton-Smith 16-18, Clemen 188, Peter 10). Formulaic grumbling seems particularly unsuited to the comically diffident narrator of the House of Fame, the humble poet of the Troilus, and the genial persona of the Canterbury Tales. Thus Chaucer's admirers may be reluctant to accept James Wimsatt's reminder that "Aside from the ABC, all of his lyrics of more than a hundred lines are called 'complaints'" (110). Wimsatt's "all" comprises only three poems, but those long complaints and three or four shorter ones constitute one of Chaucer's most sustained investigations of a literary kind. Perhaps, then, we should ask what he saw in the complaint. The answer, to anticipate my argument, will not darken the genial Chaucerian persona; it will, rather, illuminate the poet's explorations of a problem that encompasses subjectivity: poetic agency. I If they are seldom applauded, complaints are also rarely and inconsistently defined. In the only extended study to date of Chaucer's complaints, W. A. Davenport identifies them rather uncertainly as "a type of expression, or a rhetorical device ..., not - for Chaucer at any rate - a poetic form" (6). On the other hand, Nancy Dean points out that the amatory complaint was for some French poets a designation of "content, not form" (2) but for others a "separate lyric genre" (27); "Chaucer," she notes, "appears to have taken it as an epistle and a kind of 'lay' at different times" (27). Perhaps reflecting the poets' own inconsistencies, Douglas Kelly identifies the French complaint as a kind of thematic "moment" within love-narratives (182), but then aligns it with formal types such as the rondeau and balade cycle (183). Those discrepant definitions suggest that the literary complaint is distinguished neither by themes on the one hand nor by forms and devices on the other, although it often uses certain verse-forms, topoi, and rhetorical devices. Essentially, complaint is a kind of speech act: the speaker simultaneously postulates and laments a loss or injury. In contrast to other writers (such as Green 19), I thus distinguish complaint within the larger category of lament, whose speakers may bewail material afflictions such as military defeat and bodily violence. The complainant, aggrieved emotionally or morally, can denounce the loss only after defining it - after establishing, that is, that his lady is essential to his happiness and ought to have returned his love, or that he should have been better treated by "fortune," or that she (Mary, speaking in the medieval planctus) suffers uniquely from the otherwise propitious Redemption, or that humanity has lapsed into sin. Perhaps readers avoid literary complaints for the same reason that parents scold complaining children: defining the grievances that they bewail, complainers may seem to be fabricating their own problems. Thus far, my definition scarcely alleviates our aversion to the complaint. In a short but suggestive article, Lee Patterson seeks to redeem Chaucer's complaints by identifying their apparent perversity with that of language in general. The complaint's claim, he says, is "virtually always self-cancelling"; therein complaint is "virtually coextensive with poetry, indeed with writing itself" ("Writing" 56). That may be true, but it shifts the inquiry prematurely beyond the particular dynamics of the complaint. I wish to propose a more specific defense of the Chaucerian complaint by reexamining a common assumption that I have thus far tacitly endorsed. That the speaker must construct the terms of his or her grievance, as I have argued, does not mean that the grievance is a mere subjective projection, as I may have suggested. …

Speaking Out: Dialogue and the Literary Unconscious

Abstract: Freud's concept of the unconscious is the foundation of psychoanalysis, but it is also the primary obstacle to psychoanalytic literary criticism. The originality of Freud's method in The Interpretation of Dreams is to ask patients to free associate to each element of a dream as if it were a rebus rather than attempt to interpret the dream as a whole. He regards the dream itself as manifest content that screens latent and unconscious meaning. Unlike the analyst, however, critics lack a subject who can free associate or elaborate, so their first task is to define whose unconscious they seek. Then, since all textual evidence is manifest, critics must determine how to gain access to latent meaning. An early strategy of psychoanalytic literary critics was to treat the text as the author's dream and attempt to find repressed material by reading the text against the author's biography. More recently, reader-response critics such as Norman Holland have invited the reader to free associate to the text. In contrast, Peter Brooks distinguishes the unconscious of the text from that of the author or the reader. Brooks treats the relationship between the narrator and the reader as a version of the transference between analyst and analysand: The text conceived as transference should allow us to illuminate and work through that which is at issue in the situation of the speaker, or the story of the narrator, that is, what must be rethought, reordered, interpreted from his discourse. (345) Like the analyst, the reader must develop "hypotheses of construal," which are "valuable when they produce more text, when they create in the text previously unperceived networks of relation and significance, finding confirmation in the extension of the narrative and semantic web" (Brooks 346). Instead of associating to the text, the reader must associate in the text. Thus, the reader is limited to the associations textual "networks" support. Nonexplicit links between explicit passages become the source of latent content. I To speak of the unconscious of the text is to allow all its elements to count as manifest content and to allow links among any of them to count as latent content. If the unconscious in literary interpretation belongs to the text, how can we interpret it? A literary text is the product of codes of generic conventions that affect every formal structure - plot, character, narration, description, and diction. All these elements can be overdetermined, but dialogue is an especially rich site at which to seek unconscious meaning. Like the patient's speech in an analytic session, dialogue is governed by social conventions that provide the unconscious with a ready-made disguise. Since my reasoning is based on linguistic analyses of conversation and dialogue and their relation to the unconscious, the strategy I propose should be valid in any narrative or dramatic work to the extent that dialogue represents social usage. To illustrate the interpretive value of this claim, I have chosen two texts that express homosexual desire in contrasting ways - latently, in Henry James's story "The Beast in the Jungle" and manifestly, in Tony Kushner's play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes.(2) Although Freud emphasizes the importance of the individual's own associations to the elements of a dream, he also recognizes that certain symbols have common meanings. As Michel Arrive notes in Linguistics and Psychoanalysis, Freud affirms not only the capacity of the unconscious to create its own symbols, but also its ingenuity in expressing itself in preexisting, that is, conventional forms. While Freud explicitly rejects theories that posit a fixed relation between a symbol in a dream and a particular meaning, he nevertheless depends on the meaning of the dream-symbol that is, as Arrive says, "'always already there,' like the words of language, for the dreamer as for the interpreter of the dream. And it is precisely this which makes it possible for the dream to be interpreted, despite the silence which the person under analysis . …

Fabliau Plotting against Romance in Chaucer's 'The Knight's Tale.' (Geoffrey Chaucer)

Abstract: I Critics have often discussed the significance of the elements of courtly romance in Chaucer's Reeve's Tale, Miller's Tale, and Merchant's Tale.(1) There has been little interest, however, in the converse relationship, the significance of fabliau elements in Chaucer's writing in other genres. Charles Muscatine, noting that "the bare mechanics of the bringing of Troilus to Criseyde could be constructed from just two fabliaux" (Chaucer 140), asserts that "[r]omance and fabliau must . . . have contributed to details of Pandarus' activity . . ." (141). Donald R. Howard observes that the Pardoner's exemplum "is a fabliau situation in which all three tricksters are tricked by language and Fortune, by each other, and by themselves" (Idea 362). And Nancy H. Owen observes that the Pardoner "becomes the victim of a sexual and scatological jest played on him by . . . the Host" (547), and that, like the victims in Chaucer's fabliaux, the Pardoner is unattractive and is "reduced to a kind of enforced speechlessness" by the jest (548-49); Owen thus refers to the tale's "fabliau framework" (549). Such scattered remarks are typical; as far as I know, nobody has discussed fabliau elements in Chaucer's non-fabliau texts at any length. Even Peggy Knapp, whose reading of the Canterbury Tales focuses on the "contest" among social and generic "discourses" both among and within the individual tales, does not mention fabliau among the genres - epic, romance, "aristocratic chronicle," and Boethian consolatio - she sees contesting the generic space of the Knight's Tale (28-31). Although the ideologies associated with these genres are not completely consonant with one another - if they were, they could not embody Knapp's "social contest" - they are all mainly conservative, supporting existing power structures; in Knapp's reading, what "revolutionary" implications (31) the Knight's Tale has are made possible by the tale's "instances of local detail and homely colloquialism" (20) - departures from the elevated style appropriate to "authoritative" genres. Knapp ingeniously reads these departures in the traditional "dramatic" mode of criticism of the Tales: the departures are "a rhetorical ploy" on the part of the narrator, the Knight, an "effort to connect his authoritative account of noble life with the ordinary life of his fellow pilgrims . . ." (20). Any "revolutionary" effect the tale has is thus an unintended by-product of the Knight's ploy. I wish here to propose an idea that may be more in keeping with Knapp's own general critical orientation, which she says derives from Bakhtin and Foucault (2-6): that fabliau too participates in the generic contest in the Knight's Tale, contributing to the tale's "revolutionary" implications. Perhaps one reason that critics have overlooked such a reading has been the difficulty of seeing how non-fabliau texts might "allude" to fabliau, how they might evoke the complex of ideas and expectations usually associated with fabliau. To allude to fabliau in mainly non-fabliau texts would require features that could have functioned as clear generic signals of fabliau. Courtly romance abounds in such distinctive features, from the level of diction up to that of theme. E. Talbot Donaldson's discussion of the word "hende" in the Miller's Tale shows how a single word can serve as a generic signal of courtly romance in a fabliau ("Idiom" 16ff.). And even if the Miller's Tale were not juxtaposed with and dramatically related to the Knight's Tale, a reader with minimal familiarity with courtly love poetry would recognize conventions of that genre when Nicholas protests that he will "spille "of deerne love" if Alison does not grant him her "love" (3277-81). Other easily recognizable generic features of courtly romance that figure in Chaucer's fabliaux include the formal effictio, which is the background against which we must read the descriptions of Malyne in the Reeve's Tale (Rowland 210) and of the main characters in the Miller's Tale, and the aubade, which is parodied in both the Reeve's Tale and the Merchant's Tale. …

The Family Dynamics of the Reception of Art

Abstract: In our verbal accounts of how we read literature, see a work of art, or hear music, usually the first thing that happens is that the "we" disappears and is replaced by an "T": the focus shifts to the individual apprehending the work of art in isolation. This shift occurs despite our increasing sense of language as a social act and the postmodern critique of the concept of the autonomous self. Bakhtin's concept of heteroglossia, for example, implies a polyphonic self, a dialogue with internalized others that complicates the concept of the single, unitary response traditionally ascribed to the one who apprehends the work of art. But Derrida's definition of the self as merely a position in language and Foucault's sense of the self as only an effect of discourse have obscured the fact that the self is not only fictive; as Flax suggests, it is also social, located in particular relationships as well as textual conventions (232-33). Ironically, if even postmodernist arguments must assume some notion of an actual self, it tends to be, as in Foucault's case, a "socially isolated and individualistic view of the self" that "precludes the possibility of enduring attachments or responsibilities to another," and is thus incompatible with "the care of children or with participation in a political community" (Flax 217, 231). This postmodernist blind spot about particular relationships pervades academic psychoanalysis because the chief authorities, Freud and Lacan, usually assume a relatively isolated individual in conflict with frustrating Others. Because of this orientation to individual consciousness, Otto Rank conceded that in the twentieth century "psychology is the individual ideology par excellence" (389): social psychology, rarely integrated with literary study, remains preoccupied with society as a whole rather than families and small groups. In Freud's early theories, if the individual could maintain his psychic equilibrium by himself, apparently he would have little need for other people; indeed Freud suggests that as civilization develops, family ties and emotions must be sacrificed (Civilization 50-51). Admittedly, Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex does acknowledge the importance of some familial interaction (though it minimizes that of the preoedipal and of the feminine generally), and his later theories do acknowledge the lengthy period of children's dependence and a role for culture and relationships in the superego and the id (Ego 25, 19, 38). Inspired by Levi-Strauss, Lacan also concedes the importance of elementary kinship structures. Within psychoanalysis, however, it is primarily object relations theorists who acknowledge the importance of the family and social relations. They acknowledge that, in the first six months of human life, "the unit is not the individual[;] the unit is an environmental-individual set-up. The center of gravity does not start off in the individual," but in the preoedipal relationship of mother and child (Winnicott 99). Moreover, with the impact of general systems theory, quantum mechanics, and field and chaos theories, there has been a transition from the drive model to relational-model theories in other versions of psychoanalysis as well. As Barbara Schapiro observed in Literature and the Relational Self, the basic unit of study is not the individual as a separate entity . . . but an interactional field . . . [T]he psyche cannot be understood as a discrete, autonomous structure. . . . The person is comprehended only within the tapestry of relationships, past and present . . . This relational model in the social and natural sciences has implications for the critical models and frameworks that we bring to the study of literature and the arts. With its focus on dynamic, interactive patterns and relationships, the relational paradigm can redirect our attention to the interconnections, and not just the disruptions, in our cultural and literary analysis. While dismissing essentialist structures and absolute categories or truths, the relational model nevertheless highlights significant orders of connection and relationship; it expands the possibilities for meaning in our understanding of human experience and in the creative reconstruction of that experience in art and literature. …

The Restless Ghost of the New Criticism

Abstract: Why won't the New Criticism simply go away? It is the ghost of Hamlet's father, insisting upon returning yet again, always raising difficult, unsettling, seemingly insoluble questions: What does it really say to us? What does it mean? "Whither wilt thou lead me?" Does it come to us by the force of external pressures, or as the product of our own troubled (critical) consciousness? One would think that the poison poured into the ear of this once all-powerful, then all too vulnerable, figure by the Structuralists, the Deconstructionists, the New Historicists, and the current multiplicity of socially-engaged criticisms would have certainly laid him to an undisturbed rest. Yet the New Criticism seems to persist in seeking a place in our contemporary scheme of things. The New Criticism is most recently incarnated in this collection of essays, a volume in the series Wellesley Studies in Critical Theory, Literary History, and Culture (the title of which itself asserts, or at least suggests, a critical position of no little complexity and difficulty). It grew, as the editors note, out of a special session at the 1989 MLA Convention in Washington D.C., entitled "Reassessing the New Criticism: Continuities with Contemporary Literary Theory." In his Introduction to the volume, William J. Spurlin provides the justification, if not for actually summoning the ghost, at least for acknowledging and explaining its recurrent presence. In fact, Spurlin's introductory remarks seem to offer two distinct explanations. One is simply a need for an awareness of critical history. It is the "contention" of the editors that "the current dismissal of the New Criticism as a 'past fashion' forgets that earlier efforts at understanding continue to be the starting point from which we must proceed to understand and develop new analyses" (xix). The second explanation is more problematic; that is, the perceived influence of the (New) critical past upon contemporary criticism. Spurlin argues that both latter-day partisans of the New Criticism as well as adherents of post-New Critical theorizing tend to assume "a problematic opposition between the New Criticism and contemporary theory rather than engaging the relationship between them as a site of inquiry" (xviii-xix). This collection, then, becomes such a "site" of inquiry, and, significantly, the relationship one in which "connections" and "continuities" are found to operate. The editors state that "our volume examines how the New Criticism still influences many of the theories that try to leave it behind" (xix). Indeed, this influence is still so strong that "the question becomes, perhaps, if we can ever truly advance beyond [the New Criticism], for in locating ourselves in post-modernity ... we rely on past models" (original emphasis). This might be something of an oversimplification, but the essays in this collection do raise many important questions of critical theory and practice, both individually and in contradistinction to each other. The real virtue of this collection is the sense of struggle to define the very nature of connection, of continuity, of influence, and to come to an understanding of how these might be said to operate, if indeed they do. Perhaps the real underlying issue here is not influence but identity: Who are we as critics? How do we come to define a critical theory, and how does critical theory come to define us as individuals and as members of a multiplicity of larger communities? In the present volume, New Criticism becomes the catalyst for reassessment and redefinition. The question of our identity is counterpoised by the question of the identity of the New Criticism. What indeed was New Criticism, what constituted a New Critic, and who were the New Critics? These questions operate throughout this collection, and the answers seem as complex and unsettled as Hamlet's character. Spurlin, taking a somewhat sociological line, argues that "the New Criticism gave literature faculties a distinctive subject - the literary work - and a teachable method for its study" (xvii). …

Thematics: New Approaches

Abstract: Claude Bremond, Joshua Landy, and Thomas Pavel, eds. Thematics: New Approaches. Albany: SUNY Press, 1995. vi + 229 pp. $49.50 cloth; $16.95 paper. This book assembles papers originally presented (in French) at three symposia devoted to the subject of thematics; the symposia were held in 1984, 1986, and 1988, and the resulting essays appeared initially in Poetique 64 (1985), Communications 47 (1988), and Strumenti Critici 60 (1989). A previous selection of essays from these symposia (in translation) was edited by Werner Sollors and published as The Return of Thematic Criticism (1993). Like the earlier volume, Thematics features a wide variety of approaches to several interlinked questions: What constitutes a theme? What is the function of themes in art? On what critico-theoretical model(s) should the enterprise of thematics now be based? This new collection extends the domain of analysis by including essays that focus on the role of themes in visual and musical as well as verbal art. Perhaps because of this diversity of (disciplinary and critical) perspectives, readers may sometimes detect a centrifugal force operating in the volume; some of the essays pertain less directly than others to an investigation into the general problematics of the theme. For example, Peter Cryle's "Thematic Criticism" (45-55) and Jean-Yves Bosseur's "Theme and Thematics in Contemporary Music" (167-77) manifest a certain degree of overspecialization. These essays focus on specific, localized practices in literary-critical and musicological contexts, not always indicating, in more than a schematic way, the exact relation between such practices and issues surrounding modern-day thematics. By the same token, however, the book's plurality of perspectives makes for a richly suggestive text. Just by providing multiple vantage-points on the aboutness of texts, scores, scripts, paintings, performances, and other artifacts, Thematics enriches our understanding of what the theme is and does. Furthermore, taken together the essays suggest the necessity for a jointly formalist and functionalist line of inquiry-a thematics attentive both to the formal properties of texts and to the processing strategies motivated by those properties. Arguably only a dual commitment to form and meaning can yield descriptive, let alone explanatory, adequacy when it comes to analyzing the theme. In addition to the editors' concluding section on "The End of an Anathema," the book contains three parts: "Reassessing Thematics," "Thematics in Literature," and "Other Arts." Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan's lead-off essay, "What is Theme and How Do We Get at It?" (9-19), usefully surveys a number of linguistic theories and assesses their (limited) relevance for thematics. Although research on discourse topics may someday provide models for understanding the theme, such research remains embryonic at this point. Hence Rimmon-Kenan offers her own definition of theme as "a construct (a conceptual construct, to be precise), put together from discontinuous elements in the text" (14). Theme-construction entails three closely related activities: linking elements in the text on the basis of some pattern of contrast, similarity, repetition, or implication; generalizing the output of such linking operations by increasing their textual scope; and labelling the resulting categories of elements with names that become, in effect, the names of themes. In "Theme and Interpretation" (33-44), Menachem Brinker offers a similar account but sets up his argument on an intertextual rather than an intratextual basis. Themes are still constructs synthesized from discontinuous textual elements; for Brinker, however, the theme can best be described as "the principle (or locus) of a possible grouping of texts" (33). More precisely, the theme is "a semantic point of contact between the individual text and other texts. It is a meeting place of texts of various kinds: artistic and nonartistic, fictional and nonfictional, and, quite often, narrational and nonnarrational" (36). …

Douglas Hodge Reading Keats's Elgin Marbles Sonnet

Abstract: This paper is part of a large-scale investigation of the nature of the rhythmical performance of poetry(1) It uses the computer to analyze delivery instances of verse lines within the theoretical framework of the perception-oriented theory of meter, worked out back in 1971-1973, and published in 1977 It is devoted to the actor Douglas Hodge's reading of Keats's Elgin Marbles sonnet It examines some of the vocal manipulations by which Hodge renders his reading rhythmical Hodge appears singular in the devices he deploys among the readers - including leading British actors and colleagues from the academy - we have examined so far One of the most effective vocal devices we have encountered in the readings of other readers is what Gerry Knowles ("Pitch Contours") has called "late peaking," that is, when the intonation peak hits the syllable nucleus later than in the middle or even on the following continuant, usually a sonorant This device has been perceived as having an impetuous forward push, contributing to the solution of a variety of problems arising from the conflict between the linguistic and versification units In Hodge's readings, we have found so far only two instances of late peaking, both in cases when he artificially generates an unnecessary stress maximum in a weak position He prefers, instead, to deploy a variety of vocal devices, some of which are unfamiliar in the other readings By way of discussing these devices, I shall emphasize some basics of the rhythmical performance of poetry that are essential also to analyzing readings in which different vocal devices are deployed THE THEORETICAL PROBLEM The dominant metric system in English poetry from Wyatt (but according to Halle and Keyser from Chaucer) to Yeats and after is the "syllabo-tonic" or "syllabo-accentual" system In this system, both the number of syllables and the order of stressed and unstressed syllables in a verse line is fixed (in contrast to the "accentual" system, for instance, in which only the number of stressed syllables in a verse line is fixed) "Iambic pentameter" means that a verse unit consists of an unstressed and a stressed syllable and that the verse line consists of five such units In the first 165 verse lines of Paradise Lost, there are just two such lines Why should we speak at all, then, of "iambic pentameter"? Robert Bridges provided in his Milton's Prosody a list of "allowable deviations" These deviations were "allowable," mainly, on Milton's authority Such a conception is both outrageously unparsimonious and counterintuitive in that people do not read poetry with a list of allowable deviations in hand What we need, then, is a systematic explanation of what is it that we perceive when we perceive a verse line as iambic pentameter and, no less important, what are the constraints on this During the first half of the present century, several scholars attempted to solve the problem by claiming that the syllabo-tonic meter was not in fact syllabo-tonic One solution proposed was the assumption that in iambic pentameter we have, in fact, an accentual meter with four beats Another approach proceeded on the assumption that in the reading of poetry there are equal or proportional time periods between stresses, or between "regions of strength" In the 'twenties and 'thirties of the present century, the so-called "sound recorders" (whose work was summarized by Schramm) approached the issue empirically This approach had the theoretical weakness that in many instances they mistook the structure of accidental performances for the structure of the poem, but much in their findings can be utilized for establishing the inventory of the reader's (or the vocal performer's) rhythmic competence One of their achievements was that they failed to demonstrate the existence of equal or proportional time periods In 1959 Wimsatt and Beardsley published a paper in which they attempted to clean the table, arguing that the syllabo-tonic meter was in fact syllabo-tonic …

Knowledge, Belief, and Lack of Agency: The Dreams of Geoffrey, Troilus, Criseyde, and Chauntecleer

Abstract: In the process of their posthumous life they [great works] are enriched with new meanings, new significance: it is as though these works outgrow what they were in the epoch of their creation. Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech 4 The great institutions of power that developed in the Middle Ages . . . were able to gain acceptance[;] this was because they presented themselves as agencies of regulation, arbitration, and demarcation, as a way of introducing order in the midst of these powers, of establishing a principle that would temper them and distribute them according to boundaries and a fixed hierarchy. Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality 86-87 Great texts written centuries ago remain meaningful, providing sites for examining, understanding, and questioning current epistemology and ontology. Instead of defining what something means, exegesis and criticism of great texts highlight relationships and downplay inconsistencies, clarifying the nexus among knowledge, experience, and belief. A careful analysis of dream-lore categories, primary sources (Parliament of Fowls, Troilus and Criseyde, and the Nun's Priest's Tale), and current criticism uncovers an elaborate epistemology underscoring modem expectations of knowledge. Because readers' interpretations lead to the authorship of "new" texts - interpretations affected by the protocols of reading of an environment, culture, and historical period exegesis of the above texts underscores the paradigms and practices of modern culture, presenting a sectarian version of rationality as well as documenting formulations of self, truth, and power.(2) Present practices, rituals, and traditions concerning knowledge - seemingly objective, monolithic, and reliable - can be further understood through a critical exploration of and by comparison with the dominant knowledge paradigms of Chaucer's culture. In particular, signs of conflict, incoherence, and/or contradiction indicate emergent epistemes sustained by alternate epistemelogical structures. Building on Mikhail Bakhtin's definition of authoritative discourse and Michel Foucault's historical reconfigurations of knowledge and power, I identify dreams as a tangible, constraining mechanism that directs the individual conduct of Geoffrey, Troilus, Criseyde, and Chauntecleer. Their responses to dreams mark them as authoritative, monologic, hegemonic texts that depict a future with meaningful albeit limiting ontology. To interpret their actions as disempowered or lacking in agency, however, is to misunderstand the network of power relations which demand their assiduous complicity. Mikhail Bakhtin defines authoritative discourse as "the word of the fathers," in which external knowledge must be simultaneously internally persuasive. Participants are expected to adhere obediently, all the while working diligently to internalize its precepts so that it serves as a terministic screen for how they comprehend and interact with the world (Dialogic 342-45). Within the paradigm of authoritative discourse, there is no place for "experiential knowledge." Authoritative discourse, located in "a distanced zone, organically connected with a past that is felt to be hierarchically higher," requires "unconditional allegiance" (342-43). It "is indissolubly fused with its authority - with political power, an institution, a person - and it stands and falls together with that authority" (343). There can be no middle ground, no rational process for accepting one part of knowledge while rejecting another. Authoritative discourse demands total acquiescence so that knowledge and belief operate simultaneously to support the development of a legacy, an epistemological paradigm, a substantive justification for the monarchy. Because knowledge and belief are fused, the interpreter serves as a passive and invisible agent. Knowledge, understood as a static entity, is unchanging in meaning even with subsequent interpretations or multiple interpreters. Working out of the context of Christian doctrine, this paradigm expects minimal human involvement, prohibiting human agency in the processes of knowledge-making. …

"Choking on My Own Saliva": Henry Miller's Bourgeois Family Christmas in 'Nexus.'(Family Systems Psychotherapy and Literature/Literary Criticism)

Abstract: Due to his hyperfragmented narrative style and abiding interest in sexual candor, Henry Miller remains one of American literature's most enduring literary gangsters, a figure chided both for supposedly propounding a "theology of the cunt" (Gilbert and Gubar 116) and for "bad writing and silly thinking" (Widmer viii) Ever the "bad boy," Miller, who once declared that "the most boring group in all communities were the university professors," would probably relish such critical lashings ("Preface," The Air-Conditioned Nightmare 19) Indeed, he generally maintained that he desired to show the scoundrel in himself and that conventional literary form meant nothing to him Sexuality, as he often stressed, never served as his literary goal, and one may trace much of what commentators attribute to bad writing to Miller's experiments with narrative form Nevertheless, such acerbic statements reflect a larger critical tendency to ignore the cathartic nature of Miller's literary project Miller frequently asserts that he writes only to free himself from the bonds of the past and that the process of writing helps him attain a more complete level of self-awareness From what, however, did Miller need to escape? The more obvious answer to this question would no doubt center on some notion of capitalist society In books such as Sexus (1949), Miller represents his persona "Henry Miller"(1) deriding the American business ethos and "Mr and Mrs Megalopolitan," who, "hobbled and lettered," experience their "realest moments" while defecating, an act symbolic of the "big shit-house" where everything they "touch is shitty Even when it's wrapped in cellophane the smell is there Caca! The philosopher's stone of the industrial age" (374-75) A more sensitive reading of Miller's oeuvre, however, suggests that his quarrel with capitalism reveals a deeper conflict within his own family Although Miller readily launches into jeremiads concerning the public sphere, he reserves some of his more vitriolic attacks for his own family, such as in this passage from Tropic of Capricorn (1939): My people were entirely Nordic, which is to say idiots Every wrong idea which has ever been expounded was theirs Among them was the doctrine of cleanliness, to say nothing of righteousness They were painfully clean But inwardly they stank Never once had they opened the door which leads to the soul (3) While he occasionally tendered some kind words for his father, his Uncle Dave, or his Aunt Caroline, Miller's recollections of his family - especially of his mother - lean toward the vicious sentiments of the above citation In his condemnation of his family's values, Miller positions(2) himself as an independent artist searching for Truth and Beauty quite apart from the insipid platitudes and unexamined mores of his family of idiots, and, indeed, most readers would agree with J D Brown that Miller's autobiographical quest "powerfully expressed the rebellious nature of an individual narrator in a collapsing culture" (108) Through his writing, Miller desperately seeks to abandon the sterility of the American life typified by the family alcove where he "heard nothing but inanities" (Black Spring 22) Nevertheless, many adherents of contemporary family systems therapy recognize that even the most ostensibly autonomous individuals owe much of their behavior to their reactions to others Michael E Kerr and Murray Bowen elaborate: Both "rugged individualism" and obligatory conformity are strongly influenced by the togetherness force The "rugged individual" operates as much in reaction to others as the compliant person His determination to be independent stems more from his reaction to other people than from a thoughtfully determined direction for the self He has trouble being an "individual" without permanently disrupting his relationships with others (64)(3) Such a perspective suggests that Miller's fierce individualism may well find its roots not in high intellectual sources, but in the family …

A Catalogue of Rhetorical and Other Literary Terms from American Literature and Oratory

Abstract: The editors of Style have very kindly consented to publish this prospectus of my unpublished textbook, An Introduction to Style in American Literature and Oratory. In addition to an extensive bibliography, the project consists of a lengthy catalogue of rhetorical devices, a list of readings from American literature and oratory, and exercises about the readings in the form of questions or analytical "O.P.A." (on-page analysis) assignments. It is designed for university students as an introduction to style as it can be analyzed primarily in prose and such forms of expression as sermons and secular oratory. In teaching style this text discusses grammar and has a smattering of linguistics, but for the most part it is concerned with rhetoric as the art of persuasion (especially in oratory), eloquence, and stylistic versatility - figures of speech used in prose or speeches for various reasons: for auditory agreeableness (to delight the audience), syntactic ingenuity (to impress the audience), drawing comparisons (similitudes), or creating vivid images in the minds of readers or listeners. It was natural for me to select American literature and oratory as the subjects of this text because, after all, my field of specialization is U.S. literature and culture, but also because I believe no one has put together a text like this. Other rhetors who have catalogued the classical tropes and schemes have chosen their illustrations almost solely from ancient Greek and Roman or British sources (Shakespeare being a favorite, for good reason). Some rhetors have demonstrated that rhetoric is still very much employed in our time by quoting various twentieth-century figures (with Winston Churchill being a favorite). The typical Arts undergraduate, however, might get the impression that rhetoric is something that concerned the ancients and the British but was neglected on the other side of the Atlantic - that Americans, for instance, were so concerned with founding a political utopia, taming the wilderness, settling the land, establishing businesses, and making a buck, that the tradition of stylistic eloquence found no place in so pragmatic a culture. Less naive undergraduates may have heard of some legendary orators - Daniel Webster, Clarence Darrow - or may know something about the speeches of Abraham Lincoln or Martin Luther King from a sociohistorical point of view. Senior undergraduates and graduate students may also be aware of detailed stylistic studies of specific American authors - may know, for example, that more has been done with Hemingway, James, and Melville; that relatively little has been done with Poe. Still, with all this, we need an introductory text that provides a survey of American speeches and prose works and that is dedicated to exploring the stylistic qualities of those readings. This way we can see that the classical rhetorical figures - used so well by the ancient Greeks and Romans, kept alive throughout the Middle Ages, employed with brilliance by Renaissance writers, resorted to as well by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British authors - this way we can see that the tradition of classical rhetoric has been integral to American culture and literature also, right from the beginnings until our own time. We go back to the colonial era in American history for our earliest reading - Jonathan Edwards's sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." This text demonstrates, first, some typical aspects of the Puritan sermon - its appeal to reason (logos), for instance, and illustrates some rhetorical and stylistic devices that we would expect in sermons, such as dialogismus, Biblical parataxis and polysyndeton, epicrisis, cataplexis, categoria, dehortatio, adhortatio, oraculum, and protrope. At the same time, the assignment requires students to consider some idiosyncratic features of Edwards's style: his use of metaphors, antithesis, certain types of rhetorical questions, redundancy, syncrisis, enargia. …

The Vonnegut Chronicles: Interviews and Essays

Abstract: Peter J. Reed and Marc Leeds, eds. The Vonnegut Chronicles: Interviews and Essays. Westport: Greenwood, 1996. vii + 257 pp. $55.00 cloth. Kurt Vonnegut, whose publishing history spans nearly half a centurybeginning in 1950 with his forays into short fiction and continuing since the publication of Player Piano in 1952 with his innovative experiments in the fictional long form-had his fourteenth novel, Timequake, published in the fall of 1997. In the late fall of 1996, Greenwood Press released The Vonnegut Chronicles, its third scholarly contribution to Vonnegut studies in the past three years. The first two, Leonard Mustazza's The Critical Response to Kurt Vonnegut and Marc Leeds's The Vonnegut Encyclopedia, both published in 1994 and reviewed in a recent issue of Style (Davis), presented a retrospective of Vonnegut's critical reception and a catalogue of the complex and captivating nature of his fictional universe. In my review of those two important works, I suggested that each hinted at the "abundant possibilities for fruitful study" that Vonnegut's literary corpus offers. It would appear that the scholars involved in the production of The Vonnegut Chronicles not only recognized such abundant possibilities, but set to work creating a study that might add new voices and perspectives to the ever-growing canon of Vonnegut literary criticism, while attempting to construct a framework that bridges the gap between critical audiences and Vonnegut's general readership. As a writer of considerable popular acclaim-all thirteen of his novels remain in print-Vonnegut endures as an interesting and controversial figure in discussions of twentieth-century fiction and postmodern culture. While the continued healthy sales of Vonnegut's work certainly indicate that he has not lost his appeal to a broad reading audience, perhaps his place in other forms of media suggest the wider impact of his art and persona. In the past year Vonnegut's image has continued to be used in promotional activities at Barnes and Noble Bookstores, as well as in a new series of commercials for the Discover card, and he remains active on the lecture circuit at colleges and universities across the nation, offering his social commentary to thousands with each speaking engagement. In addition, 1996 saw the most recent adaptation of his fictional work to film with the production of Mother Night ( 1966) starring Nick Nolte, a big-budget feature from Fine Line which brought Nolte some of his best reviews in years. The presence of Vonnegut and his ideas in the very fabric of American culture attests to the claims that The Vonnegut Chronicles makes in the volume's collected interviews, individual essays, graphics, and selected bibliography: Kurt Vonnegut remains a provocative and indispensable voice in American letters. In their preface to the volume, Peter Reed and Marc Leeds explain that The Vonnegut Chronicles began as an outgrowth of the Quad City Arts program in 1989 when Vonnegut was featured as the festival's "Super Author in Residence." At that time, seven of the original essays presented at the arts festival were quickly duplicated and made into a spiral-bound collection to be distributed to the festival's participants. Because of the common bond these scholars shared in their study and admiration of Vonnegut and his work, two members of the group-Reed and Leeds-set about expanding the scope of the collection by soliciting original essays from Vonnegut scholars across the globe. Their efforts have resulted in a collection with scholarly representation from Hungary, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States. As Reed and Leeds explain, they sought to compile a group of essays and interviews that would in some way demonstrate the connections that Vonnegut has made in and through his own work with other cultures and across demographic boundaries. In short, they wished to make "not just another critical commentary but a tribute to an admired friend" (ix). …

Meter in English: A Critical Engagement

Abstract: David Baker, ed. Meter in English: A Critical Engagement. Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press, 1996. xxiii + 368 pp. $38.00 cloth; $20.00 paper. Prosodists, like paleontologists, come in two varieties. There are the splitters, who conceive of a new metrical form for every unusual poem (or name a new species after every new bone). And there are the lumpers, who reduce every kind of meter to a single base that generates all the rest (or fit every new fossil into a previously described species). Robert Wallace is a lumper. His final formulation in Meter in English is a good example. "Iambic and trochaic, anapestic and dactylic rhythms are mirror-image and . . . indistinguishable from one another as meter. Moreover, with substitution, any may ambiguously move toward or become one or more of the others. These rhythms, therefore, form a continuum-the single meter of English" (348-49). Robert Hass calls Wallace's reorganization of thought about meter a "paradigm shift" (125). But a paradigm shift must involve a new way of seeing things, and Wallace's essay "Meter in English" does not. Instead, with great clarity and parsimony, Wallace argues that accentual-syllabic meter is a single system that is the only possible meter in modern English. Any other way of perceiving the organization of poetic lines-by quantities, syllable counts alone, or accent counts alone-may be interesting, but for Wallace, it is not meter. Furthermore, all meters can be scanned as iambic if you take enough trouble, making notions of anapestic, trochaic, dactylic, amphibrachic, or other meters unnecessary. To create this book, David Baker included Wallace's essay "Meter in English" along with responses from fourteen writers-poets, critics, and poetcritics-and added a reply by Wallace. Some of the respondents, like Hass, largely agree with Wallace. Others object to some of Wallace's smaller points, like his insistence that spondees exist (Susanne Woods believes that any two syllables aligned will tend to vary in stress), or his insistence that pyrrhic feet do not exist (both Annie Finch and Rachel Hadas observe that pyrrhics-feet of two unstressed syllables-do occur, whatever we want to call them). There are two large issues raised by Wallace's essay. The first is his argument that all English meter is accentual-syllabic, and that quantitative, purely syllabic, or purely accentual prosodies are not valid descriptions of English meter. English readers, Wallace argues, do not hear quantities or syllable counts, and so cannot perceive them in poetry. We can hear accents just fine, but any system of accentual verse, according to Wallace, resolves to accentual-syllabic with more or less substitution of unstressed syllables between the stresses. There is no serious disagreement in the book about quantities; most critics feel that quantities cannot be used to construct English verse-though one can learn to hear them in scanning Latin verse, and can obviously hear them in lyrics set to music. Wallace's argument against syllabic meter seems odd because so many syllabic poems exist in English. Margaret Holley makes an especially strong argument (153-57) for the ability of readers to perceive syllable counts in poems by Marianne Moore and Dylan Thomas, especially when those poems are rhymed. Ultimately, however, Wallace's exclusion of syllabic meters rests on an all-but-tautological definition of meter. Syllabics are not metered because they are not accentual. They may be measured, in a form perceptible to both poet and reader, but they are not metered-because meter is, by definition, accentual-syllabic. With regard to accentual poetry, some readers are no doubt asking: "But what about rap? What about nursery rhymes? What about Old English poetry?" Their questions are taken up by Finch, who observes that accentual meter dominates "rhymes and nursery songs" and many a "popular triple-meter rap tune" (69). …

"Only Connecting" with the Family: Class, Culture, and Narrative Therapy in E.M. Forster's 'Howards End.'(Family Systems Psychotherapy and Literature/Literary Criticism)

Abstract: Although David Lodge's Nice Work (1988) provides a surprising narrative of reconciliation between the academy and industry, its concluding pages allude to an even more pervasive cultural dilemma that has haunted English life for centuries - the mostly silent war that rages unchecked between the classes. Robyn Penrose, the novel's academic protagonist, recognizes the acuity of class and cultural distance that separates her students from a young black gardener tending the campus lawn. "The gardener is about the same age as the students," Lodge writes, "but no communication takes place between them - no nods, or smiles, or spoken words, not even a glance. . . . Physically contiguous," Lodge continues, "they inhabit separate worlds. It seems a very British way of handling class and race" (277). Lodge's depiction of the tacit acceptance of England's rigid class structure and the interpersonal distance that it produces in Nice Work signal the narrative's place in an historical tradition of British novels that highlight the social and economic discrepancies of life on the sceptered isle and its principalities. From such works as Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders (1722) and Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1749) to Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South (1855) and Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day (1989), British literature echoes with authorial discontent in response to the nation's historical obsessions with rank, social standing, and pedigree. England's dizzying celebration of class and the implicit honor that invariably accompanies it extends to its national folklore as well, from the anti-heroic exploits of Empire and colonialism to disaster at sea. Legend has it, for instance, that as the Titanic sank during the early morning hours of 15 April 1912, Captain Smith implored first-class male passengers to "be British, boys, be British" and surrender the ship's paucity of lifeboats to women and children. Nevertheless, more first- and second-class male passengers, including the White Star Line's derelict chief executive, J. Bruce Ismay, managed to survive the disaster than children from third-class and steerage combined (Wade 58, 67).(1) Concern for such a corrosive lack of value for the lives and experiences of the lower or disenfranchised classes underscores the narrative agenda inherent in many of E. M. Forster's fictions, including Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), which problematizes English perceptions of the lifestyles and mores of Italians, and A Passage to India (1924), a novel in which Forster surveys the social inequities and atrocities inevitably bred by a class- and race-conscious nation that engages in imperialism. In Howards End (1910), Forster assaults the superstructure of the British class system, peels back its many and variegated layers, and argues that only interpersonal connection and compassion will enable England to modify its deafening social distances, the likes of which Lodge depicts in Nice Work. The parlance of family systems psychotherapy offers a particularly useful means for explicating Forster's illustrations of class and culture and the roadblocks that they erect in England's pathways to the kind of national morphogenesis necessary for its society to bond and endure.(2) In Families and Larger Systems: A Family Therapist's Guide through the Labyrinth (1988), Evan Imber-Black astutely observes that "all families engage with larger systems." Healthy, differentiated families, moreover, "are able to function in an interdependent manner with a variety of larger systems, utilizing information from these systems as material for their own growth and development" (14). Reading the layers of England's class structure as the component parts of a larger, albeit dysfunctional, family system illuminates Forster's critique of class and culture in Howards End. By supplying readers with a critical lens that identifies the nature of the feedback loops existing between the novel's characters and the diversity of their class origins, family systems psychotherapy demonstrates the manner in which Forster employs narrative therapy as a means for challenging his nation - with its collection of disparate classes and cultures - to, if nothing else, "only connect. …

Anne Tyler's 'Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant': A Critical Feast

Abstract: John V. Knapp makes the case that psychological approaches to literary interpretation can be enhanced by broadening the hermeneutic base to include a variety of psycho-social perspectives.(1) Those of us involved in teaching literature know the merits of Knapp's argument. My own students understand "family systems therapy" - at least on an informal basis - because they have lived it on a conscious level; they understand dysfunctional families. For that reason, some might relate with more immediate affect to works such as Anne Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982) than they do to Hamlet, whose protagonist they see as the "product of a dysfunctional family" long before they see him as a tragic hero. What is more important, they expect literature to teach them about their own lives as well as about universal truths regarding human behavior. What is remarkable about contemporary family systems theory as a means of interpreting literature is that it can meet both of those expectations. One of the many advantages this contemporary theory provides is an understanding of how the "self" evolves as part of a social environment; family systems theory goes beyond the self as a psychologically separate unit.(2) Carlfred Broderick and Sandra Schrader give an overview of the distinction between psychoanalytic and family systems therapy. They write: Psychoanalysis by its very nature is concerned with the internal dynamics of the human psyche, and with an analysis of the patient-therapist relationship. Freud left a legacy of conviction that it was counter-productive and dangerous for a therapist to become involved with more than one member of the same family. It is not clear from his writing exactly what prompted him to feel so strongly on the matter. (16) I include works by Anne Tyler in my literature classes because her writing offers us insight into the human psyche and the family systems which influence the psyche as the stuff of interpersonal as well as intrapersonal relational structures. It comes as no surprise to learn that Anne Tyler is herself the wife of a child psychiatrist (Petry, Critical Essays 7). What is more interesting is that the characters in her novels are so meticulously constructed that they stand up to clinical study. In reviewing the critical literature on Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, one finds not only literary critical approaches, but also clinical psychoanalytic ones. In "Anne Tyler: The American Family Fights for its Half-Life," Leo Schneiderman's argument is grounded in object-relations theory(3); he asserts that "Tyler's families have only a half-life, perhaps because their members do not love or hate each other with enough intensity" (78). Schneiderman goes on to explain that "the breakup of the American family in Tyler's fiction is accompanied by egregious failures of parenting involving non-nurturant mothers and physically or psychologically absent fathers" (70) and that "the great weakness of the kind of American family portrayed by Tyler is that its members require proximity rather than intimacy" (79). Schneiderman does a competent job of looking at several of Tyler's novels from an object-relations perspective.(4) Object relations as a term "refers to specific intrapsychic structures, to an aspect of ego organization, and not to external interpersonal relationships. But these intrapsychic structures, the mental representations of self and other (the object), also become manifest in the interpersonal situation" (Horner 3). In contrast to the study of intrapsychic structure, family systems therapy regards the entire family rather than the individual as the matrix of identity. We cannot understand the individual without understanding the family system, and we cannot understand Tyler's characters without understanding their family systems. Thus, one theorist whose approach is useful in a critical analysis of Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is the family systems therapist James Framo, who classifies himself as an "integrationist," one who integrates his study of the intrapsychic and the interpsychic influences on and within families. …

Greimas, Bremond, and the 'Miller's Tale.' (A.J. Greimas; Claude Bremond)

Abstract: In the late twentieth century, the application of modern and contemporary critical approaches to literature has become widespread especially in regard to modern literature. David Lodge, for example, has used Roman Jakobson's distinction between metaphor and metonymy and the Formalists' concept of defamiliarization to explain the relations between modernism, antimodernism, and postmodernism (3-16, 74). The James Joyce Quarterly has devoted part of a number to the results and critique of a graduate-class exercise on the Seymour Chatman-Roland Barthes analysis of James Joyce's "Eveline" (Chatman, "New Ways"; Sosnoski), and Jennie Skerl has also resorted to the same story to test Vladimir Propp's model for Russian fairy tales. Wallace Martin has provided a convenient bibliography of such studies on a number of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers of narrative (189-90n5). Since 1990 Style's annual bibliographical issue (number 4) has published William Baker and Kenneth Womack's annotated listings of literary theory and criticism as well as specialized studies by David Gorman on Russian Formalism (26.4), Bakhtin and his circle (27.4; 28.4; 30.4), Jonathan Culler (29.4), and Gerard Genette (30.4). The theories of the French semiotician A. J. Greimas have most frequently served critics of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature: Henri Mitterand on the nineteenth-century French novel (203-12), Susan Suleiman on the bildungsroman and the thesis novel (65; 273n39; 279n25), Lodge on Hemingway (32), John N. Duvall on Faulkner, and perhaps most persistently Fredric Jameson on Balzac, Gissing, and Conrad. Jameson's interpretation of the latter's Lord Jim and Nostromo by means of Greimas's semiotic square is exemplary (277). Despite this tendency to concentrate on writers of the last two centuries, some semioticians have devoted their attentions to ancient and medieval writers, including Ovid, Petronius, Boccaccio, and Chaucer (Martin and Conrad; Allen),(1) and a few have applied Greimas to medieval narrative, notably the Arthurian corpus (Maddox; Collins). Not all of this practical criticism is successful, however, and the failure may not, at least in some cases, be ascribed to the critics. Not many theoreticians have hastened to adopt the Greimasian method, which, in the words of Robert Scholes, may be "more interesting than satisfying" (Structuralism 107) because it is incomplete and confusing (103, 106). In his second book on structuralism, Semiotics and Interpretation, Scholes avoids Greimas although he attempts to apply Tzvetan Todorov, Genette, and Roland Barthes's codes again to Joyce's "Eveline" (89-104). And in his later, pedagogical book, Textual Power, the structuralist model is veiled, appearing, for instance, in the method of examining oppositions in the manner of Levi-Strauss (32). This suggests that Greimas's semiotic square, based on contraries and contradictions, is simply redundant since most narratives proceed on these bases (Segre 51). Generally, though, the opposition to Greimas and to Claude Bremond, another French semiotician, has complained of their mistaken claim to create a system valid for all narrative when the model has actually been derived inductively from a limited corpus of fairy tales (Kloepfer 117n1) or cultural cliches (Ricoeur 264), or opponents have criticized these systems' reductiveness, inapplicable abstraction (Culler 232, 235; Segre 27, 34; Riffaterre 31), or their failure to take into account the temporal aspect of plot (Brooks xiii). In the analysis that follows, I shall try to reply to these criticisms (though occasionally acknowledging their justification) by demonstrating how Greimas and especially Bremond might successfully be applied to a narrative. What we shall discover, I believe, is that Bremond's system does account for the forward movement of action, though perhaps not in the way Peter Brooks envisages it - psychologically - and although both Greimas's and Bremond's taxonomies abstract character and action, these very abstractions may reveal similarities and differences not immediately apparent at the so-called surface level of plot. …

Towards a "Natural" Narratology

Abstract: Monika Fludernik. Towards a "Natural" Narratology. New York: Routledge, 1996. xvi + 454 pp. $99.95 cloth. "`The king died and then the queen died,' is a story. `The king died, and then the queen died of grief,' is a plot" (Forster 93). Surely no formulation summarizes more succinctly the interface between the various narratological theories of recent years and earlier approaches to the study of narrative. Accentuating chronology of events, on the one hand, and causal links between those events, on the other, it gives a favored place to the "who-did-what-and-why" of narrative and, in effect, reflects the widely held and pervasive position that narrative is defined essentially in terms of a content composed of ordered events coupled with actantial roles which is then communicated by linguistic or other means to the addressee. Scholars of a more theoretical bent than E. M. Forster have sought to provide (without necessarily referring to Forster) models that either render this core conception more precise by pinpointing the formal features of narrative, or that are related to it in some other way. Hence, Boris Tomashevsky distinguished between fabula ("the aggregate of mutually related events reported in the work") and sjuzhet ("the orderly sequence in which [the events are] presented in the work"), and he further proposed a formal method for identifying the motif as the "irreducible part" of the theme included in each work-a program that is generally in line with Vladimir Propp's morphological model, aimed at uncovering the invariable "functions" attributed to the dramatis persona so as to define the underlying structure of a folktale, independent of its style or textual manifestation. As is well known, this work acted as a predecessor and important stimulus to the various currents of narratology as they were formulated in the 1960s according to structuralist principles and which, generally speaking, concur in dividing the narrative text into "signified" and "signifier," albeit with divergences in methodology, emphasis and terminology: "immanent" level/"apparent" level (A. J. Greimas); "racontant"/ "raconte" (Claude Bremond); "genotext"/ "phenotext" (Julia Kristeva); "recit""narration" (Roland Barthes); "histoire"l"recit"l"narration" (Gerard Genette); story/discourse (Seymour Chatman). Needless to say, the connection between Forster and properly narratological research raises issues in narrative theory that are a great deal more complex than the previous paragraph suggests. It does give some indication, however, of what Monika Fludernik, in her Towards a "Natural" Narratology, characterizes as "the analytic, non-organic approach to mainstream narratological studies (what some people would call narratology's structuralist heritage)" (338). Fludernik's latest book, following the lead of her earlier writings, is a highly informed critique of narratology in its structuralist phase but, more particularly, an ambitious attempt to forge a new paradigm for narratological research that incorporates decades of work carried out by other scholars through both a redefinition and reorientation of the habitually employed categories and a theoretical framework aimed at enabling narratology to take up questions relating to the historical evolution of narrative starting from medieval prose and extending up to recent plotless narratives--questions that have largely eluded narratologists, devoted for the most part to the synchronic dimension of a corpus composed of the novel from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Globally speaking, Fludernik has sought to put narrativity at the heart of matters by demoting all plot-based and actantially-based concepts of the term and, as an alternative, equating narrativity with experientiality a feature derived from research being done on oral narrative in everyday conversation along the lines laid down by William Labov and continued by specialists of discourse analysis, but at the same time a notion with roots in Kate Hamburger's thesis that (as Fludernik herself points out) narrative is the only form of discourse that can portray consciousness, particularly the consciousness of someone else. …