Showing papers on "Plot (narrative) published in 1976"

The Aesthetics of Mutilation in Titus Andronicus

Abstract: When T. S. Eliot so flamboyantly denounced Titus Andronicus as ‘one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written’, he naturally invited rebuttal. But while an apology for Titus can certainly be erected, the fact is that the imputed stupidities of the tragedy attract far more interest than any of its mediocre achievements. Indeed, if we would only persist in the study of those very ‘stupidities’ that many critics would rather forget, we would discover that the ways in which the figurative language imitates the literal events of plot makes The Tragedy of Titus Andronicus a significant dramatic experiment. In the play’s spectacularly self-conscious images that keep pointing at the inventive horrors in the plotting, in its wittily-obsessive allusions to dismembered hands and heads, and in the prophetic literalness of its metaphors, Titus reveals its peculiar literary importance. The peculiar language of Titus Andronicus is particularly apparent in the literalness of its central metaphors. In a play preeminently concerned with the mutilation of the human body, Titus makes nearly sixty references, figurative as well as literal, to the word 'hands' and eighteen more to the word 'head', or to one of its derivative forms. Far from being divorced from the action as many critics claim, the figurative language points continually toward the lurid events that govern the tragedy.

The Prebendaries'Plot of 1543: A Reconsideration

Abstract: There are many accounts of the ‘prebendaries' plot’ of 1543 against archbishop Thomas Cranmer. Some view the event as a counterattack against advancing heresy in Canterbury diocese. Others see a ‘papist’ revolt within Cranmer's own household. Nearly all agree that the plot was a wholly clerical enterprise. They have studied the clergy alone, focusing on the prebendaries' and preachers' activities against their ordinary. Recent accounts have stressed the relationship between the prebendaries' plot and the conflict between Cranmer and bishop Stephen Gardiner. That there was factional strife in the royal council, which could easily focus on religious issues, is not in question here. What is lacking, however, in recent accounts is any consideration of the substantial involvement of a number of Kentish gentlemen and royal officials, although their part in the affair was noted in near-contemporary accounts. By following these traces we may enlarge our understanding of the intrigue of 1543 in the context of Reformation politics at the county level.

Next Week--East Lynne: Domestic Drama in Performance, 1820-1874

Abstract: Examines plot, character, setting, and spectacle, viewing the plays in performance. Discusses the importance of costume, makeup, gesture, and audience participation, and relates the subject matter of the plays to contemporary society, especially as it reflected England's change from a semi-feudal to an increasingly democratic society. Illustrated.

Folklore and Myth

Abstract: HE relationship of myth to folklore is a subject which arises inevitably out of my two earlier presidential addresses. In the first of these, Folklore and History, I indicated certain repetitive patterns in popular traditions concerning historical persons and events: the generous donor, the monster of destruction, the king returning to inaugurate a golden age. In the second, on Folklore and Literature, I was again dealing with repetitive patterns found in folk and fairy tales, which may find their way also into more sophisticated literature: the patient wife, the despised youth who becomes a hero, the fight with a supernatural adversary. Some of these are patterns of a recognizable mythical type, and this means that we have to make some attempt to consider the relation of myth to folklore. It is by no means a simple question, and since our Society came into being, there have been a series of long and heated controversies about myths, in some of which folklorists have played a major part. Much nonsense has been talked and written on this subject, and many roads enthusiastically marked out by eminent scholars as major routes to a solution have been abandoned by their successors. As Andrew Lang once stated with his customary good sense: 'The history of mythology is the history of rash, premature and exclusive theories."' Nevertheless since folklore must form part of the evidence on which theories of the nature of myth are based, we cannot afford to ignore the subject altogether. Both myth and folklore are terms notoriously difficult to define. The definition I am using for a myth is that given by Joseph Fontenrose,2 who defines it as a traditional story accompanying rituals, a story with a definite plot, purporting to tell of occasions when some institution or cult, or certain rites and festivals, had their beginning, and of the original act which set the precedent for this. There are stories of a mythical type not attached to ritual in this way, which are better included in the category of legend or folklore, even though they may have a plot similar to that of a true myth. It is worth noting also that there is material not in narrative form which may be called mythical in type, although the main controversies have been over myths as stories rather than mythical patterns or characters. It is clearly not helpful to use the term too loosely, to include the whole sum of men's feelings and ideas about the gods.3 Also, as Fontenrose points out, we must not be misled by the use of the term myth in current literary criticism, where it seems to be employed for any large controlling image which the critic

Plautus' Captivi and the Ideology of the Ancient City-State

Abstract: Plautus' Captivi is a play of discovery rather than of action. Its plot is not so much a story as a situation, which is misperceived at first but gradually revealed to the characters in the drama. The chief complications of the plot are all given as part of the initial conditions, which are described in the prologue as having occurred prior to the time of the dramatic action. There had been a war between two Greek communities, Elis and Aetolia. The event itself is strictly and explicitly banished from the stage as befitting tragedy, not comedy (58-62). The prisoners taken on either side in the war were sold as slaves, as commonly happened. Among these was a young Aetolian named Philopolemus, son of Hegio, who fell into the possession of a doctor in Elis called Menarchus. As a result, Hegio, though a man of excellent character, has begun to purchase slaves on the slave market, not with an eye to profit, however, but in order to acquire an Elean captive whom he may exchange for his own son. On the day before the date on which the play is imagined to take place, Hegio has succeeded in buying, at considerable cost, a distinguished citizen of Elis named Philocrates, along with his personal slave, Tyndarus.

English and Italian Portraiture in Daniel Deronda

Abstract: T^ HE EXISTENCE of English and Jewish "halves" of Daniel Deronda, and the difficulty of reconciling them, have dominated critical discussions of the novel since F. R. Leavis revived the issues in The Great Tradition (1948). Some critics have deplored the discrepancy between the two halves, others have defended it as intentional and necessary, and still others have described it as more apparent than real.' Among the many accounts of the double plot, however, none has called attention to the fact that each part incorporates a distinctive mode of literary portraiture. George Eliot regularly describes her English characters in terms of the English portrait tradition and her Jewish characters in terms of Italian, especially Venetian, painting. The stylistic contrasts between these two schools of painting mirror moral contrasts between the two (as she thought) racial groups represented. Thus the pictorial descrip-

Annibale Carracci's “Scherzo”: The Christ Church Butcher Shop

Abstract: Recent studies have pointed out some of the comic elements that exist in late sixteenth-century genre painting.1 These paintings often have burlesque qualities coupled with actual references to the costumes, plot, and characters of the Commedia dell'Arte.2 Annibale Carracci's Butcher Shop (Fig. 1), like many late cinquecento genre scenes, appears to transcend mere naturalistic portrayal and to have a place within this comic tradition.3

American History and Literature: Team-Teaching High School History.

Abstract: THE CHANCE remark over a morning cup of coffee, "I want to teach American Literature," and the almost automatic response, "I have always wanted to teach American history through novels," resulted in the creation of an interdisciplinary, team-taught, block class. Very quickly, we perceived that the two desires could be met in one course-two specialists teaching the same materials from the perspective of their own fields. The English teacher would treat the novel as an expression of the times as well as just literature with a plot, theme, character development, and other technical qualities. The history

Reflecting Consciousness: Three Approaches to Henry James

Abstract: In a recent issue of Sight and Sound, director Jacques Rivette suggested that the works of Henty James were perhaps "unfilmable"; James is an author, he said, who can be filmed "diagonally but never literally"1 Nonetheless, since 1972 at least seven films of James stories have been made or are in production: Rivette's own film Celine et Julie vont en bateau, based in part on The Other House, Bogdanovich's Daisy Miller James Ivory's The Europeans, and five films made for French television, to be directed by Claude Chabrol Paul Seban, Volker Schlondorff, and British director, Tony Scott In addition, a number of James stories have recently been adapted for television both here and abroad There have, of course, been James films in the past: Berkeley Square, The Heiress, and several versions of The Turn of the Screw It is interesting, however, to speculate upon the reasons for all this interest in James now, at a time when critics insist on the widespread demands from audiences for violence and pornography Perhaps James's concern with the nature of artistic process interests directors who want to create art about art; perhaps the suggestion of repressed eroticism in his work challenges them; or perhaps his analyses of the power struggles involved in the most ordinary human relationships speak clearly to a post-Watergate consciousness "It all comes back in the last analysis" James writes in the preface to The Tragic Muse, "to the individual vision of decency, the critical as well as the passionate judgment of it under sharp stress"2 In any case, whatever the motive for selecting these stories to film now may be any James work certainly presents a number of challenges to the director To begin with, although the action of a typical James novella or tale is easy enough to transfer to the screen - all those unscrupulous villains and mysterious deaths - the distinctive quality of the author's work is his dense and often almost opaque verbal style, a style full of qualification and elaboration which is not easy to translate into visual terms Moreover, whatever the action of the story may be, the center of any James plot is always the essentially intellectual act of seeing in both its literal and its metaphorical sense, that is of understanding, of incorporating vision into consciousness This act of seeing, although in life non-verbal and instantaneous, we have learned to deal with in and through literature as a process of sequence and analysis; it can be paradoxically difficult to embody in a visual medium The three James films of the current crop that have been released so far in the United States - Daisy Miller Chabrol's The Bench of Desolation, and the Rivette film - represent, as might be expected, three totally different approaches to the author's work By examining these works even superficially, we can learn something about the problems involved in a James adaptation and explore the meaning of Rivette's remark Peter Bogdanovich's attitude toward his source might best be called irreverent The director claims to have felt no obligation to be faithful to the "sketchy" story he adapted3 and apparently set out to make an historical film as he had made a fifties film, a thirties comedy film, a musical, and so forth, to display the talents of his company of actors In the light of this, it is surprising to see how close to the original the movie really is The dialogue is a literal adaptation of that in the story - it is hard to find many lines that have been omitted or changed - and the action is on the whole accurately reproduced as well The movie is handsome and generally amusing For the reader of James, the only thing that is missing is the essential quality, the Jamesian ambiance: that is, a sense of moral concern strong enough to make the audience care about what happens to the characters on the screen and a pervasive ambiguity that might prevent our judgments about these characters from being predictable and automatic …

Trollope as a Short Story Writer

Abstract: A NTHONY TROLLOPE'S stories constitute a substantial and substantially ignored portion of his prodigious output. He began writing them after having established, in his mid-forties, a reputation as author of the first three Barsetshire novels; and with the great success of Framley Parsonage in 1860, editors of Victorian middlebrow magazines began to importune him for short works bearing his name. To his young American friend, Kate Field, who had sent him one of her short stories for criticism, Trollope offered a formula for storytelling which demonstrates how modestly he may have regarded his own practice, at least in the beginning stages: "Tell some simple plot or story of more or less involved, but still common life, adventure, and try first to tell that in such form that idle minds may find some gentle sentiment and recreation in your work."' Such a goal indicates why so many of his stories, virtually all of them pleasant enough to read through, are not comparable to the more ambitious, more painstakingly constructed, efforts of James and Kipling, Lawrence and Joyce. Like Mrs. Gaskell and Dickens, Trollope was perfectly willing to produce slight works of an anecdotal or inspirational nature. Like them, however, he was also capable of works of great power or delicacy. "Malachi's Cove" and "The Spotted Dog" are masterpieces of the Victorian short story form; and even when Trollope is not at his best, he does provide us with aspects of his art and personality-in the forms of a humorous self-portrait, or a somber display of his view of human nature, or a rare glimpse of his creative process at work-that are usually missing from the novels themselves.

Tone and Time in Chaucer's Troilus

Abstract: Things change. This is one of the few of its commonplaces which remains unscathed by the action of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. For the fact that things do change is, alas, at the heart of Chaucer's " tragedie." It is also central to our experience of the poem, for mutability, besides being a theme in this story, is also what makes a plot go forward. Sub specie aeternitatis, this world can be perceived not as a narrative but as a vision, which is how Troilus sees it from the "holughnesse of the eighthe spere" (V, 1809).1 But we are condemned to read the poem, for all its foreshadowings and interruptions as a narrative, in time, even though such immersion in the narrative is difficult, discontinuous and subject to reconsideration at the end of the poem.2 My subject here is the means by which the poem suggests changes in our consciousness, our attitudes towards the characters, towards the fiction, towards the act of reading, changes which parallel the vicissitudes of the plot. Ultimately, of course, this has been the thrust of most criticism of the poem, whether it concentrates on the characters, the imagery, the narrator, or, more recently, the audience. I should like, however, to concentrate on more subtle hints and cues, which manipulate and color our sense of these other factors, and which suggest the path, direction, and quality that our response should take. The tone, the mood, the atmosphere of the work combine to form a shifting matrix which signals, and sometimes causes, the reader's complicity in the world of the poem. I need not dwell on the extent to which Chaucer's romance differs from both its sources and its traditions.3 For while the historical