A prosopography of poets, writers and scholars from Thomond

Reviews273 Through the Custom-House: Nineteenth-Century American Fiction and Modem Theory, by John Carlos Rowe; 218 pp. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982, $18.95. Rowe's first sentence succinctly outlines the structure and purpose of Through the Custom-House: "This work is an experiment in intertextual criticism that reads six nineteenth-century prose texts in relation to six critical problems that exemplify the modern debate concerning representation and signification" (p. xi). Each chapter of the book matches one "prose text" with one "critical problem." Here is his all-star line-up: Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and Heidegger's effort to "reconceptuadize " philosophic discourse vis-à-vis die nature of language, thinking, and poetry; Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance and Sartre's "phenomenological theory of the imagination as an autonomous mental function" (p. 2); Poe's Narrative ofArthur Gordon Pym and Freud's critique of consciousness as a unified process; Melville's "Bardeby the Scrivener" and Derrida's "conception of a decentered, psychic 'writing'" (p. 3); Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson and Nietzsche's concern over "people's bondage to their linguistic categories and sociohistorical situation" (p. 3); and James's The Sacred Fount and the "debate between structuralists and poststructuralists concerning the 'subject' as a grammatical fiction" (P- 4)· Compacting this ambitious project into one slim volume accounts for its feverish pace and breathless style. Fortunately, Rowe roots his prose firmly in each ofthese nineteenthcentury "marginal" literary works — "marginal" here meaning, in part, that the work stands outside both the traditional, critical mythologies (American Adam, American Renaissance, etc.) and the writer's more broadly accepted publications. Standing squarely on these neglected or abused texts, Rowe levels a nonhistorical, deconstructionist attack at these confining mythologies and all formalistic criticism. Looking to Derrida's neologism différance and its deconstruction of the paradigm of the sign, Rowe argues that these marginal texts are of particular value because they self-consciously disrupt the traditional, illusory unity of signifier and signified. As a result, these texts must be used to pose the philosophic questions ofmodernity that examine the "accepted conventions in the literary and cultural traditions" (p. 11). Through such use, or intertextuality, Rowe concludes that "we might hope to make intelligible the force of the literary without taming or rendering its provocations harmless" (p. 17). Rowe places "Bartleby" at the heart of his literary rescue mission. Unlike the five other marginal texts, "Bartleby" is seldom viewed by critics as seriously flawed; there is something "uncanny" about the story. In order to understand diis uncanniness, Rowe moves far beyond his initial controlling drought — matching "Bartleby" with Derrida's "decentered, psychic Sviiting1" — to consider other works by Melville (Redbum, Moby Dick, Pierre, The Confidence Man) and other theorists (Freud, Plato, Cicero, Hegel). Amidst all the confusion, however, there is embedded in his dense prose an insightful, though brief, reading of the short story. Rethinking the obvious, and oft-neglected, legalistic dimensions of the story, Rowe raises thoughtful issues involving, among other things, the ontological and epistemological underpinnings of copying legal documents, and Bartleby's enigmatic "preference." 274Philosophy and Literature In response to my letter expressing curiosity over die absence of any current, grand critical discoveries in American literature, Melvillean Merton Sealts recendy wrote that "die ground has virtually been pulverized, there can be few more Great Original Discoveries." Given Sealts's pulverized ground, is Rowe's intertextual strategy helpful? Judging from the fruits of his labor, specifically his critical readings of the literature, I would have to say yes. In each chapter, though I had to struggle dirough the jargon and numerous digressions, I found several thought-provoking comments. On the whole, however, despite diese refreshing oases of insight, I hesitate to embrace fully Through the Custom-House. My hesitancy arises in view of the apparent price Rowe's intertextuality must pay in order to link literature with modern dieory. The book makes few distinctions between the audiors or their work; they all appear to be writing the same "prose text." Does adi literature, American or otherwise, dove-tail widi modern theory? Rowe gives no reason to diink differendy. Certainly there is a way to avoid the undifferentiated...

The Classical Tradition: What’s It Good For? PAUL BAROLSKY This is a prodigiously ambitious, cornucopian book.* As Terence Cave has justly observed, the authors have “fused their voices into a single, urgently argued discourse .” No easy thing this! Readers will want to place this tome on a shelf next to Curtius’s European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, Bolgar’s Classical Heritage, Seznec’s The Survival of the Pagan Gods, Panofsky’s Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, and Auerbach’s Mimesis. So vast in scope is this volume that no review can possibly do it justice. The title says it all. It suggests a seeming infinity of possibilities. The book is intended for scholars, graduate students , and the general reader. One might wonder if the general reader is up to the daunting task. For that matter, I question whether graduate students can handle the sheer abundance of this work, and whether even scholars of various kinds (classicists, literary scholars, art historians, et alia) can deal sufficiently with all of what is contained in this book. I think readers will seek out aspects of the book in which they have some grounding and feel a certain level of comfort. The table of contents and index are crucial. In the former we find a series of titles that point us to various topics : for example, knowledge, style, morality, visual arts, popular culture, translation, science, etc. These themes are all located the first part of the book, which is an overview. The next several sections of the book address subjects that come more sharply into focus: the hero, myth, the city (Rome), the *Michael Silk, Ingo Gildenhard, and Rosemary Barrow, The Classical Tradition: Art, Literature, Thought. London: Wiley Blackwell, 2014. 500 pages, 11 b/w illustrations, 10 colorplates, $139.95. arion 22.2 fall 2014 forms of government, painting, poetry, political thought, etc. Although the bibliography of both primary sources and modern scholarship is rich, the authors are fully aware that it can never be exhaustive, and so they remind the reader of other useful bibliographers. The topic of the book is subject to so many possible readings and interpretations that one can imagine some readers wondering about what seem to them to be striking omissions . For example, scholars of Humanism might well wonder why Politian, the great classicist of his day, gets only two brief fleeting references. Art historians might wonder how Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne, one of the great sculptures in the classical tradition, a work that brilliantly emulates the Apollo Belvedere, is mentioned only in passing. And in a book that deals with English, French, German, and Italian traditions some will wonder why Spain is essentially ignored , since it produced two towering figurers in the classical tradition: Cervantes and Velazquez. Or, how is it, some might wonder that, in a book that properly deals with Joyce, Picasso, Cocteau, among other modern figures in the classical tradition, there is no mention of the deep Greek roots of Le Corbusier? Such hypothetical criticism is perhaps unfair, but it is inevitable, since no treatment of the classical tradition can be complete. The book can withstand such criticism since it implicitly invites such responses. The subject of the book is open-ended. I cannot emphasize enough the fact that this book is so rich that no review will do it justice. I therefore want to take up just a single issue that it implicitly raises. The subject is rhetoric, which is fundamental to the classical tradition about which our trinitarian authors have so many interesting things to say. I find a deep puzzle here regarding rhetoric . Why is it that when they address the subject of rhetoric as a historical concept, so many scholars in various fields who write about the classical tradition seem so indifferent to the rhetoric of their own writing? It is no secret that ever so much scholarly writing on rhetoric, whether addressing anthe classical tradition: what’s it good for? 126 cient literature or Renaissance literature, is itself so often lugubrious, and impenetrable, so insensitive to its own lack of rhetorical skill. We can trace a tradition that celebrates an art that conceal arts from...

The Latvian writer Gunars Janovskis (1916–2000) lived a long life, becoming the most productive Latvian exile prose writer not only in Great Britain but the whole Latvian exile community. Everything he saw, experienced, observed, and noticed in some way, was echoed in his literary work. Janovskis’ voluminous work offers diverse interpretation and analysis opportunities for a researcher of literature. The present article focuses on two of Janovskis’ prose texts – his novels “Sōla” (1963) and “Pilsēta pie upes” (‘A Town by the River’, 1992), belonging to different stages of the writer’s activity, as well as his life. For the literary characters depicted by Janovskis, it is vital to remember, avoid losing the past while they attempt to live in the present, though this may be rather hard at times. It has been commented regarding the works of Janovskis that in his books, people only are really living when they are remembering. The present article aims to view the aforementioned novels by Janovskis within the model of the relationship between the past and the present, mainly concentrating on the relationship of the main characters with the time. The novel “Sōla” is the first novel by Janovskis ever published in a book. The main protagonist is Arturs Skuja, returning to some past impressions alongside the present from time to time. The landscape and elements of nature bring back his memories, inviting comparisons with the things once seen in Bolderāja or Daugavgrīva. There is a second and much heavier layer of the past in the protagonist’s dramatic and even tragic experiences during the war, which haunt him during sleepless nights or even return like a ghost. The main tense of the story within this novel is the present. But the novel “Pilsēta pie upes”, written much later, shows a shift of accent. The story starts in the present reality – at the old people’s home “Straumēni”. The urge of the author to tell the life story of Ansis Klētnieks is obvious, but in this story, one can unmistakably recognise the reflections of the author himself, through the location depicted (there are clear parallels between the course of life of Ansis from Krustpils and that of the author). The urge to tell, testify, not remain silent is much more pronounced in the story. The author has become less ambiguously involved in documenting a dramatic era, being its eyewitness. The novels chosen for the present article mark the changes in the relationship of the Janovskis’ literary characters with the present and the past. While the narrative in the present basically dominates in the novel “Sōla”, the other novel, “Pilsēta pie upes”, shows the past events and narrative dominating over the present. In both works, the plot takes place in both Great Britain and Latvia, though with changing intensity. It can be concluded that for Gunars, Janovskis writing was a kind of therapy aimed at overcoming the past while still securing the memories from being lost.

The embodiment of the prose libretto in opera genre (on the example of the works by M. Mussorgsky, D. Shostakovich, S. Prokofi ev and G. Shantyr)

The heritage of Greco-Roman antiquity is still deemed among the most powerful transcultural and transhistorical archives of the contemporary world. The various meanings which this ancient material has taken on in later contexts, both ancient and modern, is central to a research field that is nowadays called ‘classical reception studies’. My paper examines the genealogy of this name by focussing on its different components: ‘classical’, ‘reception’ and ‘studies’. I will argue that they are all attempts to revise the agenda of its ancestor named ‘the classical tradition’. The latter mainly tried to reassert the enduring value of antiquity throughout Western history. Ever since the 1960s, the term ‘reception’ has become an important shorthand for the resistance within literary studies against such affirmative notions of tradition. Literary works are no longer seen to have an immanent value, but are time and again ‘received’ and ‘(re)appropriated’ by new cultural communities. That is why the name ‘classical receptions’ was coined at the end of the 1990s, even though it was rashly criticized for overemphasizing the act of receiving and neglecting the appeal or lure of the ancient repertoire. This paper will argue that we can also look upon the term reception as a ‘travelling concept’ (Mieke Bal), a name that primordially seeks to institutionalize a new pedagogical community within and beyond classical studies. Its aim is to reorganize and refresh the study of ‘the classical tradition’ by adopting new methodological values that will also realign classical studies with the contemporary humanities. This perspective enables us to work towards a reappraisal of the notion of ‘classical tradition’, as the latter may come to epitomize the way in which certain cultural communities understand their indebtedness to the classical past.

This study focuses on the analysis of the study of sentence types in prose text literary works. The formulation of the problem in this study is how the arrangement or sentence structure is contained in the prose text of the Bahasa Indonesia Tingkat Lanjut Cakap Berbahasa dan Bersastra Indonesia Kelas XI Kurikulum Merdeka textbook. Prose text is a genre in literature which is commonly called fiction or narrative text. Prose texts presented in narrative form contain various types of sentences. Sentence types are divided into declarative sentences, interrogative sentences, imperative sentences, and exclamatory sentences. This research was conducted with the aim of finding and describing types of sentences based on syntactic structures in prose texts of the Bahasa Indonesia Tingkat Lanjut Cakap Berbahasa dan Bersastra Indonesia Kelas XI Kurikulum Merdeka textbook. The method used in this study is a descriptive qualitative approach combined with note-taking techniques for the data collection process and syntax analysis techniques. Qualitative research is included in the methodology used for research procedures that produce descriptive data. Based on the analysis that has been carried out on prose texts, it is known that of the 3 prose titles analyzed, namely “Penggali Sumur yang Ingin Pensiun”, “Saat Ayah Meninggal Dunia”, and “Janji Ayah” there are only three types of sentences, namely 229 declarative sentences, 17 question sentence, and 1 imperative sentence. So, it can be concluded that there are no exclamatory sentences in the prose text but are strongly influenced by declarative sentences.

When a King of Norway Became a King of Russia

Reviewed by: The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature by Gilbert Highet Robert J. Ball Gilbert Highet. The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. xl, 763. $29.95 (pb.). ISBN 978-0-19-937769-5. With a new foreword by Harold Bloom. The Classical Tradition, first published in 1949 and reissued in 2015 (its third reissue in paperback), ranks as perhaps the most famous of all the books published by one of the twentieth century’s most respected classicists. It provides a sweeping, unprecedented examination of the Greek and Roman influences on Western literature from the fall of classical civilization through the middle of the twentieth century. Its author, Gilbert Highet (1906–1978), a remarkable teacher/scholar who taught at Columbia University for thirty-five years, published roughly one thousand items, including twenty-one books.1 When Cyril Bailey, whom Highet regarded as his best teacher at Oxford, read The Classical Tradition, he wrote to Highet: “I can’t see how any one man can have done it … I wonder that you are alive” (January 4, 1950). One may well wonder where Highet found the time to write a book of this magnitude between his three-volume translation of Werner Jaeger’s Paideia: die Formung des griechischen Menschen (Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, Oxford 1939–1945) and The Art of Teaching (New York 1950). Classics reviewers of that day regarded Highet’s 1949 book as an important pioneering work, as a stimulating, crisply written, carefully organized, and copiously documented mine of information. The distinguished literary critic Edmund Wilson described this volume as “solidly built,” “solidly grounded,” and “continually stimulating,” a volume “animated by the Humanistic spirit.”2 And now, in [End Page 140] his four-page foreword, Harold Bloom, having reread this volume over sixty years after its original publication, declares that he finds it as admirable and as invaluable as ever. By placing a twenty-four-page table of contents at the beginning of The Classical Tradition, Highet provided his readers with a comprehensive outline of his book, furnishing a thorough and detailed view of every chapter. This detailed outline, a virtual mini-guide to the volume, furnishes readers with Highet’s first attempt to pack lots of information into every page while making every word count—a technique one may also observe throughout the rest of the volume. The comprehensive table of contents became a standard feature of his later books, like Juvenal the Satirist (Oxford 1954), The Anatomy of Satire (Princeton 1962), and The Speeches in Vergil’s Aeneid (Princeton 1972). Although the 2015 reissue prints the table of contents on xv–xxxviii, this reissue refers to it (707) as being on xiii-xxxvi, a reference unavoidably reproduced via the scanning process. The 2015 reissue, scanned from the 1951 reprint of the 1949 edition (with corrections), does not exhibit the errors Highet caught in 1949 but does retain and even introduce several mistakes.3 With scrupulous attention to detail, The Classical Tradition traces the Greek and Roman influences on the literature of the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. As Highet recognized, the process of imitation had an ongoing but checkered history; no single book had ever furnished a complete description of the process or even an outline of it. Striving to fill that void, Highet used his powerful writing style and a humane form of scholarship to celebrate the strength and the endurance of classical literature down through the ages. The specialist and nonspecialist should continue to find Highet’s descriptions of the classical and modern authors educational and stimulating not only in the text but also in the endnotes. These endnotes, not merely bibliographical, show illuminating insight, such as the two-page note on the Latin language (558–59) and the three-page note about Vergil and Beowulf (563–65)—Vergil (not Virgil) being the spelling of the poet’s name Highet insisted on using to avoid what he regarded as a medieval misspelling (74 lines 9–12, 584 n.13). Although The Classical Tradition may seem out of place in the context...

The poets and prose-writers of Greece and Rome were acutely conscious of their literary heritage. They expressed this consciousness in the regularity with which, in their writings, they imitated and alluded to the great authors who had preceded them. Such imitation was generally not regarded as plagiarism but as essential to the creation of a new literary work: imitating one's predecessors was in no way incompatible with originality or progress. These views were not peculiar to the writers of Greece and Rome but were adopted by many others who have written in the 'classical tradition' right up to modern times. Creative Imitation and Latin Literature is an exploration of this concept of imitation. The contributors analyse selected passages from various authors - Greek, Latin and English - in order to demonstrate how Latin authors created new works of art by imitating earlier passages of literature.

Hakim Sanai is among the few major poets and mystics and is one of the Persian-language primers, whose works created modern developments of the Persian poetry’s content. He was also, in the true sense of the word, “like a thunder that lightened and like a sun that shined,” brightening the road of such poets as Attar and Rumi. The significance of Sanai’s position in literature and mysticism, as well as the position of his poetry has still not been explored as it should be. While examining Sanai’s verses in the prose works, his verses were found in the prose texts of the 6th to 9th century AH/12th to 15th century AD, which do not exist among the popular edited works of this great poet. This article introduces the sources and investigates 43 confirmed verses attributed to Sanai, based on nineteen ancient Persian prose texts, whose authors attribute them to Sanai, or are attributed to him due to coming in the same text with his other verses. This may prove useful for the future edited works of Sanai. Key Words: Sanai, confirmed verses, prose texts, newfound verses.

Lynn Arner, <i>Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising: Poetry and the Problem of the Populace after 1381</i>. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013. Pp. ix, 198. $64.95. ISBN: 978-0-271-05893-1.

The article is dedicated to the study of linguistic and stylistic means of comic effect creation in English-language and French-language prose texts. The relevance of the study is stipulated by the constant interest of scientists in the phenomena of humour and its functioning in literary works. The research aims at the detection of linguistic and stylistic means for comic effect achievement in English-language and French-language prose texts. Study methods: descriptive method, comparative analysis, correlation analysis, quantitative analysis. Received results. Analysis of English-language and French-language prose texts found linguistic and stylistic means of comic effect on phonetic, lexical and pragmatic levels. Hyperbole, occasionalisms, allusion, similes, as well as devices such as irony, sarcasm, and paradox are widely used in two languages. The comic effect is the most evident at the lexical level. Conclusions drawn. Linguistic and stylistic means of comic effect creation have a universal nature. Nevertheless, their functioning varies in different languages and cultures, which affects the specifics of humour in English-language and French-language texts. The scientific novelty of the study. The novelty of the work lies in the attempt to systematise linguistic and stylistic means by which comic effect is created in English-language and French-language prose texts. Further study perspectives include a comparison of comic devices in different literary genres. The study of the comic at the intercultural level will enable a better understanding of cultural context and the effectiveness of means of humour in different cultures.

The long tradition of Hindu philosophy in India had several distinct peaks of systematic thought. The apogee of its political theory developed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a response to the British imperial authority, commonly known as the Raj. This article describes modern Hindu political philosophy's admixture of its classical tradition with contemporary Indian nationalism as it encountered British theories of freedom, equality, power, and social or political change. The result was an original and cogent system of ideas that at once responded to the British intellectual challenge and reconstituted key elements of the classical Indian philosophical tradition. The leading formulators of this formidable project were four major Hindu theorists: Swami Vivekananda, Aurobindo Ghose, Rabindranath Tagore, and Mohandas K. Gandhi. These four are intricately connected by a logical nexus of concepts derived from their common religion, their interpretative intellectual project of reforming Hinduism in the face of British colonialism, and their significant commitment to the cause of Indian independence.

Byzantium's relationship with what we call “the classical tradition” is central to the development of its civilization and has been extensively discussed by Byzantinists for a number of reasons: since the fifteenth-century Renaissance, European interest in Byzantium was spurred by research on classical antiquity, and Byzantine literary culture was generally treated as a warehouse from which to retrieve information on ancient texts. In addition, Byzantine studies as a modern academic discipline was formed around the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, when the classical tradition was understood as a constituent part of modern Western culture, while ancient Greece and Rome served as political and aesthetic paradigms for the world's industrialized nations.

Introduction. Avant-garde painting of the beginning of the 20th century is rich in new directions, trends, new aesthetic concepts of avant-garde artists. For a deeper study of the characteristics of avant-garde painting there is a need to expand the conceptual and methodological apparatus of aesthetics. We consider in this article the methodological foundations of the study of Russian avant-garde painting of the beginning of the 20th century, systematize those methods that are most effective in the philosophical-aesthetic and the art-critical analysis of visual art. Methodology and sources . Based on well-known principles in the methodology of science, the article focuses on the specificity of art criticism methods, which together with philosophical and aesthetic create a unified methodological basis for considering avant-garde painting. Results and discussion . The emergence of the avant-garde is primarily related to a departure from the classical tradition in art and the formation of new methods and means of artistic expression. Avant-garde art sought to create its own author’s «philosophy of art», to bring it to the general public, but like all philosophies, it remained an elitist and subjectivistic understanding of the world by individual artists. As a result of the understanding of existing aesthetic and art-historical methods of painting analysis, the article describes a complex system that includes a list of methods combining aesthetic and art-historical approaches to the study of works of avant-garde painting: historical-biographical method; method of comparative analysis; formal-stylistic method; method of criticism and connoisseurship; iconographic and iconological methods; structural-semiotic and semiotic-hermeneutic methods. This list can be continued, it is far from being exhausted by the mentioned methods, but in our study we define it as sufficient and necessary to achieve the stated goals. Conclusion . The methodological bases of the study of Russian avant-garde painting from the beginning of the 20th century allow us to systematize a rather fragmented material concerning the study of fine art in the Silver Age, linking together philosophical-aesthetic and art-historical approaches.