Part of Frost's continuing appeal to the "popular imagination" stems from his pronunciamentos on diverse topics: the metaphoric "pleasure of ulteriority," "the sound of sense," poems beginning in wisdom and ending in delight—"a momentary stay against confusion." These phrases along with favorite one-liners have made their way into our lexicon as memorable formulations both of Frost's ars poetica and of quotidian reality. Even schoolboys allegedly know the poet in these or similar terms. And why not? Yet the supposed "commonness" of (...) Frost is precisely what must be brought under radical scrutiny—including his formulaic statements of intent. Though these statements have been used effectively for critical purposes, the fact remains that they themselves are often problematic and tend toward the disconcertingly devious.1 That Frost's recourse to the rhetoric of irony and indirection is by no means confined to his poetry should not deter us from using his statements of intent to understand his poetry more fully. A cautionary "go slow," however, is in order. · 1. This is one reason I have difficulty accepting Elaine Barry's claims for Frost as a theorist. Having distinguished between Frost as "critical theorist" and as "practical critic," Barry concludes: "Robert Frost has left us a body of critical theory that is probably larger than that of any American poet. It has scope and depth, wit and subtlety—and a great sanity. In its significance, it bears favorable comparison with the formalized criticism of Eliot or Pound . . ." . Frost makes some most suggestive statements—often requiring de-metaphorization—about poetry, especially his own. But taken as a whole, those statements constitute, at best, only an approximation of "theory." That this is not merely semantic haggling over the definition of theory should be evident from Barry's favorable comparison of Frost to Pound and especially Eliot. Victor E. Vogt has recently completed a study on love, death, and the quotidian in modern American drama and is currently working on the moral and sociological aspects of dramatism. (shrink)

The lyric speaker begins by turning his or her will into words, but begins to be a Browningesque speaker when this conversion leads to a turning of the will against words. This inversion, or perversion, of the will against its own expression requires a reader to entertain a complex notion of the relationship between intention and language—or, more accurately, to hold in suspension two competing versions of that relationship. A reader learns not only to conceive interpretation in the simple lyric (...) sense, as a prevailing assertion of the will, but also to conceive any given assertion of the will, any intention given over to articulation in language, as an interpretation and therefore a potential falsification inviting further refinement. The playful competition Browning urges between these two conceptions of intentionality frees meaning to wander somewhere beyond the ken of each lyric speaker, somewhere in the future of lyric utterance. Meaning is to the dramatic lyric what action is to the drama proper; and much as the curious "action in character" of Browning's dramas defers dramatic action and makes room for play, so Browning defers meaning in the lyrics by enlisting the patterning forces of the self-interfering will.1· 1. Browning remarked in the preface to Strafford that his play turned on "Action in the Character rather than Character in Action".Herbert F. Tucker, Jr., an assistant professor of English at Northwestern University, has published articles on Hopkins and Browning. An expanded version of the present essay appears in his Browning's Beginnings: The Art of Disclosure. (shrink)

Plato's philosophical dialogues can be seen as his creation of a new genre. Plato borrows from, as well as rejects, earlier and contemporary authors, and he is constantly in conversation with established genres, such as tragedy, comedy, lyric poetry, and rhetoric in a variety of ways. This intertextuality reinforces the relevance of material from other types of literary works, as well as a general knowledge of classical culture in Plato's time, and the political and moral environment that Plato addressed, when (...) reading his dramatic dialogues. The authors of Philosophy as Drama show that any interpretation of these works must include the literary and narrative dimensions of each text, as much as serious the attention given to the progression of the argument in each piece. Each dialogue is read on its own merit, and critical comparisons of several dialogues explore the differences and likenesses between them on a dramatic as well as on a logical level. This collection of essays moves debates in Plato scholarship forward when it comes to understanding both particular aspects of Plato's dialogues and the approach itself. Containing 11 chapters of close readings of individual dialogues, with 2 chapters discussing specific themes running through them, such as music and sensuousness, pleasure, perception, and images, this book displays the range and diversity within Plato's corpus. (shrink)

Prodelision or Inverse Elision takes place when a word ending in a long vowel or diphthong is immediately followed by another word beginning with a short vowel. Though it is very occasionally found in inscriptions and in the manuscripts of certain prose authors, particularly those of Plato—almost uniquely and its cases—it is to be considered as essentially a verse phenomenon, affecting as it does the metre of the line in which it occurs. Prodelision was unknown to Homer and Hesiod, is (...) rare in lyric, and seems only to come into real use with the dramatists of the fifth century. An examination of the practice of the three tragedians and of Aristophanes is not without interest in itself and may occasionally throw some light on points of textual criticism. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAnalyzing the function of song as a genre can clarify debates over how Shelley’s more visionary mode of poetry might intervene in politics and whether his overtly political popular songs betray the philosophical claim to a revolution in subjectivity made by those visionary works. Because the genre of song originates in communal, oral performance, yet is also a subgenre of the larger category of lyric, its intrinsic oppositions or tensions mediate between political action and lyric subjectivity. Tracing two streams of (...) song, the “urbane” and the “marginal,” that offer models for Shelley’s experiments in song, the essay then conducts a census of songs in the volumes that Shelley published or intended to publish. Applying a description of oral song performances as representing a “bodily economy,” it examines Shelley’s three revisionary Greek dramas, especially the two published in 1820, to interpret the drafts of songs intended for his “little volume of popular songs, wholly political.”. (shrink)

This paper traces some of the sources of Socratic dialectic: myth, drama, lyric poetry, law and the courts, pre-Socratic cosmology.

European thought begins with the Greeks. Scientific and philosophic thinking--the pursuit of truth and the grasping of unchanging principles of life--is a historical development, an achievement; and, as Bruno Snell writes in The Discovery of the Mind, nothing less than a revolution. The Greeks did not take mental resources already at their disposal and merely map out new subjects for discussion and investigation. In poetry, drama, and philosophy they in fact discovered the human mind. The stages in man's gradual (...) understanding of himself are revealed in the course of ancient literature from Homer to Virgil. A rational view of the nature of man slowly established itself in the creations of epic and lyric poetry, tragedy and literary criticism, pre-Socratic thought, and early Greek ethics all the way to the discovery of humanitas and the spiritual landscape of Virgil's Arcadia. The Discovery of the Mind is a landmark work in tracing this evolution of consciousness--one of the distinguishing characteristics of the history of man. (shrink)

International array of contributors, bringing together both traditional and more recent approaches to provide valuable insights into the poets’ use of language.Covers authors from Lucilius to Juvenal.Of the peoples of ancient Italy, only the Romans committed newly composed poems to writing, and for 250 years Latin-speakers developed an impressive verse literature.The language had traditional resources of high style, e.g., alliteration, lexical and morphological archaism or grecism, and of course metaphor and word order; and there were also less obvious resources in (...) the technical vocabularies of law, philosophy and medicine.The essays in this volume show how the poets in the classical period combined these elements, and so created a poetic medium that could comprehend satire, invective, erotic elegy, drama, lyric, and the grandest heroic epos. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Cynthia Willett HEGEL, ANTIGONE, AND THE POSSIBILITY OF ECSTATIC DIALOGUE In his lectures on aesthetics, Hegel argues that drama is the highest form of art. Only drama can resolve, or sublate (auflieben), an opposition between objective and subjective poles ofaesthetic experience.1 This opposition takes its penultimate form in the difference between epic and lyric poetry. Subjective feelings expressed in lyric and the objective representation ofevents in epic (...) are sublated in classical drama as ethical character and action. In this article I will examine both what Hegel does and does not say about the structure and function ofclassical drama in order to determine its role in the education of humanity, or what Hegel calls the "phenomenology of spirit." As it turns out, drama is not only a climactic moment in the development of spirit. The structure ofdrama also traces a paradigm and an historical origin for Hegel's dialectic. The ironic reversals and discoveries that emplot tragic drama also constitute dialectic. An immediate consequence of this parallel is mat, in accordance with Aristode's definition of tragic drama, dialectic demands the catharsis, or purging, of emotion from educated spirit.2 After establishing the analogy between dialectic and cathartic drama, I turn to the exemplary role that is played by Sophocles' Antigone in the Phenomenology ofSpirit. A reinterpretation of the play suggests that Hegel fails to see that emotional engagement, or the unsublated subjective feeling relegated to die lower art of lyric, in fact orients the dramatic action of Antigone. The resemblance between drama and dialectic suggests that desire can no more be purged from dialectic than from classical tragedy. As a consequence, Hegelian dialectic should be reconceived in terms of a notion of tragedy that is not cathartic but ecstatic. Philosophy and Literature, © 1990, 14: 268-283 Cynthia Willett269 In the AesUietks, Hegel places drama after epic and lyric as the third and final moment of the highest stage of art. Drama presents actions that are ethical and thus differs from the lyrical expression of feelings as well as the adventures narrated in epic (A, pp. 1158; 474). Hegel's definition of epic in terms of narration and description suggests that the language of epic functions as representation. Representational language externalizes, or objectifies, spirit's movement in a series ofevents which are related by the epic poet. This narration functions without the mediation ofa subject, which is to say without an "agent's inner will and character" (A, pp. 1160; 476). Lyric poetry, on the other hand, concerns feelings or "the inner life alone" (A, pp. 984; 254). In accordance with its subject matter, the language oflyric is not representational but expressive. Drama presents actions before an audience, such actions occurring primarily in the mode of speech (A, pp. 1159; 475). What we can characterize as the "speech-acts" performed in drama carry out intentions of, or ends soughtby, the main character. Drama advances dialectic because, as Hegel writes, "drama does not fall apart into a lyric inner life and an external sphere as its opposite, but displays an inner life and its external realization" (A, pp. 1 160; 476). First, events which occur episodically in epic attain the unity of a single action that comprises dramatic plot. Secondly, a "cleaned-up" version ofthe "chaotic" feelings expressed in lyric poetry develops into the intention of a character to adher to a universal ethical principle. It is important to emphasize that, according to Hegel, drama should not draw any of its effect from subjective emotions. Drama sublates lyrical feeling into ethical law. Only thus does drama bring together the epic-making events and lyrical subjectivity, notby wayofa mechanical synthesis, but in a metamorphosis enabling elements initially opposed to give rise to an original whole. The proximity ofdrama to dialectical thought appears in the contrast Hegel draws between dramatic action and action which is prosaic, or philosophically insignificant (A, pp. 1159; 475). Dramatic action, Hegel explains, "is notconfined to the simple and undisturbed accomplishment ofa specific aim; on the contrary, it rests entirely on collisions ofcircumstances, passions, and characters... which in turn necessitate a resolution of the conflict and discord" (A, pp. 1159; 475). On the other hand, a prosaic, or ordinary... (shrink)

This article is a survey of familiar ground—those passages of the Poetics of Aristotle which throw light on the treatment of legend by the tragic poets. Although sweeping generalizations are often made on the use of the traditional stories in drama, our evidence on the subject is slight and inconclusive. We have little knowledge of the form in which most of the legends were known to the Attic playwrights, for the few we find in the Iliad and Odyssey appear (...) there in very different versions from those they take on in the plays, and the fragmentary remains of epic and lyric poetry between Homer and the fifth century B.C. present us with a wide field for speculation, but few certain facts; while vase paintings and other works of art supplement only here and there the scanty information gained from literature.The comments of ancient writers on this aspect of tragedy are surprisingly few, and carry us little farther. The Poetics stands out as the one source from which we can draw any substantial account of the matter. Even Aristotle, of course, is not directly concerned with the history of drama, and deals with it only incidentally in isolated passages; and in considering these it must constantly be borne in mind that he is discussing tragedy as he knew it in the late fourth century, for the benefit of fourth-century readers. But even so, his statements are the main foundation on which our view of the dramatists' use of legend must be built. (shrink)

This article is a survey of familiar ground—those passages of the Poetics of Aristotle which throw light on the treatment of legend by the tragic poets. Although sweeping generalizations are often made on the use of the traditional stories in drama, our evidence on the subject is slight and inconclusive. We have little knowledge of the form in which most of the legends were known to the Attic playwrights, for the few we find in the Iliad and Odyssey appear (...) there in very different versions from those they take on in the plays, and the fragmentary remains of epic and lyric poetry between Homer and the fifth century B.C. present us with a wide field for speculation, but few certain facts; while vase paintings and other works of art supplement only here and there the scanty information gained from literature.The comments of ancient writers on this aspect of tragedy are surprisingly few, and carry us little farther. The Poetics stands out as the one source from which we can draw any substantial account of the matter. Even Aristotle, of course, is not directly concerned with the history of drama, and deals with it only incidentally in isolated passages; and in considering these it must constantly be borne in mind that he is discussing tragedy as he knew it in the late fourth century, for the benefit of fourth-century readers. But even so, his statements are the main foundation on which our view of the dramatists' use of legend must be built. (shrink)

This book critically explores the development of radical criminology through a range of written Ancient Greek works including epic and lyrical poetry, drama and philosophy, across different chapters. It traces the development of political power and the concepts of law, legitimacy, crime, justice and deviance in the Ancient Greek world and the political struggles that propelled that development, using the conflict perspective as a conceptual tool of the sociological analysis of reality. Theoretical discussions of crime and justice typically (...) stem from the better known works of Plato or Aristotle although this book explores the works preceding these. This book will appeal to those interested in the history of criminology and the historical production of criminological knowledge. (shrink)

Writers of fiction have always confronted topics of crime and punishment. This age-old fascination with crime on the part of both authors and readers is not surprising, given that criminal justice touches on so many political and psychological themes essential to literature, and comes equippedwith a trial process that contains its own dramatic structure. This volume explores this profound and enduring literary engagement with crime, investigation, and criminal justice. The collected essays explore three themes that connect the world of law (...) with that of fiction. First, defining and punishing crime is one of the fundamental purposes of government,along with the protection of victims by the prevention of crime. And yet criminal punishment remains one of the most abused and terrifying forms of political power. Second, crime is intensely psychological and therefore an important subject by which a writer can develop and explore character. Athird connection between criminal justice and fiction involves the inherently dramatic nature of the legal system itself, particularly the trial. Moreover, the ongoing public conversation about crime and punishment suggests that the time is ripe for collaboration between law and literature in thistroubled domain.The essays in this collection span a wide array of genres, including tragic drama, science fiction, lyric poetry, autobiography, and mystery novels. The works discussed include works as old as fifth-century BCE Greek tragedy and as recent as contemporary novels, memoirs, and mystery novels. Thecumulative result is arresting: there are "killer wives" and crimes against trees; a government bureaucrat who sends political adversaries to their death for treason before falling to the same fate himself; a convicted murderer who doesn't die when hanged; a psychopathogical collector whose quitesane kidnapping victim nevertheless also collects; Justice Thomas' reading and misreading of Bigger Thomas; a man who forgives his son's murderer and one who cannot forgive his wife's non-existent adultery; fictional detectives who draw on historical analysis to solve murders. These essays begin aconversation, and they illustrate the great depth and power of crime in literature. (shrink)

In an interesting paper read some time ago to the Cambridge Philological Society , H. J. M. Milne analysed the first Ode of Sappho and showed that it is constructed according to those principles of poetical form which we should expect to find in the work of so delicate a Greek artist. If more of these lyrics had survived in their entirety, the task of expounding the technique of Greek poetry would be simpler than it is, because naturally the principles (...) are more easily grasped in a short lyric than in epic or drama. (shrink)

Rawdon Wilson's "On Character" raised a great many questions, and I should like to deal with lesser matters before going on to those of more consequence. He has found in my work the Fallacy of Novelistic Presumption. To commit this unnatural act is to assume "that the novel possesses a history that is independent of other modes of fiction and that it may be discussed independently of the history of literature." Let me say at the outset that I am not (...) trying to frame a restrictive definition of the novel. Novels are whatever most critics agree to call novels, and if I speak of "the novel" I can only hope that the phrase will be taken as convenient shorthand rather than an attempt to define an essence. And of course the novel has a history of its own, just as the state of Connecticut has a history even as it remains one of the fifty states, just as literature has a history although it is only one of the arts or institutions of our culture. Mr. Wilson wants a theory of characters that "will necessarily account for - go to the heart of - all instances of character, symbolic, allegorical, naturalistic, whether in the novel, in epic, in romance, in drama, or in lyric." To that I can only reply with E.M. Forster's sentence: "We must exclude someone from our gathering, or we shall be left with nothing." In this essay Martin Price, Thomas E. Donnelley Professor of English at Yale University, responds to Rawdon Wilson's "On Character" which raised objections to Price's "People of the Book: Character in Forster's A Passage to India". (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Medieval Troubadour Mobilized in the French Resistance *Roy RosensteinIntroduction: The Place of Poetry under VichyRien ne semblait plus anachronique que d’interroger, inter arma, le silence des Muses médiévales....Frank 1In Chantons sous l’occupation André Halimi details how raucously the band played on in wartime Paris. 2 If Vercors in 1941 advocated the practice of silence and Sartre in 1945 maintained that Paris had been dead for the four years (...) of the Nazi occupation, Halimi and others have shown that Parisians [End Page 499] sang, danced, and laughed during the Occupation as never before. 3 Rarely had so many plays been staged, so many movies been produced. 4 While in other Nazi-occupied countries the theaters and restaurants remained closed, thus preserving a modicum of national dignity in defeat, in France the arts thrived and la vie mondaine accelerated its pace. Journalist Henri Amouroux rightly explains how cinema and theater provided more than entertainment and why they were periodically the target of curfews. In these wartime performances a seemingly insignificant phrase could take on a rich contemporary context. Thus a line like “toute la fleur du royaume se trouve en prison” in Montherlant’s La reine morte invariably provoked applause. Whether the text was classical or contemporary in origin, the audience “seized upon all the passages that could be linked to the current situation.” 5 In this broad sense, Resistance literature came to include any “poetry written and/or distributed in France during the Occupation, and which the reader sees as implicitly or explicitly conveying hostility to Nazism and Collaboration.” 6Between 1940 and 1944 French audiences escaped their national misfortunes more through literature than through film and drama combined. “Never, perhaps, had literature played such a momentous part in the daily life of French readers,” wrote the late Henri Peyre in 1945. 7 As is often noted, the intellectual Resistance “fut surtout poétique.” 8 Every page of poetry, past or present, seemed to remind wartime readers of their current circumstances. One young poète résistant is categorical: “Never before had poetry played such a decisive role in history.” 9 Pierre Brunel of the Sorbonne is just as emphatic in confirming [End Page 500] the judgment of contemporary scholars and Resistance fighters alike: “During the war years, French poetry found a singleness of purpose and an audience that it had never enjoyed before.” 10In anticipation of more comprehensive treatments of French Resistance poetry sens large, the present study proposes a necessarily modest and certainly partial approach to the role of poetry in the French Resistance. Following the general groundwork of Seghers, Gaucheron, Higgins, and others, it undertakes to track, if only schematically, the reaction to France’s fall as polarized across three territories—in American exile, in Vichy France, and in German camps—through a focus on one exemplary twelfth-century troubadour. Concurrently with the “nouvelle floraison poétique” hailed by André Rousseaux in 1941, 11 Jaufre Rudel was one earlier poet who enjoyed a resurgence of interest during the war. With respect to this troubadour, to date only Dietmar Rieger has mentioned in passing an oblique reference to Rudel’s trademark distant love in Aragon’s “Pour un chant (national)”: “Jaufre’s love from afar is set against a love for France.” 12 This particular troubadour’s legend and lyrics assumed new dimensions through their immediate relevance not only for Aragon but for all French nationals, both imprisoned at home and exiled abroad. Literary historian René Dumesnil observed as early as 1941 with respect to pre-war French classics: “Present circumstances give them new depth and extend their range.” 13 Regarding France’s medieval literature, a modern critic has noted how “the troubadours, just as much as Tristan, Roland, Lancelot, Perceval, or even Yseult..., emerge as agents of unity, even of unanimity, around whom it is still possible to muster the French people in 1940.” 14 [End Page 501]As has been observed for centuries, “Frenchmen abroad seldom wholly give up the idea of going back to France some time or other.” 15 All French patriots and expatriates, wherever they found themselves after the Armistice in June 1940, whether... (shrink)

Synge, with his “fully-flavoured” Hiberno-English established a tradition of Irish theatrical eloquence that has come down into the contemporary period in the lyrical fluencies of Brian Friel, the vatic speech of Frank McGuinness and the Midlands poeticism of Marina Carr. Tom Murphy, however, set a different sort of precedent, resistant to such eloquence, forging a stage speech instead from the broken language of the inarticulate. The aim of this paper is to explore the rejection of ‘poetry talk’ in contemporary (...) Irish drama, and the various ideolects created by Billy Roche, Conor McPherson, Martin Mc- Donagh, Mark O’Rowe and Enda Walsh. (shrink)

1. A World of Difference: Travel Narratives and the Inscription of Culture -- 2. Fair Texts/Dark Ladies: Renaissance Lyric and the Poetics of Color -- 3. "Commerce and Intercourse": Dramas of Alliance and Trade -- 4. The Daughters of Eve and the Children of Ham: Race and the English Woman Writer -- 5. "An Object in the Midst of Other Objects": Race, Gender, Material Culture -- Epilogue: Oil "Race," Black Feminism, and White Supremacy -- Appendix: Poems of Blackness.

I admire Robert Denham's enlightening and often very amusing response to my "Coherent Readers, Incoherent Texts" Critical Inquiry 3 [Summer 1977]:781-802). Not surprisingly, however, I remain unconvinced by its arguments, large or small. This may sound defensive, partly because it is, but I do wonder if his use of pluralistic sound sense is quite so fresh or so formidable as he takes it to be. . . . I think Denham understands quite accurately my use of "genre" as representing a (...) traditional structure for organizing plot, character, images, tones, and the like. I think it is true, also, that I use the word to refer both to narrative pattern and to what he calls "intention," that I use both Frye and Sacks as examples of convincing distinctions among ordering patterns. Of course Denham is right in saying that these systems are not necessarily coordinate, that they cover species and subspecies alike, and that the generic patterns are not of the same order. One might have a represented action that is comic, tragic, or even "serious." I wonder if all this really makes my argument "sometimes difficult to follow" . I had thought that I was signaling clearly the switch from Frye to Sacks, that neither was using "genre" in an unfamiliar or restrictive sense, and that both presented useful systems that were comprehensive and thus adaptable—as time has surely shown—for the labeling and pigeonholing needs of those seeking coherence at all costs. Since Frye sees narrative patterns as "pre-generic," it would not be difficult to work out coordination simply by saying that Sacks' three general categories of fiction could each exist in any of Frye's twenty-four phases. But things are not that simple, and more important, such devices would surely distract a reader I wanted to be in search of other game. Most of us switch freely from system to system, understanding "genre" to refer to a class that includes epic-drama-lyric-novel, a class that includes comedy-tragedy-romance-irony, a class that includes apologue-satire-represented action. As I see it, the only danger lies in mixing incompatible systems. James R. Kincaid is professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His works include Dickens and the Rhetoric of Laughter, Tennyson's Major Poems: The Comic and Ironic Patterns, and The Novels of Anthony Trollope. His contributions to Critical Inquiry are "Coherent Readers, Incoherent Text" , and "Fiction and the Shape of Belief: Fifteen Years Later". (shrink)

In this paper I approach the relationship between one kind of choral ode and its play, through an analysis of two stasima and less detailed reference to their respective plays. The two odes, Hipp. 732–75 and Hel. 1451–1511, share the theme which has provoked comment on Euripides' use of ‘escapism’ to counteract the supposed reality of his tragedies. I prefer to see the escape-form as a reassertion of the themes and problems of the play in a different and distant context, (...) and to suggest that even in the ‘elsewhere’ of lyric song the dark features of life that mark the drama are not to be escaped. The winged boat in the Hippolytus, for instance, is parallel in the ode to the winged bird, symbol and vehicle of escape, but it is also the ship whose journey initiates the disaster of the play. (shrink)

In this paper I approach the relationship between one kind of choral ode and its play, through an analysis of two stasima and less detailed reference to their respective plays. The two odes, Hipp. 732–75 and Hel. 1451–1511, share the theme which has provoked comment on Euripides' use of ‘escapism’ to counteract the supposed reality of his tragedies. I prefer to see the escape-form as a reassertion of the themes and problems of the play in a different and distant context, (...) and to suggest that even in the ‘elsewhere’ of lyric song the dark features of life that mark the drama are not to be escaped. The winged boat in the Hippolytus, for instance, is parallel in the ode to the winged bird, symbol and vehicle of escape, but it is also the ship whose journey initiates the disaster of the play. (shrink)

Whatever we choose to call Beckett’s series of disjunctive and repetitive paragraphs , Ill Seen Ill Said surely has little in common with the short story or the novella. Yet this is how the editors of the New Yorker, where Beckett’s piece first appeared in English in 1981, evidently thought of it, for like all New Yorker short stories, it is punctuated by cartoons and, what is even more ironic, by a “real” poem, Harold Brodkey’s “Sea Noise” . Notice that (...) the reader immediately knows—or is supposed to know—that Brodkey is a poet and Beckett a fiction writer, not only because “Sea Noise” is designated a poem in the issue’s table of contents, but also because its placement on the page, framed by white space, distinguishes it from Ill Seen Ill Said, which is printed in standard New Yorker columns. Yet if we examine the sound structure of Brodkey’s poem, we find that the rhythm of recurrence is, if anything, less prominent here than in the Beckett “prose.” The four stanzas are of irregular line length ; the stress count ranges from one to five ; rhyme occurs only once, at the end of the poem ; and alliteration and assonance are not marked. Unless we assume that poetry is defined by the sheer decision of its maker to lineate the text, or unless we want to call “Sea Noise” a poem because it is built around a single extended metaphor , there is no rationale for the classification the New Yorker has implicitly adopted.4The meaning of this classification is worth pondering, for it represents, in microcosm, the orthodoxy of every major literature textbook and literary history as well as of most classrooms in the United States and Britain, which that Beckett is a writer who, like the young Joyce or the young Faulkner, wrote in his dim youth some negligible, clotted lyric poems but whose real work belongs to drama and fiction. As such, we don’t teach Beckett in our poetry courses or include him in discussions of contemporary poetry and poetics. The index of any major book on the subject—say, Robert Pinsky’s The Situation of Poetry—will bear this out. And yet the irony is that contemporary poets are increasingly using forms that cannot be properly understood without the example of Beckett’s astonishing “lyrics of fiction”—to use Ryby Cohn’s apt term5—or, as I shall call them, his “associative monologues.” Perhaps, then, it is time to rethink our current procedures of canon making. In what follows, I shall use Ill Seen Ill Said as an example.4. Contemporary prosodists, perhaps because they must account for the difficult case of free verse, generally do equate verse—and hence implicitly the poem—with lineation. For example, Charles O. Hartman, in his recent Free Verse: An Essay in Prosody , observes that, difficult as it is to define the word “poetry” “rigorously and permanently,” verse can be distinguished from prose quite readily:Verse is language in lines. This distinguishes it from prose…. This is not really a satisfying distinction, as it stands, but it is the only one that works absolutely. The fact that we can tell verse from prose on sight, with very few errors…indicates that the basic perceptual difference must be very simple. Only lineation fits the requirements. [P.11]But, as I have just shown in the case of Beckett and Brodkey, what looks like verse may sound like prose and vice versa. The “basic perceptual difference” between the two is surely not as simple as Hartman suggests. I discuss this question from a somewhat different angle in “The Linear Fallacy,” Georgia Review 35 : 855-69.5. See Ruby Cohn, Back to Beckett , chap. 5, “Lyrics of Fiction.”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy of Music Education Review 12.1 (2004) 80-83 [Access article in PDF] Response to Yiannis Miralis, "Manos Hadjidakis: The Story of an Anarchic Youth and a 'Magnus Eroticus'" Lenia Serghi Ionian University, Corfu Manos Hadjidakis and his work are like his song, "O Mythos," for they take you from reality to fantasy and bring you back again. For my generation Hadjidakis was a myth with substance, since he was (...) a real person and his work represented our reality.The first time I heard of Hadjidakis was in relation to his song, "The Children of Pireas," that won him an Oscar for Best Song in 1960-61 as the main theme of his music for the film, Never on Sunday. The first record, a 45-single in the early 1960s, aroused a strong emotional response in the youth of the time.My next and most important experience with Hadjidakis' music was in London during the International Theatre Festival in the Spring of 1964. The Art Theatre of Greece under the Direction of the acclaimed Karolos Koun gave its first performances outside Greece. They presented Aristophanes' comedy, The Birds, and the Aeschylean tragedy, The Persaes. After forty years these performances are still topics of discussion in theater and musical circles. The performance of The Birds took the audience by surprise. The strong, vivid rhythm with the superb [End Page 80] melodies and the chorus filling the stage with its movements and dance gave a new perspective to the production of ancient comedy and drama. The audience was exuberant and the clapping went on without end. It was the unveiling of a new world of music for the theater, a music which could create strong emotions.Perhaps one of the most important works of Hadjidakis is the cycle of songs, The Megalos Eroticos-Magnus Eroticus, composed in 1972 for two voices, choir, and twelve instruments. The song cycle consists of eleven songs based on the lyrics of Greek poets from antiquity till the present time, like Sappho, Euripides, Solomos, Sepheris, Gatsos, Elytis, and Kavafis. Included in the collection is the famous poem, "S'agapo" [I love you], by Myrtiotissa, one of the important women poets of the twentieth century, which according to Hadjidakis was his inspiration for writing Magnus Eroticus. As he says: I think I succeeded [in creating] a beautiful piece of work, and deeply, it belongs to her as a whole. If Magnus Eroticus belongs to somebody it belongs to the memory of Myrtiotissa.1In Magnus Eroticus the combination of lyrics and music is at the highest level of sensibility and the musical style of each song is superb. Music follows the verse to express its deepest meaning while maintaining its uniqueness. In 1973, Pantelis Voulgaris made Magnus Eroticus into a film of the same title.Without doubt Hadjidakis was one of the troubadours of love; in fact he considered himself as a tragoudopoios. Etymologically tragoudopoios comes from the words tragoudi (song) and the verb poio (make, create), and is the root of the word poieses (poetry). A tragoudopoios could be a follower of the rhapsodoi of Homer's time, or the troubadours of medieval times who created songs.In my view, the comparison made by some critics of Hadjidakis' songs with those of Schubert and Brahms is not so successful, especially for the songs written in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, songs that were very popular and represented the reality of Greek life of that period. Similarities to these composers may exist in his later work of the 80s, when his style of art song had become more sophisticated.As a person and composer, Hadjidakis himself could be considered a Magnus Eroticus. I am not sure, though, that he could be considered an anarchist, as Miralis suggests. As Hadjidakis used to say, "[P]erhaps I would have been an anarchist if I didn't have my mother." I would say he was more a lover of democracy in its wider sense.One could say, perhaps, that Hadjidakis was an anarchist in spirit... (shrink)

This paper examines Lesia Ukrainka’s two lyrical cycles about Crimea, Krymski spohady and Krymski vidhuky, as examples of a poetic dialogue with Adam Mickiewicz’s Sonety krymskie. I begin my analysis by highlighting the diff erent sensibilities of Mickiewicz’s Sonety krymskie and Lesia Ukrainka’s Krymski spohady, and underscore their formal and thematic peculiarities. The paper continues with an examination of Lesia Ukrainka’s second cycle, Krymski vidhuky, as an experiment in drama – a genre that is absent from her fi (...) rst cycle – before situating a dramatic scene, “Ifi heniia v Tavridi,” this cycle’s only text about Crimea’s Hellenic history, within the cultural contexts of Lesia Ukrainka’s oeuvre. In doing so, I argue that Iphigenia’s lament echoes the voice of an exiled poet from Mickiewicz’s sonnets and conclude my analysis by probing reasons behind Lesia Ukrainka’s choice of a Greek heroine. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Names Alive Are Like the Names in GravesBlack Life and Black Social Death in Terrance Hayes's American Sonnets for My Past and Future AssassinLee Spinks"After blackness was invented / people began seeing ghosts."1One of the most powerful and provoking responses to the political rise of Donald Trump appeared with the 2018 publication of Terrance Hayes's American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin. Hayes began writing these poems (...) straight after Trump's remarkable triumph in the 2016 presidential election, and they race to keep pace with the rapidly metastasizing effects of the Trump phenomenon, from his relentless radicalization of the modes and mores of political speech ("Newshounds ponder the tweets of a bullhorn"), his continuous assault on American democratic institutions, and his singular success in marshalling a newly cohesive political constituency seduced by the reactionary allure of resurgent white nationalism or what Hayes caustically calls "a mandate for whiteness, virility, sovereignty / stupidity" (AS: 38).2 As the phrase "mandate for whiteness" suggests, integral to the story of Trump's ascendancy in American Sonnets is another story, a story about race and social authority in the time of Black Lives Matter when blackness remains "the color of this country's current threat / advisory" (AS: 10). At home and abroad the appalling incandescence of Hayes's contemporary American political moment is reflected by the names of its black victims, names like Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and, perhaps most explosively of all, George Floyd, whose May 2020 police killing on a Minneapolis street reprised such a familiar configuration of racial power that Hayes had already glimpsed its spectral outline two years earlier: "A [End Page 60] brother has to know how to time travel & doctor / himself when a knee or shoe stalls against his neck" (AS: 77).3Without compromising the intensity of Hayes's focus on this contemporary social emergency, I want in what follows to expand our sense of the historical and metaphysical scene of his writing by reading it as an imaginative response to a larger and more fundamental question: What does it mean to live a black life in an antiblack world? I'm moved to do so by the double register of his writing vividly exemplified by the penultimate sonnet in the sequence which memorializes "All the black people I'm tired of losing / All the dead from parts of Florida, Ferguson / Brooklyn, Charleston, Cleveland, Chicago / Baltimore, where the names alive are / Like the names in graves" (AS: 81). What's remarkable, to my mind at least, about the phrase "the names alive are / like the names in graves" is its fusion of a directly contemporary perception of the precariousness of black existence within a culture of white supremacy (the perception that every black life could share the social fate of Tamir Rice at any particular moment) with an encompassing metaphysical vision of blackness as the embodiment of social death and the continuing afterlife of slavery. Paying close attention to several of Hayes's poems, I will trace this double register to explore a number of ideas central to his thinking in American Sonnets including the foundational role of antiblackness in organizing American reality for both black and white identities, the dialectical relationship between antiblackness and the libidinal economy of white supremacy, and the hope of imagining new possibilities of life capable of contesting the antiblack conditions of contemporary social existence.4 In doing so I will place particular emphasis on Hayes's development of a distinctively dialectical and dialogical style of poetic address that reimagines lyric subjectivity as a drama of racial becoming focused on the relationship between black social death and the culture of white supremacy.5Black Social Death and the Libidinal Economy of WhitenessBefore continuing let me briefly develop three ideas above which help shape my reading of American Sonnets: the social life of social death, the continuing afterlife of slavery, and what Hayes calls in my epigraph "the [End Page 61] invention of blackness." The first draws on the Afropessimist radicalization of Orlando Patterson's famous redescription of slavery as social death that sees the slave as a "social nonperson" whose relation to... (shrink)

The account in Part I of this essay posited two related but distinct sequences of development: of literary systems proper and of critical systems. Or, more simply, we must recognize that literary practices and systematic ideas about them develop in different ways. Today we can see in retrospect that lyric, narrative, and lyric-narrative or narrative-lyric begin literary cultures. Systematic ideas about literature develop, however, more by accident, what seems to be the result of conditions producing important critical minds at times (...) propitious for reflection. Any full account would have to consider such things as bipropertied conceptions. This has been mentioned before, but a specific example can be given here. Chinese wen designated not merely poetry but also prose historical writing: the fu established a kind of middle ground between them. In any event, such combinations, such bipropertied conceptions, do exist in very sophisticated times. Another matter of crucial importance involves the difference between the actual or descriptive existence of a literary variety and normative or valued critical consideration of a given kind. Various evidence shows that ancient Greece had lyrics as well as narrative, and preliterary Japan, narrative as well as lyrics. In the case of Greece, we tend today to think of narrative normatively as the early literature, although Plato and Aristotle lumped it with lyric and concerned themselves almost entirely with their crucial genre, drama. As for early Japan, the narrative was largely a possession of reciters, and so few heroic cycles are left from the nondominant peoples that narrative poetry is more a supposition that a presence. But there is in what remains from early times a mixture of lyric poetry with narrative prose. That combination did not prove crucial for a systematic poetics, although it is of utmost significance for later developments. It can hardly be said emphatically enough that the literary system comes first and the critical system after some interval. But the various complexities in different cultures are such that to get our bearings we may well consider the course of literary development in a single culture. Earl Miner is Townsend Martin, Class of 1917, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. "That Literature is a Kind of Knowledge," his previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, appeared in the Spring 1976 issue. His works include Literary Uses of Typology from the Middle Ages to the Present and Japanese Linked Poetry. Part I of the present essay appeared in the Winter 1978 issue of Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy of Music Education Review 12.1 (2004) 80-83 [Access article in PDF] Response to Yiannis Miralis, "Manos Hadjidakis: The Story of an Anarchic Youth and a 'Magnus Eroticus'" Lenia Serghi Ionian University, Corfu Manos Hadjidakis and his work are like his song, "O Mythos," for they take you from reality to fantasy and bring you back again. For my generation Hadjidakis was a myth with substance, since he was (...) a real person and his work represented our reality.The first time I heard of Hadjidakis was in relation to his song, "The Children of Pireas," that won him an Oscar for Best Song in 1960-61 as the main theme of his music for the film, Never on Sunday. The first record, a 45-single in the early 1960s, aroused a strong emotional response in the youth of the time.My next and most important experience with Hadjidakis' music was in London during the International Theatre Festival in the Spring of 1964. The Art Theatre of Greece under the Direction of the acclaimed Karolos Koun gave its first performances outside Greece. They presented Aristophanes' comedy, The Birds, and the Aeschylean tragedy, The Persaes. After forty years these performances are still topics of discussion in theater and musical circles. The performance of The Birds took the audience by surprise. The strong, vivid rhythm with the superb [End Page 80] melodies and the chorus filling the stage with its movements and dance gave a new perspective to the production of ancient comedy and drama. The audience was exuberant and the clapping went on without end. It was the unveiling of a new world of music for the theater, a music which could create strong emotions.Perhaps one of the most important works of Hadjidakis is the cycle of songs, The Megalos Eroticos-Magnus Eroticus, composed in 1972 for two voices, choir, and twelve instruments. The song cycle consists of eleven songs based on the lyrics of Greek poets from antiquity till the present time, like Sappho, Euripides, Solomos, Sepheris, Gatsos, Elytis, and Kavafis. Included in the collection is the famous poem, "S'agapo" [I love you], by Myrtiotissa, one of the important women poets of the twentieth century, which according to Hadjidakis was his inspiration for writing Magnus Eroticus. As he says: I think I succeeded [in creating] a beautiful piece of work, and deeply, it belongs to her as a whole. If Magnus Eroticus belongs to somebody it belongs to the memory of Myrtiotissa.1In Magnus Eroticus the combination of lyrics and music is at the highest level of sensibility and the musical style of each song is superb. Music follows the verse to express its deepest meaning while maintaining its uniqueness. In 1973, Pantelis Voulgaris made Magnus Eroticus into a film of the same title.Without doubt Hadjidakis was one of the troubadours of love; in fact he considered himself as a tragoudopoios. Etymologically tragoudopoios comes from the words tragoudi (song) and the verb poio (make, create), and is the root of the word poieses (poetry). A tragoudopoios could be a follower of the rhapsodoi of Homer's time, or the troubadours of medieval times who created songs.In my view, the comparison made by some critics of Hadjidakis' songs with those of Schubert and Brahms is not so successful, especially for the songs written in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, songs that were very popular and represented the reality of Greek life of that period. Similarities to these composers may exist in his later work of the 80s, when his style of art song had become more sophisticated.As a person and composer, Hadjidakis himself could be considered a Magnus Eroticus. I am not sure, though, that he could be considered an anarchist, as Miralis suggests. As Hadjidakis used to say, "[P]erhaps I would have been an anarchist if I didn't have my mother." I would say he was more a lover of democracy in its wider sense.One could say, perhaps, that Hadjidakis was an anarchist in spirit... (shrink)

Bolesław Leśmian’s The Mad Violinist contains many suggestions concerning the musical side of the drama, especially its properties of sound and expression. The violin and violin playing fulfill an important function – coloristic, dramaturgic and symbolic – in the work. Also appearing are the sounds of other instruments (gong, dulcimer, plucked string instrument), refined musical timbres and acoustic effects (sound portrait of the Woodland Water Nymph), musical profiling of the characters (Alaryel plays the violin, Chryza dances on stilts, the (...) Witch strikes the clock) and ‘ballet’ scenes – solo and ensemble (Chryza’s dance, Chryza and the Water Nymph’s dramatic duet, the dance suite in the Second Delusion). The poet also described very suggestively the expressive categories of the fragments set to music. Their skillful distribution in time and combination on a contrast principle, as well as the utilization of their dramatic potential, contribute to the reinforcement of their power of expression. Alaryel’s virtuoso showpiece, maintained in a furioso-type tone, leads to a true explosion of sound and contrasts with the lyrical and wistful lamentoso played over the grave of the Water Nymph. However, the ethereal timbre of the Water Nymph, who is accompanied by an indigo dawn, emphasizes the symbolic significance of this character. The musical components in The Mad Violinist blend perfectly with the other elements – word, gesture, stage movement and the visual side of the drama, creating an extraordinary whole of great artistic value. The present article also proposes a reference to the violin music of Belgian violinist and composer Eugène Ysaÿe, whose oeuvre fits into the European Symbolist trend. His Six Sonatas for Violin Solo op. 27 from 1927 form a peculiar interpretative context for Leśmian’s drama. The point here is not to suggest any actual relationship, but rather to draw attention to the similar type of artistic sensitivity and imagination, feel for color and deeply sensual manner of experiencing the world. (shrink)

Price commits the Fallacy of Novelistic Presumption. This is clearly evident to his earlier essay ["The Other Self"], but it is certainly implicit in "People of the Book." He assumes that the novel possesses a history that is independent of other modes of fiction and that it may be discussed independently of the history of literature. In this perspective, a specific element of the novel will seem validly detachable from literary history in general. I think that this is an error (...) and that if a theory of character should emerge, it will necessarily account for—go to the heart of—all instances of character, symbolic, allegorical, naturalistic, whether in the novel, in epic, in romance, in drama, or in lyric. "By any inclusive definition of the term, Gerontion can be a character; yet he is at once less and more."1 Such a statement can be correct only if it masks "less and more than a character in a novel." · 1. Martin Price, "The Other Self: Thoughts about Character in the Novel," in Imagined Worlds: Essays on Some English Novels and Novelists in Honour of John Butt, ed. Maynard Mack and Ian Gregor : p. 291. Rawdon Wilson, associate professor of English at the University of Alberta, has contributed articles and short works of fiction to literary journals in the United States, Canada, and Australia. He contributed "The Bright Chimera: Character as a Literary Term" to Critical Inquiry in the Summer 1979 issue. Rawdon Wilson responds in the present essay to Martin Price's "People of the Book: Character in Forster's A Passage to India" . Martin Price's rejoinder, "The Logic of Intensity: More on Character" appears in the Winter 1975 issue of Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to present the senses ant contexts in which the concept of nothingness (and also "non-existence", "emptiness", a "vacuum” and "timelessness") appears in the world presented in Bolesław Leśmian’s poems. The above-mentioned terms are the constructive elements of his poetic reality. The lyric "I" of Leśmian’s numerous poems is the poet, placing the world of his poetry on the borderland between existence and non-existence. Paradoxically, one might say that the poet has created a world which (...) does not exist, though it is characterized by some specific qualities. Thus, there is no clear borderline between existence and nothingness. In the world presented by Bolesław Leśmian, absolute nothingness appears to be impossible. One can, however, identify a kind of transcendental nothingness, which is not the complete annihilation of everything, but only, as the poet put it, "a state of consciousness different from the consciousnes of existence". There is also a category of immanent nothingness, which can be perceived either as a lack in existence (this sort of nothingness is typical of the protagonist from Pieśni kalekujące [The Crippling Songs] or as the annihilation of individual existence. The second type of nothingness is frequently identified with non-existence. The concepts discussed here have been reified and materialized by the poet. They have become the agent or subject of action. Sometimes they are presented as the categories of space. Then their synonyms are "emptiness", a "vacuum" and a "chasm" existing in timelessness. Nothingness is a category which, in the poems by Leśmian, defines not only the ontological status of all kinds of existence but also the drama of the existential situation of characters living in the poetic world presented in the poems. (shrink)

All editions and translations of Homer'sIliadpresent the epic as a series of twenty-four segments always marked off in the same places. In this respect theIliadconforms to, and seems even to originate, a practice in which narratives of any considerable length are almost always presented in marked segments, usually calledchapters.Similarly, dramas, except very short ones, usually run as a series ofactswhose dimensions are determined in the composition. Acts may be marked by curtains, intermissions or briefer pauses, or other variations in the (...) performance: in ancient Greek drama the segmentation is unmistakeably marked by the placement of choral lyrics. It is not exactly clear why the chapter and the act should be so indispensable, but authors and audiences alike know intuitively that they are. Yet many scholars since antiquity have believed that theIliadand theOdysseyoriginally lacked marked segmentation, and that the now-familiar presentation was imposed upon them later by someone other than their composer. Even today, when few scholars see profit in analyzing theIliadandOdysseyinto earlier and later strata, the so-called 'book divisions’ continue to offer a tempting target for analytic criticism. (shrink)

This book is short on pages but long on valuable content. Oates intends to refute the rather widespread contention that Plato "denied the worth of all the so-called fine arts" by an objective and historical study of the Ion, Republic, Greater Hippias, Phaedrus and Symposium. Since the author himself clearly summarizes his own thought frequently, we here need only present his final conclusion. Every human activity is valuable in direct proportion to its closeness to the domain of the ideas and, (...) specifically, the Idea of Beauty and Goodness. But artistic creation is a human activity. Therefore, it too must be oriented towards the Idea of Beauty. Thus, "the creative artist must be ‘philosophical'" and, since he comes close to Beauty through intuition, also "quasi-mystical", as were Aeschylus, Sophocles, Dante, Milton, Shakespeare, Michelangelo. So too was Plato himself, whose dialogues are philosophical dramas containing "a more explicit expression of a vision of reality and value than is to be found in epics or tragedies or lyrics". In Oates’ book the only flaws are minor: an occasional awkwardness of style, referral only to scholars prior to the mid-twentieth century, notes are placed at the end of chapters rather than at the bottom of the pages. Even so, the book is well worth having.—L.S. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary HistoryC. S. SchreinerThe Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History, by Susan Howe; 189 pp. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1993, $40.00.In the interview which concludes The Birth-Mark, Susan Howe says that during childhood her Boston household was visited by such pioneers of American studies as Perry Miller and F. O. Matthiessen. Career-wise, however, Howe’s path to academia has be (...) en indirect: born in 1937, she gained her first professorship in 1989 in the Poetics Program at SUNY Buffalo. A visual artist by [End Page 192] training, Howe veered into a genre of writing in the 1970s that seeks to “install certain narrativ es somewhere between history, mystic speech, and poetry” (p. 44). Her poetry includes Secret History of the Dividing Line (1978), Pythagorean Silence (1982), and Defenestration of Prague (1983). In 1985 she published an original criti cal study, My Emily Dickinson, which criticized editors for having homogenized the format and typography of Dickinson’s manuscripts, taming the unruly rigor of poems which were originally “multifaceted visual and verbal productions.” Howe also argu ed that the Amherst poet should not be viewed as a victim of repression, as many feminists see her, but as a refuser of congregations, a powerful will-to-reclusion in art—“One unchosen American women alone at home and choosing.” Emily’s home was a nomadi c space between orthodoxies.An understanding of Howe’s kinship with Dickinson’s poetic daring is helpful for reading The Birth-Mark, whose prose is poetic, and whose protagonist, Mary Rowlandson, shared Dickinson’s “stubborn strength in isolation.” The captivity narratives ar e portals into the antinomian controversy of New England, which was “the primordial struggle of North American literary expression” (p. 4). It is not Gilbert and Gubar to whom Howe has recourse in her analyses of hostage consciousness. She cites the philo sophy of Emmanuel Lévinas. As with feminism, which she extends rather than follows, Howe takes up the philosophy of alterity without its orthodoxy. (In the face of frontier brutality she cannot discern the “Father of orphans and defender of widows” of Psalm 68.) Encounters in the wilderness of tribes, woods, and waters aroused an immodest otherness within the American literary unconscious, unsettling the styles of expression and selfhood which the puritan colonies were trying to instantiate. The literary awakening of Dickinson, Rowlandson, Melville, Hawthorne, and other writers was not due to the Great Awakening urged by churches, but to the traumatic transfer of sovereignty from God to frontier, a permanent revolution to which these writers’ imaginations would remain exposed.Howe’s new foray into criticism tracks the textual marginalia which yield the visionary utterances of Rowlandson and Hutchinson. A self-confessed “library cormorant,” Howe gathers a quiet spectacle of testimonies, those of separated loved ones dragged int o “Removes” by tribes of Native Americans. These resonant texts from New England village libraries and major collections at Harvard, are melded together by Howe’s intuitive, almost telepathic sensibility into a kind of spiritual drama informed by critical acumen. Howe takes her bearings from Patricia Caldwell’s essay “The Antinomian Language Controversy,” which appeared in the Harvard Theological Review in 1976. The dislocating frontier experience for Hutchinson, Rowlandson, and others forced the c reation of a different language. It is with this antinomian language that Howe develops a sensitive rapport, echoing its myriad haunting voices in her commentaries. What Gadamer calls effective history broods and rustles inside her [End Page 193] writing with lyrical unease. Indeed, Howe’s work is a creative example of the fusion of horizons which Gadamer says epitomizes the hermeneutic event. Howe’s personal method as revealed in her interview: “Not to explain the work, not to trans late it, but to meet the work with writing... Not just to write a tribute, but to meet her [Dickinson] in the tribute. And that’s a kind of fusion” (p. 158). Some scholars will find her method obscure. But it’s hard to find anything negative at this height. Howe would have us meet others at their most exposed, delicate point, where their vulnerability... (shrink)

Scrutinizing the critical tendency to label texts or writers as "postmodern", scholar Stephen Watt argues that "reading post modernly" merely implies reading culture more broadly. In contemporary drama, Watt considers postmodernity less a question of genre or media than a mode of subjectivity shared by both playwright and audience. 6 illustrations.

In Improvisation, Samuel Wells defines improvisation in the theater as "a practice through which actors seek to develop trust in themselves and one another in order that they may conduct unscripted dramas without fear." Sounds a lot like life, doesn't it? Building trust, overcoming fear, conducting relationships, and making choices--all without a script. Wells establishes theatrical improvisation as a model for Christian ethics, a matter of "faithfully improvising on the Christian tradition." He views the Bible not as a "script" but (...) as a "training school" that shapes the habits and practices of the Christian community. Drawing on scriptural narratives and church history, Wells explains six practices that characterize both improvisation and Christian ethics. His model of improvisation reinforces the goal of Christian ethics--to teach Christians to "embody their faith in the practices of discipleship all the time."--Publisher description. (shrink)

I investigate the normative status of an unexamined category of emotions: ‘lyrical’ emotions about the transience of things. Lyrical emotions are often accused of sentimentality—a charge that expresses the idea that they are unfitting responses to their objects. However, when we test the merits of that charge using the standard model of emotion evaluation, a surprising problem emerges: it turns out that we cannot make normative distinctions between episodes of such feelings. Instead, it seems that lyrical emotions (...) are always fitting. Although this claim is counterintuitive, the price of denying it is to hold that such emotions are never fitting—an equally strange result. If this is correct, then the commonplace discourse of sentimentality surrounding lyrical emotions lacks normative moorings. (shrink)

Philosophers ask just whose expression, if anyone’s, we hear in lyric poetry. Walton provides a novel possibility: it’s the reader who “uses” the poem (just as a speech giver uses a speech) who makes the language expressive. But worries arise once we consider poems in particular social or political settings, those which require a strong self-other distinction, or those with expressions that should not be disassociated from the subjects whose experience they draw from. One way to meet this challenge is (...) to consider the poem expressive of a plural subject, which frees us from looking for a particular individual whose voice we hear in the work, whether she be fictional or actual. Some lyrics give voice to a group whose experience is attended to in the work. This may be done through a posited fictional speaker, but the ontology of the speaker is shown to be less important. Attending to a group whose concerns are voiced allows us to explain how poems can manage to address our-worldly concerns even when lacking actual persons whose expressions we encounter in the poems. (shrink)

This article reconsiders the methodological issues posed by the reception of archaic and classical poetry in imperial rhetorical texts. It argues that references to ancient poems and poets in the works of imperial sophists are always already the product of appropriation and rewriting, and that the study of sophists’ engagement with poetry should go beyond Quellenforschung to explore how and why poetic models were transformed in light of their new rhetorical and imperial contexts. To illustrate this approach and its contribution (...) to our understanding of both ancient-reception phenomena and imperial rhetorical culture, the article focusses on Himerius of Athens, a fourth-century c.e. sophist and teacher of rhetoric whose fondness for lyric poetry has caused his Orations to be used as a quarry for lyric fragments and testimonia. Himerius’ treatment of carefully chosen lyric models is here discussed with attention to his self-presentation and rhetorical agenda to show how the sophist appropriated the voices of diverse lyric icons to promote his school and negotiate his position in relation to the imperial administration. This analysis restores Himerius’ intellectual significance within late imperial culture and society, but it also demonstrates how a more in-depth study of the reception of ancient poetry in imperial sophistic literature has the potential to illuminate the strategies of cultural politics used by imperial authors to (re)construct Greek tradition. (shrink)

The nineteenth century English Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins struggled throughout his life with desolation over what he saw as a spiritually, intellectually and artistically unproductive life. During these periods, he experienced God’s absence in a particularly intense way. As he wrote in one sonnet, “my lament / Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent / To dearest him that lives alas! away.” What Hopkins faced was the existential problem of suffering and hiddenness, a problem widely recognized by analytic (...) philosophers to be left relatively untouched by conceptual explanations. In this essay, I argue that Hopkins’ poems themselves fill this gap left by conceptual approaches by articulating the existential crisis faced by those who feel the searing pain of suffering and the numbing, leaden echo of silence. His lyric speaks into existential suffering in ways akin to biblical laments and, as such, creates a space in which those who suffer can meet God, even if only to contend. Understood within Hopkins’ view of the incarnation and passion, these poems also suggest a way to identify with Christ in the experience of hiddenness, thereby making God present even in divine absence. (shrink)