Imaginea lui Narcis în critica literară

A Study on the Theory of Ethical Literary Criticism

Literary Theory and Criticism: An Interdisciplinary Textbook is written by Hossein Payendeh as a university textbook for master's degree course in Persian language and literature. It was first published in two volumes in 2018 by SAMT publications. Given the global importance of interdisciplinary studies in literature in recent decades as well as the need of the same in Persian literature, the current article makes an attempt to investigate the extent and manner of the application of interdisciplinary approaches in the aforementioned book. Taking into account historiographical and critical-analytical approaches, we could obtain a history of the theory and literary criticism in the West and then in Iran. This topic has also been presented in the official curriculums of Iranian universities. The form and structure of the book were studied after explaining the prevalence of the literary criticism discourse in Iran. In the section on reviewing the content, while enumerating the most important variables of the book, the relation of topics with the current situation of the theory and literary criticism in the West and Iran was explained and its contents drew the attention in order to confirm interdisciplinary studies in Persian literature. Based on the findings of this article, it can be argued that the publication of Literary Theory and Criticism: An Interdisciplinary Textbookwhile preserving the link with literary theories, indicating a break from those theories and turning attention to interdisciplinary studies in Persian literature. Its publication as an academic textbook can be considered as a turning point in academic literary studies in Iran.

This study examines the conceptual characteristics of fantasy movies. It also studies the process of socio-cultural changes of the mythical images such as heroes, goddesses and the devil that have often become the centre of fantasy movie characters. This study further examines the features of each character that correspond to specific mythical images. The purpose of this research is to suggest the conceptual and aesthetic characteristics of fantasy reflected in the characters and the costumes of fantasy movies, which were released since the year 2000. The followings are the results of the research: The conceptual characteristics of fantasy reflected in the characters and the costumes of fantasy movies are summarized as representation of reality, allegory and symbols, horror, desire, deconstruction and metamorphosis, otherness and counter-cultural sentiments. The aesthetic characteristics of the costumes of fantasy movies are defined as typicality and symbolism, grotesqueness, sensuality, hybridization, and otherness. These characteristics are very interconnected. The costumes of heroic characters appearing in fantasy movies show strong side of standard while the costumes of the evil characters revealed the limit of dualistic point of worldview centered on West. Heroic characters show realistic and human side that reflects the ethos of the time. Negative characters such as the devil or witches, which were created in human imagination and emotion, become the dynamic force of fantasy movies through their deviant actions. Their clothes, with variety and hybridization, become the source of creativity expected in present society.

This paper discusses the characteristics of ancient literary criticism, including imagery criticism, intuitive thinking, and dialectical thinking, and explores the oneness of literary criticism and creation and its revelations in the study of modern critical history. The process of ancient literary creation is studied in depth, including using LSTM and BERT models to decode the formalized data of poems and control the metre. Meanwhile, the study of ancient literary criticism based on structuralist semiotics is introduced, exploring the operation mode of narrative grammar and two-layer narrative structure. Finally, old literary creation and criticism are discussed in depth through example analysis. By analyzing the course Appreciation of Ancient Poetry, the article demonstrates how literary criticism can enhance the understanding and evaluation of literary works from aesthetic and cultural dimensions. Overall, the article deeply analyzes the methods and theories of ancient literary creation and criticism and explores their application and development in the information age, providing valuable perspectives and tools for understanding and advancing the field.

Reviewed by: Les personnages mythiques dans la littérature de jeunesse (Mythical Characters in Children's Literature) ed. by Nathalie Prince and Sylvie Servoise Anne Cirella-Urrutia (bio) Les personnages mythiques dans la littérature de jeunesse (Mythical Characters in Children's Literature). Edited by Nathalie Prince and Sylvie Servoise. Rennes, Fr.: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2015. In this collection of seventeen essays gathered from a symposium on children's literature held at the University of Maine in Le Mans, France (12–14 June 2013), Prince and Servoise fuse two problematic categories of literary theory: the concept study of characterization on the one hand, and the concept study of mythology on the other. How does children's literature "mythify" itself and create myths? How does it recycle mythical figures drawn from the Bible, from Greek and Roman literature, or from comic or literary fictions originally intended for adults? May characters for children be mythical, and, if so, what characteristics differentiate them from classical mythical figures? How does children's literature (including comics) recapture mythical heroes and heroines aesthetically? Do these works simply entertain, or do they reinforce the characters' unchanging archetypical nature? In constructing such a type of children's literature, how do we measure the evolution of mythology in various media for children and young adults? Finally, as part of this generic reconfiguration, how do children benefit from becoming acquainted with such mythical figures and stories, and what are the writers' intentions in rewriting them? Véronique Gély, a specialist in mythology, welcomes this continuation of a debate that she initially launched in 2011 in a symposium held in Paris titled "La Mythologie à l'usage des enfants" (Mythology for use by children), and contends that this book expands the concept study of mythology in literature. She praises the project, examining how contributors refashion familiar and less familiar myths and mythical characters in the light of many pressing issues (political, editorial, and aesthetic) within the genre. Part 1 addresses the problem of characterization with the renewal of characters drawn from Greek mythology into modern narratives. Which elements do children's authors retain, discard, or alter from original myths, and for what effects? The four essays in this section examine the role that authors play in transmitting these mythical heroes and heroines to young people as cultural patrimony. They also assess the significance of the use of mythology as one source of fictional and artistic innovation. Nadège Coutaz compares two best sellers that revive Sophocles's tragic heroine Antigone in Jacques Cassabois's fantasy novel for adolescents Antigone 256 (2007) and Martine Delerm's picture book Antigone peut-être (2007). Antigone is refashioned into multiple images of the child/adolescent figure. The "miniaturization" of Antigone from an adult figure into many images of a rebellious teen who rejects her [End Page 262] prospective marriage attests to these works' editorial success and to the changing status of both girls and adolescents. Sylvie Dardaillon examines Yvan Pommaux's graphic novels and the figure of Ulysses in Œdipe: l'enfant trouvé (2010), Ulysse aux mille ruses (2011), and Troie: la guerre toujours recommencée (2012), in which a father takes on the roles of both narrator and storyteller. Analyzing Pommaux's detailed research and illustration style, she highlights his unique "mytho-graphic" approach, his editorial success, and his pedagogical intentions. Hélène Cassereau-Stoyanov studies Ulysses and other Homeric characters from The Odyssey in Sylvaine Jaoui's adolescent novel Fort comme Ulysse (2011). The poem's ethic reflects onto the life of young Eliott, who gradually becomes blind yet strives to gain independence from his parents and from the students who bully him. The section closes with Agathe Salha's reading of Nathaniel Hawthorne's A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys (1851), in which myths are refashioned as new sources of fantasy and wonder for children and embedded within national American landscapes as part of their "naturalization" (65). Part 2 explores the ways in which children's authors revisit biblical myths for the edification of plots and characterization. The actualizations of such mythical characters reveal the values of the time in which they were born. Carlo Collodi's Le avventure...

Folklore is a repository of the ideological foundations of each nation. The history of the people, their views and worldview features are unique treasures recorded in folklore and passed down from generation to generation. From the objects of folklore, you can find out how the people developed, what they thought about, how they lived, what their values were. Folklore is the keeper of the memory and cultural code of the people. The forms of faith, social structure and power are changing, and folklore has the property of preserving information in its own context. This property is manifested in folklore in images. Myths form a system that reflects the special way of thinking of the people, their unique perception of the world. If myths are the spiritual core of culture, then mythical images are an integral part of this people. Although myths are falling out of use, mythical characters, transforming, remain forever in the minds of people. Such mythical characters include the gods Umai-An and Zher-Su (Earth and Water) of the Turkic peoples. Images of these gods can be found in fairy tales and legends of the Turkic peoples. In fairy tales derived from myths, they are depicted with their names, in other genres - in the images of “Albasta”, “Zheztyrnak”. Although their functions are in a polar relationship, we see that the actions of these characters are related to family, childbirth and the condition of a woman. The purpose of the article is to reveal the images of the gods Umai and Zher-Su in Turkic folklore and analyze the manifestations of their divine functions in transformed images. In the course of this analysis, the place of the gods Umai and Zher-Su in the worldview of the Turkic peoples will be established.

Among the Turkic peoples Zhalmauyz K empіr character, compared to other demonological characters, is widely used in genres. The transformation of this character from seven-headed villain - Zhalmauyz kempіr to mystan kempіr was seen. This very transformation is associated with the transition of society from matriarchy to patriarchy. Zhalmauyz is a syncretic person. She acts in the character of an evil old woman. This character is the main image of the evil inclination in the Kazakh mythology. She robs babies and eats them, floating on the water surface in the form of lungs, cleeks everybody who approached to the river and strangle until she will agree to give up her baby. In some tales she captures the young girls and sucks their blood through a finger deceiving or intimidating them. Two mythical characters in this fairy-tale image - mystan Kempіr and ugly villain - Zhalmauyz are closely intertwined. In the Turkic peoples Zhalmauyz generally acts as fairy-tale character. But as a specific demonological force Zhalmauyz refers to the character of hikaya genre. Because even though people do not believe in the seven-headed image of this character, but they believes that she eats people, harmful, she can pass from the human realm into the demons’ world and she is a connoisseur of all the features of both worlds. Zhalmauyz is a mythical image, which is as chthonic ghosts, destroys all flesh. Zhalmauyz is representative of the underworld, which is struggling with the world of light, she tends to extinguish the torch of life, draw the disaster and destroy all flesh. Zhalmauyz function, aimed at the destruction of life by absorbing the sun, the moon and the reign of darkness, surely connects her with the nether world. Based on her act of the sun and the moon absorbing, you can imagine her as bottomless, pitch substance with a huge mouth. There is not a portrait of Zhalmauyz in fairy tales, we get information in the course of its destruction only by destroying her one eye or cutting off her seven heads, and only through these acts we know that she was one-eyed, or seven-headed. Finally, we can say that the image of Zhalmauyz Kempіr in Kazakh folklore was influenced by different historical periods - from the image of mythical ghosts in ancient times, and then in the form of a shapeless body, and later in the image of seven-headed villain, and in the process of the matriarchy collapse she appeared in the image of Zhalmauyz Kempіr. Keywords: folklore, mythology, hikaya, genre.

The Pre-Qin is the origin of Chinese ancient literary criticism. The study of literary criticism in the Pre-Qin period is along with the study of the subject of Chinese literary criticism. We will have a good knowledge of the Pre-Qin of literature criticism through placing this period’s study in the three phases of the whole Chinese literary criticism.

Through his ‘Confessions of an English Opium-Eater’, Thomas De Quincey effects a meticulously crafted entrance onto the literary scene: less a series of confidential notes than a stage-managed performance, the ‘Confessions’ serve as a stage on which he announces his literary ambitions. One such set of performative acts has received little attention: it pertains less to establishing a ground from which to authoritatively create, than it does to laying down a structure through which to mediate. Acting on recent developments within literary criticism and translation studies, this article examines the ways in which the ‘Confessions’ launch their writer on a career in interlingual and intercultural transfer, and how this performance of minority is designed to operate alongside other Romantic writers. The article ponders the successes and failures of mediation on display in emblematic scenes, and attends to how these chart the uneasy relationship between authorship and translatorship.

The article examines for the first time the period of the late 14th — 16th centuries using the material of church singing art, as a transition period from the early Russian Middle Ages to the New Age. In related fields of knowledge — literary criticism, art criticism and cultural studies — it is associated with the problem of the Pre-Renaissance. The period of rise of national culture after the Battle of Kulikovo is similar to the Paleologian Renaissance. In church singing, their similarity is revealed, in particular, in the tendency of melodization. In Russian chants, in accordance with the new texts according to the Jerusalem Charter, singers achieve an organic fusion of text and melody. During the period of the “second South Slavic influence” in Rus’, liturgical songbooks appeared in the Bulgarian edition of canonical texts. However, in the field of singing there is no need to talk about the influence of the southern Slavs: the rapid development of musical writing in our Fatherland in comparison with Bulgaria and Serbia proves this. The style of “weaving words” in singing was indirectly reflected in the scale of the compositions and the renewal of the musical language. The mystical philosophy of hesychasm, dating back to the monastic ascetic practice of Palestine, affected the internal concentration and fullness of chanted prayer. The appeal to “one’s own Antiquity,” characteristic of the European Renaissance, manifested itself in the clear continuity of the traditions of pre-Mongol Rus’. The style of the “second monumentalism” is obvious in the voluminous Stichirarion of the menaion “Slave’s Eye” and the new lengthy chants — putevoy, demestvenny and bolshoy. Thus repeating some European features, the Russian Pre- Renaissance created a solid spiritual foundation for the further development of Russian art, which even during its “golden age” was based on this foundation, distinguished precisely by its deep spiritual essence.

Literary criticism is one of the most important and complex parts of literature, closely related to history and the theory of literature. It defines the nature of verbal art, the relationship and aesthetic peculiarities between the reality of life and artistic reality. It is aimed to evaluate literary heritage, artistic works in terms of the requirements of today. Literary criticism mainly considers contemporary literary trends, its development, writers and their work from a modern point of view. Since it defines the ideological power and aesthetic qualities of a literary work, literary criticism is based on the challenges facing the development of a society, differentiating it from the heights of human values. One of the topical issues of modern Kazakh literary scienceis the analysis of the current state, development directions, shortcomings and achievements of literary criticism, the study of features, the study of internal laws. It is awell known fact that the Kazakh literary criticism has passed various stages and is based on the best experience of world literature and sets up ts own scientific conclusions and positions. Scientific principles of literary criticism are interconnected with new methods of semiotics, structuralism, postmodernism in modern Kazakh literary science. Contemporary literary criticism focuses on receptive aesthetics and aesthetic categories. Comprehensive understanding of new directions has determined the goals and objectives of our research work. In this connection, the article has covered issues of generalization, analysis, comparisons, study of critical views, new searches, scientific works, critical views of modern Kazakh literary critics. The review of new approaches to the study of Kazakh literary criticism was conducted as well. Having conducted the analysis of significant research works of foreign and domestic researchers, the role in the literature has been determined. As a result of a comprehensive analysis, the article has presented its findings.

A Study of Paradigms and Theoretical Key Words of Asian American Literary Criticism

On the back of his latest edited collection of Australian cognitive literary criticism, Jean-François Vernay has produced his own contribution to the field, Neurocognitive Interpretations of Australian Literature: Criticism in the Age of Neuroawareness (2021). Both in his literature review and his own analyses, Vernay paints an exciting picture of the present and future of Australian cognitive literary studies, with each chapter taking a different cognitively informed approach against the backdrop of dominant paradigms in the sciences of the mind: embodied and affective cognition. The work covers an impressive range of texts (from literature of the margins to mainstream popular authors) and approaches (including cognitive historicism, affect studies, and reader reception). This eclectic assortment makes no unified argument but rather models different aspects of the field, and the various kinds of knowledge produced by juxtaposing literary and scientific theory.The book begins with a general introduction to cognitive criticism. Vernay describes a discipline premised on cognition’s relationship to embodiment, action, and affect, and interested in how the cognitive sciences help us to read, understand, interpret, and appreciate literature. The overview is followed by a diachronic review of cognitive studies of Australian literary criticism. This introductory chapter conveys an appreciation of the scope and interdisciplinarity of the field, encompassing areas across both the arts and sciences: theater, visual arts, literature, neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, and linguistics. The introduction is also a bit of a “how to,” in that it guides critics in cognitive approaches, including a list of texts, which lend themselves to cognitive analysis, from the neuronovel, to crime fiction, to modernism. However, this list is not prescriptive—Vernay acknowledges that cognitive criticism can be a productive entry point to any text, across the fiction–nonfiction spectrum. His survey of the field is useful for anyone just starting out, or taking stock, of the state of the field of cognitive literary criticism in Australia.The first chapter is a study of the cognitive appeal of books’ appearance through the lens of The Book Thief’s Liesel Meminger. Vernay chooses this focal character for her metafictional love of books as a nonprofessional reader—an inverted reflection of the literary critic studying Zusak’s text. Through both cognitive theory and fictional evidence, Vernay shows how Liesel’s sensory experiences of books conflate different forms of consuming (a literal and idiomatic appetite for new books), demonstrating how the appearance and feel of books themselves are integrally involved in producing sensory, cognitive, anticipatory pleasure, able to activate various hedonic centers in the brain simultaneously. This capacity is, he points out, reproduced in the appealing covers of The Book Thief itself, so that we mirror the emotional response of its namesake when we encounter the book in stores or libraries. Delving a little deeper, Vernay considers that the ambivalent relationship Liesel develops with books after witnessing atrocities in the Nazi regime is a form of scapegoating: books, and the words they contain, are blamed for the violence done in their name. Despite this almost psychoanalytical transference, Liesel’s continued attachment to books is, Vernay suggests, explained by the nature of human–object relationships, or the “natural attachments humans have to objects” (in terms of sensory pleasure and associated memories). This connection makes Liesel hold on to the books despite the danger of possessing them. This opening chapter is consonant with theories of the “material turn” in literature, and—despite some overly binary claims about the importance of the book as physical object (in contrast to a “repository of stories” [28]1)—Vernay’s argument nicely highlights the complexity of our embodied encounters with books.The next chapter tackles the bildungsroman through the works of C. J. Koch’s work. It does an interesting job of drawing together scholars of the bildung (Karl Morgenstern Françoise Dolto, Arnold van Gennep, among others)—including anthropologists, psychoanalysts, and literary critics—to produce an argument that satisfyingly marries structural accounts of narrative to cognitive accounts of mind, as each moves through analogous stages of development. Vernay notes that in both cases, what occurs is not so much a formation (the completion of a predetermined trajectory) but a transformation, as the character/individual’s past self is displaced by a new self, constructed by the vagaries of their interactions with the environment in dialogue with their biology. Vernay investigates a similar process within the reader of the bildungsroman, questioning whether the reader is transformed (not only in the immediate experience of reading but in both the mid-term and long-term stages) by the process of reading these coming-of-age novels. The difficulties in quantifying this readerly transformation, including the multitude of confounding factors, create an empirical problem outside the scope of literary criticism. Ultimately, Vernay leaves this question open, but expresses optimism about the transformative potential of literature.The next chapter, on mindstyle and neurodivergence, gives a competent overview of the depiction of literary Asperger’s in the Graeme Simsion Rosie trilogy. The chapter spends valuable time teasing out the tension between real life Asperger’s and the literary Asperger’s figure. In relation to Simsion’s trilogy, there are qualifications around the fact that the author is not autistic, and the narrative—shaped by various ethical and aesthetic drives—is not a study of the Asperger’s experience, but a romantic comedy that aims to raise awareness about the positive “potentialities” of autistic cognitive styles. In addition to this theorizing, it would have been fascinating to hear more about how literary Asperger’s is stylistically constructed, beyond direct dialogue or report. Simsion’s works, as popular fiction, do not deal in subtleties, and so perhaps more of a genealogy of the Asperger’s character in literature may have been useful here. This could have opened up an interesting discussion around literary Asperger’s and Semino’s concept of mindstyle (which Vernay references), to more deeply explore the textual patterns used to evoke this particular “cognitive style” in literature.In the following chapter, Vernay comes into his own as he analyzes the erotics of writing and reading, taking a psychoanalytic lens to consider the conflation of the sexual and creative impulse, and the consumption of bodies and stories. This chapter gives an interesting overview of erotic Australian fiction from the 1960s to today through the lens of the multiple designations of the word “arousal” (including their interactions with capitalist motives). A cognitive perspective highlights the overlap between sex and curiosity (and thus the drives behind our relations with both people and novels), which, according to Stanislas Dehaene and colleagues, share certain neural circuits. In reading erotic fiction, the overlap becomes explicit, producing the desire to know not just what, but who, a character is doing. This is followed by another fruitful discussion of literature and the body: a study of embodied trauma in Indigenous literature. Vernay looks at Claire Coleman’s Terra Nullius and Follow the Rabbit Proof Fence by Doris Pilkington Garimara. The complex narrative strategies of each text do not straightforwardly invite the reader to empathetically share in the experience but rather invite witness and recognition. Vernay presents an insightful representation of the deep interpenetration of mind/body/culture, which, as 4E cognition has been arguing for the last few decades, is impossible to detangle, given the enculturated nature of our embodied minds.This cognitive-cultural perspective is continued in the last section, on cognition and emotions, as Vernay traces the complex web of ideological critique and embodied affect. It begins with a comparative analysis of Peter Polites and Christos Tsolkias’s depiction of “Angry Gay Men,” particularly looking at anger across class, race, and gender lines. This moves into the mind of the reader in the final chapter, returning us to the discussion in the first chapter of professional and nonprofessional readers, and how they differently triangulate emotional responses to the text and its authorial figure. Here Vernay uses the controversy around Helen Dale’s The Hand That Signed the Paper to discuss the productivity of moral emotions, such as indignation and disgust, in our interpretation of texts.To give Vernay’s argument full consideration, some historical details should be recounted around the scandal of Dale’s novel. Though published as a fictional work, it was marketed as having a historical basis through paratextual features such as the Ukrainian pseudonym, Demidenko, under which it was published; the prefaces of certain editions (1995), which declared the historical context of the story to be truthful; as well as epitext such as interviews. These extratextual elements featured explicit claims that Demidenko accurately represented Ukrainian sentiment toward the Soviet regime, a story that was implied to have emerged from her family history. It was later revealed that she was not Ukrainian and had not accurately represented this historical period, and furthermore had encoded anti-Semitic views in her text. This was certainly a complex case, in which the nature of creative licence, truth in fiction, and the relationship between text and author all came into question. In such a complex case, it’s possible Vernay may have taken an overly simplistic line: he argues that critics of Helen, particularly those that objected to the anti-Semitism of her work, committed the referential fallacy (confusing fictional claims with claims about the real world). Vernay suggests that such critics were “clouded” (118) by their own emotional response to the case, which may have impacted on their “mental clarity” (118). I think this chapter deviates from the earlier accounts of emotion, fictionality, and the role of the critic that Vernay deploys in the book, and the inconsistency weakens his argument here. Earlier in the book is an acknowledgment of the social and political role of both literature and literary criticism, explicitly pointing to their ability to have real world effects, and to reflect and refract our world in productive ways. For example, in the chapter on Indigenous writings, Vernay points out the role of the text and the surrounding sphere of criticism in developing empathy and promoting social activism and mutual understanding. Here, however, he suggests that literature should be considered a closed semiotic system, in which “fiction is bereft of extralinguistic referential properties and therefore makes no reference to anything other than itself” (117). Thus, any emotional response to literature, particularly critical emotional responses such as anger about a certain perspective presented in the work, are simply a result of confusion. Vernay asks, “how could anyone feel indignant at literary creations based on no extralinguistic reference or on pretended reference?” (121). It would have been interesting to hear Vernay’s take on the potential tension between the cognitive criticism of the rest of the book and what Vernay calls the “no-reference theory” espoused by the French new realists and Vernay himself in this chapter.2Furthermore, Vernay suggests the critics who condemn such ideological perspectives as the anti-Semitism of Demidenko’s novel are performing a kind of censorship: “anti-Dimidenko critics pressing charges of anti-Semitism clearly deny literature’s right to represent and fathom a diverse range of moral stances” (116). This claim itself denies literary criticism’s function (performed by both professional and nonprofessional literary critics): to reflect on our cultural output and the ideologies embedded within it, saying things about the work that it cannot—and, importantly, would not, necessarily—say about itself. This is a process that, as the cognitive reader response theories—e.g., from Lisa Zunshine, whom Vernay references earlier—emphasize, does not require the critic to be “detached . . . dispassionate” or “objective” (120).3 Vernay’s suggestion that only the nonprofessional would be “taken in by the illusion” of literature enough to feel an emotional response feels hard to square with his scholarship in the remainder of the book. However, on the whole, in this chapter Vernay makes many astute comments on the ability of emotion to ethically charge our reading, and there is an interesting critique of criticism—its tendency to conflate the author with his or her work, and an inability to detangle moral issues from aesthetic ones. These are valuable reminders in the age of outrage that we currently live in.Overall, Neurocognitive Interpretations of Australian Literature, in both its depth and scope, makes a valuable contribution to cognitive literary criticism. Alongside his earlier anthology, The Rise of the Australian Neurohumanities (2021), this present work both promotes and substantially develops cognitive studies of Australian literature, which is shaping up to be a major player in the critical landscape of the twenty-first century.

Widening the leadership mythology: in the search for Simorgh

Previous articleNext article FreeAndrew Elfenbein, Romanticism and the Rise of English Romanticism and the Rise of English. Andrew Elfenbein. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009. Pp. viii+278.Grant F. ScottGrant F. ScottMuhlenberg College Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreElfenbein is a resurrection man, and his corpse is philology. He sneaks into the cemetery of our profession, exhumes the body, reanimates it in clear prose, and presents it to the world—a little wobbly but ready for a comeback. The book examines the philological effects of the standardization of English on literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, surveying a cast of characters from Hugh Blair to Gertrude Stein. Admirable for its breadth, the book dwells mainly on the canonical Romantic writers but also spends time with composition manuals, grammar books, dictionaries, and guides to pronunciation. It offers a set of heroes and villains but often (and wisely) blurs them, resisting the deafening blow of the academic thesis. There is certainly an argument here, but it is more a meta-argument about the critical neglect of philology in literary criticism and the vital influence of contentious debates about the English language during the eighteenth century. How Romantic writers responded to these debates is the focal point of most of this study. For those skeptical about the originality of the argument, the author’s is not your grandfather’s philology, but a “new” version informed by an awareness of history and historicity. It is this self-consciousness along with a compelling tension in the book itself between the formal demands of academic criticism and the less thesis-driven syntactic description or gloss, what Elfenbein calls the “pile-up of evidence” (5), that makes this a valuable hybrid study.One of the central questions of the book concerns agency. From whence does it derive, especially for Romantic writers? Recent critics have vested authority in a variety of sources, among them the author, genre, or gender, and political, cultural, and institutional history. But few scholars have turned to the English language itself as a persuasive force in understanding works of the creative imagination. “The demands of English as code, as institutionalized by eighteenth-century prescriptivism,” Elfenbein argues, “have as good a claim…to agency in a historical account” of literary texts as the demands of these other pressures (10). In a move sure to rattle the Romantic scholarly establishment, Elfenbein releases nineteenth-century authors from the contextual stranglehold of life and career and resituates them within “the history of English” (14). Hemans and Keats, for example, are wrestling as much with semantic and syntactic problems as emotional and psychological ones.The set of questions these and other Romantic authors address arises from the linguistic ferment of the second half of the eighteenth century, which was spurred on by a legion of philologists, grammarians, orthoepists, and lexicographers who changed the way English was conceived at almost every level. The period saw the rise of prescriptivism, the rise of books on usage, on how to speak English and speak it correctly. Elfenbein calls those responsible for this movement the “English experts” who capitalized on the ascendancy and uniformity of print to consolidate their influence. These experts “worked hard to link pure English to Britishness” (22) and managed to attain an ideal of commonality that Protestantism could not achieve even as it celebrated the vernacular. A standardized form of English contributed to national unity and, for the English experts, looked forward to imperial greatness. To use bad English became tantamount to political treason, a point nicely illustrated by references to passages in Belinda and Pride and Prejudice (24). By contrast, to use “Pure English” often served as a ticket of admission to literate Britain for working-class or immigrant authors like Ann Yearsley or Olaudah Equiano. Of course, “Pure English” also had a dark side, tyrannically prescribing forms of usage and excluding those writers who refused to conform to its rules.To demonstrate how complex and varied is the Romantic response to prescriptivism, Elfenbein focuses on two representative case studies: double negatives in “Tintern Abbey” and the will/shall distinction in a number of other canonical works from the period. In the former case, as the author contends, “the poem’s English skates on the brink of linguistic impropriety, coming close to a perilous edge without actually being incorrect” (50). Thus, Wordsworth’s use of partial double negatives and litotes complicates the prescriptions of the English experts, challenging their belief in clarity and contributing to the poet’s own “distinctive obscurity” (55). Led by Bishop Wallis and Lindley Murray, the eighteenth-century grammarians were all but unanimous in the distinction they drew between the modal auxiliaries “will” and “shall.” The first predicted; the second promised a future action. In the “corpus analysis” he performs (61), Elfenbein finds a surprising number of Romantics who follow the rules. In spite of flouting the conventional use of grammar and punctuation, for instance, Blake’s “Little Black Boy” gets the will/shall distinction exactly right and thus subtly evokes the characters’ Britishness. However, many Romantics ignored the English experts by preserving archaic forms such as those linking the use of “shall” with prophecy in the King James Bible. The second generation of Romantics, moreover, began to erode the distinction between these two words sometimes in an attempt simply to vary sound, as in Frankenstein (66). From this kind of philological description, Elfenbein turns to a brief literary analysis in his brilliant reading of the will/shall shift in a passage from Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (67–68). What is typically invisible—the effects of English usage—he not only makes apparent but also uses as critical evidence in constructing a persuasive reading of Prometheus’s radically altered view of Jupiter.The middle chapters take up the issues of pronunciation, dialect, versions of nonstandard English, elocution, and voice. The theater emerged as an arbiter of good pronunciation, and playwrights often created “an in-group of characters who used correct English and an out-group who did not” (76). Elfenbein investigates the representation of slave and Jewish dialect in popular plays, looking at the association between mispronunciation and resistance to authority. It is interesting to note that many of these representations were sympathetic and may have helped pave the way for “the abolition of the slave trade and, decades later, the removal of Jewish ‘disabilities’” (83). The subsequent analyses of the “philological moment” in Blake’s “The clod & the pebble,” Keats’s “Ode to Psyche,” and Hemans’s “Evening Prayer at a Girls’ School” are extraordinarily revealing and show just how useful the focus on stylistic, syntactic, and aural codes can be. We learn that “Blake contests the dialect masterplot of purification because his poem moves from older to newer forms of the verb [“seeketh” and “hath” to “gives” and “builds”], but…the change asserts not progress but indifference” (91); that for grammarian Murray’s insistence on clearness, unity, and strength in the sentence, Keats substitutes “lush sensuality…a pile-up of choice phrases” and “a post-orgasmic laxity” (99); and that Hemans, “rather than deforming words in accordance with a perception of ethnic or regional usage…made poetry a sanctuary for certain kinds of highly emotional prosody that were being exiled from respectable prose” (105). Likewise, it was Hemans who recognized the importance of elocution in her dramatic monologues, borrowing the elocutionary voice from the genre of the novel while omitting its expository narrator (127). By contrast, as Elfenbein argues, most other Romantic poetry silenced elocution and gave voice to exposition (130). Writers tended to move to “a peculiar unheard voice available only in print” (135), a quality that often made specific words and names in their verse difficult to pronounce.English experts like Blair and Murray were obsessed with the sentence as an isolated unit and devised exercises that helped correct bad ones. Elfenbein moves on to trace the relationship between the sentence and the maxim, the way sentences turned into sententiae. The problem was the implicit tension that emerged between the microcosm of the well-formed sentence and the larger macrostructure of the text. We see this contradiction in Radcliffe’s The Italian and in the way Jane Austen exploits it to reveal character in Pride and Prejudice. We also see evidence of how ill suited was the well-formed sentence for Walter Scott’s fluid narrative style: “The whole point of his flow was that nothing about the language was to be remembered, only the situation” (167). In Richard Lanham’s terms, we are encouraged to look “through” rather than “at” the language. Elfenbein goes on to discuss “the rise of the excerpt” (169) in the period and the way some authors, like P. B. Shelley, actively resisted such extraction of their work while some, like Keats in “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” embraced if not parodied it, as in the famous final motto, itself a detachable, brightly polished quotation designed to be quoted. The chapter titled “Sentencing Romanticism” concludes with a superb analysis that counterpoints Macaulay as a model of prose style and his “dark twin,” Thomas Carlyle, whose sentences spiral madly away from the prescriptivists (182).In the final chapter and afterword, Elfenbein brings the issues discussed in the book to our own time, singling out the work of late-nineteenth-century teacher and philologist John Wesley Hales as a notable model. In his textbook and anthology, Hales makes the detailed study of the English language “inseparable from the analysis of English poetry in general and Romantic poems in particular” (187). Refreshingly, Hales’s glosses shy away from the prescriptive, and his exercises sometimes have no right answer. Elfenbein calls this method “experimental philology” (190), admiring the way his explanations chart the shifting nature of the language and mix dialect with standard English, classicism with the vernacular. Elfenbein laments the way Hales’s “quirky…glosses” (193) gave way to New Criticism and the close reading of thematic unities. The art of recitation—inspired by J. Clifford Turner, who in 1929 made sound recordings of Romantic poems—likewise succumbed to the New Critical bogeyman, which “killed off the academic respectability of such oral recitation” (201). As Elfenbein notes, recitation all but disappeared because it was unable to meet the professional demands of the new English discipline that valorized printed prose. It could not compete with the rise of credentialism that was fueled by the uniformity of textbooks, monographs, and critical essays. Despite indulging toward the end in a bit of op-ed prescriptivism himself, Elfenbein succeeds in making what might seem a musty and highly specialized topic relevant to contemporary literary criticism and the classroom teaching of English and composition. Indeed, the book offers a “renovated understanding of philology” (215) that is genuinely compelling and deserves a wider audience than Romantic studies. 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