Critical Explication Research Articles

Haecceity and haptics: A critical explication of bookness in Speaking in Tongues: Speaking Digitally / Digitally Speaking

Given the ongoing need for a more rigorous theoretical underpinning for book arts discourse, this essay conjoins a critical explication of my artist's book Speaking in Tongues: Speaking Digitally / Digitally Speaking, and the practice of making it, with selected foundational statements on the haptic experience of artists' books by Gary Frost. These statements provide a framework across and through which I am able to weave the explication. In order to do this, however, a history of the call for a more critical underpinning of the field is first undertaken. Thereafter, selected relevant theoretical tropes that have been influential on my thinking and practice are drawn together, forming a ground upon which the explication can be undertaken, focusing particularly upon haptic theory. This explication of artist's book practice acknowledges, and is predicated upon, the well-documented lack of a conclusive definition for such objects, and thus I attempt to foreground constituent concepts of bookness as critical and appropriate lenses for characterising and theorising the book arts.

From Mu-Cha-Cha to Ay-Ay-Ay! A Critical Explication of the Use of "Latin" Dance Styles and the Absence of Latinx Creatives in the Broadway Musical

From Mu-Cha-Cha to Ay-Ay-Ay! A Critical Explication of the Use of "Latin" Dance Styles and the Absence of Latinx Creatives in the Broadway Musical

The Measure of Homer: The Ancient Reception of the Iliad and the Odyssey by Richard Hunter

Reviewed by: The Measure of Homer: The Ancient Reception of the Iliad and the Odyssey by Richard Hunter Jonathan S. Burgess Richard Hunter. The Measure of Homer: The Ancient Reception of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. x, 254. $44.99. ISBN 978-1-108-42831-6. Referring to his recent monographs on Hesiod and Plato, Hunter describes this book as completing a "trilogy" on foundational literature. The author notes that he will not repeat himself on Hellenistic poetry or cover reception of Homer in drama, imperial epic, and philosophy of later antiquity. As this learned inquiry amply demonstrates, there remains much other material by which to "measure" the influence of Homeric poetry. In an often digressive and accumulative manner, the five chapters explore a number of different themes. Chapter 1, "Placing Homer," argues that the effect of Homer was geographically extensive and socially deep. Chapter 2, "Homer and the Divine," discusses ancient reaction to select Homeric passages featuring divinities. Chapter 3, "The Golden Verses," surveys the attention given to Odysseus' symposiastic address to the Phaeacians in Odyssey 9. Chapter 4, "Homer among the Scholars," discusses ancient critical explication of a number of Homeric passages. Chapter 5, "The Pleasures of Song," focuses on two key passages, the song of the Sirens in Odyssey 9 and the heroic song of Achilles in Iliad 9, with attention to divergent explication or utilization of them in antiquity. Despite the term "reception" in the subtitle, "heritage" might be the better word for this work's celebratory exploration of Homeric influence. Besides referring to a wide variety of literature that discussed Homeric poetry, Hunter also searches out everyday texts, often epigrams of the eastern Greek world, that seemingly reflect Homer. The point is that the implicit employment of Homer in even obscure texts especially affirms the reach of Homeric influence. At times Hunter's optimism that we are "invited" to perceive Homeric allusions may not convince. An early example is a "humble" epigram from Cappadocia (5–6); it is undoubtedly epicized, but a father grieving a dead son does not bring to my mind the parents of Hector watching their son being dragged in Iliad 22, despite the correlation of two common words. Though Hunter refers to the use of Homer in ancient education, this usually involved rote copying and memorization of the early parts of the Homeric epics; more socio-economic analysis would be required to demonstrate that Homer penetrated "all levels of society" in a specific and sophisticated manner. An interesting section in chapter 4 reveals that ancient scholars were actually quite alarmed at the attention given to humble characters and activities in the Odyssey. In many ways the book gathers strength as it explores the undoubted importance of Homer in antiquity. Hunter is particularly informative in his subtle yet dogged pursuit of the shifting employment of various themes, such as the snatching of a mortal to heaven or the song of the Sirens. Though the author excellently [End Page 113] explains the mechanics of ancient interpretation of Homer, not every reader will be as sympathetic to its methods and conclusions. For example, Hunter is rather accommodating with Longinus' biographical hypothesis that an aging Homer composed the Odyssey as an epilogue to the Iliad. The argument that Nestor's speech to Telemachus in Odyssey 3 ("the sufferings of the Greeks at Troy, the sacking of the city … , and then the νόστος") suggests the "shape of the Iliad followed by the Odyssey" is carefully worded yet misleading. Three of the four dead lamented by Nestor belong to cyclic traditions, not the Iliad, and in general the Odyssey looks back to non-Homeric episodes and famously avoids Iliadic material. But there is no doubt that readers will come away from this book much better informed about ancient responses to Homer, and this work should prove to be an impetus for further consideration of the extent of reception of the Homeric poetry in the ancient Greek world. Jonathan S. Burgess University of Toronto Copyright © 2019 The Classical Association of the Atlantic States, Inc.

Religion Around Emily Dickinson by W. Clark Gilpin (review)

Reviewed by: Religion Around Emily Dickinson by W. Clark Gilpin Shira Wolosky (bio) Gilpin, W. Clark. Religion Around Emily Dickinson. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2014. $34. Through the various waves of twentieth-century criticism of Dickinson, religion has been mainly lacking. New Critical explication studied her work in its formal iconicity, independent of social history. The assumption was that Dickinson’s poems, like other literary works, were about the powers and forms of the imagination as they illuminated themselves: artifacts about art, language constructing language. Gender criticism opened the door to social history, but only as wide as women’s literary performances. In an odd way this increased Dickinson’s isolation, together with women contemporary to her. As madwomen in the attic — with Dickinson an exemplar in her reclusion – women writers continued to be seen as cut off from public events. Their restricted, constrained domesticity became the very subject of their work, expressed as an anxious tension between their double roles of women and poet. Cultural Studies linked this gendered positioning to other cultural subjections, making a trinity of race, class, and gender. On one level this broadened discussion into wider social fields. On another, it narrowed analysis to questions of power, of domination and oppression as the ultimate measure or mode of analysis. The literary text became a record of oppression and resistance, which it is the critic’s role to track. [End Page 103] Religion was a cultural arena that these approaches generally ignored. Most critics displayed a kind of metalepsis: the secularism they assumed for themselves, they extended backwards into the nineteenth century. But religion has erupted in the twenty-first century, a return of the repressed with a vengeance, horrifyingly destructive but also as an insistent aspect of human experience and efforts to make sense of it. To omit attention to religion in a century like the nineteenth is to occlude fundamental aspects of the formation of self, the constitution of society, and many aesthetic practices of literature derived from, reflecting, or transforming religious practices. Emily Dickinson’s world was religious. Amherst, and the entire Connecticut River valley, was Jonathan Edwards’s country. The Second Great Awakening stretched from the start of the nineteenth century to the Civil War, and it was experienced by Dickinson directly through conversion waves, including those that swept up her father and the missionary-inclined Mount Holyoke Seminary Dickinson attended. The period leading up to the Civil War and the War itself, the historical maelstrom during which Dickinson composed half her poems, was represented in theological terms that profoundly shaped the conflict. That Dickinson herself resisted formal religion, while also composing poems almost ecstatic in ways structured according to religious modes, only ties her work more firmly to the religious contexts in which she lived and wrote. This religious world of Dickinson’s engagement (and disengagement) is the subject of Religion Around Emily Dickinson. To some extent the material Gilpin assembles is familiar. The basic touchstones of American literary history and Dickinson studies, such as Jonathan Edwards and Emerson, are duly treated. Gilpin extends beyond these to topics of recent interest, as well as contemporary methods: domesticity and the market, sentimentality, and the profession of authorship. He addresses a broad range of social practices through a variety of fields, for example examining domestic architecture and its representations as newly spatialized genderings of middle-class life. William Ellery Channing’s call to “self-culture,” reading practices and dissemination, bereavement practices, landscaped cemeteries, keepsakes and public memorials, spiritualism, letter-writing, consolation literature, and gendered boundaries as they were elaborated and enforced in the nineteenth century weave a cultural-social fabric in which Gilpin frames Dickinson’s own texts. Religion is the thread basting together the varieties of social topics the book reviews. Nineteenth-century domesticity, as a religious site, takes on new and specific forms, such as the “parlor piety” of Phoebe Palmer. Examined as a domestic space gendered female and crossing private with public activity, the [End Page 104] parlor offered a social locus where religious attitudes conjoined with emergent American ideologies such as “self-improvement.” The outpouring of religious publications points inward to religious experience while also penetrating public...

Schrödinger's notebook: Shifting real

Abstract The science fiction prototype featured in this article is the second chapter of a novel in progress that contains an omnibus of interventions into physics, queer science, feminism, and intellectual history. The title of the article references the notebooks of Erwin Schrodinger, a Nobel-Prize winning physicist who discovered wave theory that superseded Heisenberg's more complex form of mathematical formalism, therefore changing the way in which interpretation is done. Despite being part of a series, the prototype is written so it could be read as a standalone. The story, combined with a critical explication of its background and intent, produces the contestations illustrating the relationships between physics, the cultures in science and technology, as well as politics extending over the internal and external values of the scientific enterprise. Specifically, the differences between these values are rendered impossible through the epistemic continuity stemming from a shared ontology. At the same time, the prototype also forecasts the possibility of future technologies based on current and possible developments in physics while contesting the notion of a ‘good life’ these technologies supposedly offer. As a politically inclined epistemic move, the prototype will demonstrate points of amplification in the interactions taking place at the microscopic level for manifestation in our macroscopic space. Therefore, the amplified microscopic interactions are in competition with the observables in our ‘meatspace’ dominated by the conventions of classical physics. The prototype also acts as a speculative device for modeling probable outcomes stemming from different constraint sets, thereby acting as an ‘algorithmic’ blueprint for the narration of scenarios produced as an outcome of macro- and micro-entanglement.

‘Reiterative divergence’: Reflections on Maurice Ssendak’s Bumble-Ardy and Kenzaburô Ôe’s reimagining of Outside Over There

Abstract This paper discusses the six pages of free-form drawing in the middle of Maurice Sendak’s Bumble-Ardy, in terms of Japanese Nobel laureate Kenzaburô Ôe’s idea of ‘reiterative divergence,’ by which ‘meaning emerges [within a text] from the progression of slight variations’. I contextualize my cross-cultural borrowing by discussing Ôe’s analysis of Sendak’s Outside Over There, and exploring its revelatory and interpretive functions within Ôe’s novel, The Changeling. Beginning from the premise that Sendak is affirming his art as a mode of self-expression and self-revelation for which he has created both private and cultural symbols that he repeats and varies, I reference Sendak’s published interviews in an attempt to identify areas of significant personal interest—such as death, music, art, the purpose and function of artistic expression, sexuality and love. I also provide textual evidence for the claim that Outside Over There provides the Ur-text for this centre cut of Bumble-Ardy; As an example of reiterative divergence as a mode of critical explication, I advance an original interpretation of Outside Over There, suggesting that the central meaning of the text lies in Ida’s need to come to terms with the loss of her father, a mirror image of Sendak’s own yearning for a ‘lost’ daughter.

The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing is a Way of Thinking (review)

Ball, David M. and Martha B. Kuhlman, eds. 2010. The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing is Way of Thinking. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. $55.00 hc. $28.00 sc. xxiii + 238 pp.In their introduction to The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing is Way of Thinking, editors David M. Ball and Martha B. Kuhlman note that for many years, Ware cult figure primarily known only within the comics community, an innovative writer/artist who came to the attention of the scholarly world only after the publication of his graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth in 2000 (xvii). Though Ware began his comics career many years earlier, drawing quirky and innovative cartoons for UT Austin's Daily Texan, it was not until he published four pages in RAW in 1990 that his work gained nationwide exposure and growing cadre of fans. Between 1990 and 2000, Ware published fourteen volumes of The ACME Novelty Library, an anthology of short comics stories, character studies, experiments in graphic design, quasi-autobiographical narratives, and preliminary forays into the world of Jimmy Corrigan. Now, ten years after the collected/revised/expanded Jimmy Corrigan appeared on bookstore shelves, this collection of fifteen essays exploring Ware's life and oeuvre represents the first book-length critical text devoted entirely to his comics work. It is, at heart, an attempt-and an impressive one at that-to justify the sustained scholarly interest that Ware has attracted over the years.Ware is tantalizing subject for scholarly study for several reasons, not the least of which is his assiduous postmodern sensibility regarding matters of character, identity, narrative, and culture. In his comics he embraces an unconventional, avant-garde approach to art and story that transcends (and some would say, transgresses against) literary and artistic conventions. Typically, he focuses on the ordinary, mundane circumstances of life, the minutiae of experience, and the trivial details of place (a la Harvey Pekar and Alison Bechdel) rather than the fantastic, the heroic, or the idealistic that comprise most comic book fare. He draws from wide range of literary and artistic traditions and violates just as many, often disrupting readers' expectations with non-sequential narratives and impressionistic renderings of temporal and spatial relationships. It is no surprise, then, that contributors to this collection (which had its origins in 2007 MLA Conference roundtable) approach Ware's comics from diverse set of scholarly perspectives that reflect the richness of their subject matter, including comics and art history, disability studies, and critical race theory. Having said that, the theoretical and rhetorical paradigms for all the essays in this book are firmly situated in the domain of literary theory and critical/cultural analysis.The book is divided into five sections-Contexts and Artistic Intersections, The Urban Landscape, Reading History, and Everyday Temporalities-each of which offers distinctive lens for analysis and interpretation. However, they all display striking homogeneity in their shared attention to the tensions and inherent self-contradictions that appear in nearly every aspect of Ware's graphic corpus. To be fair, Ware's work almost demands this sort of critical explication. His art and storylines belong to what New York Times Magazine critic Peter Schjeldahl describes as a 'cult of difficulty' that has always characterized avant-gardes (ix). Ware's strategy for provoking this sense of difficulty involves the carefully chosen juxtaposition of concurrent yet conflicting images and themes. To cite just one example, in Contexts and Canons, single unifying theme quickly emerges in each of the chapters, namely the conflict between Ware's forceful rejection of the critical and aesthetic frameworks of canonicity and his equally forceful though somewhat ironic reverence for the aesthetics of high art and the stylistic sophistication of 'serious' literature. …

Halliday’s model of register revisited and explored

Halliday’s description of register as ‘a variety of language, corresponding to a variety of situation’, with situation interpreted ‘by means of a conceptual framework using the terms “field”, “tenor” and “mode”’ (Halliday, 1985/89: 29, 38) is revisited to reflect on the theoretical work the term ‘register’ does within the SFL paradigm. In doing so, we recognise that the concepts of a linguistic theory are ‘ineffable’ (Halliday 2002[1988]); i.e. that ‘providing definitions of a theoretical term... requires that it be positioned vis-à-vis other concepts in the theory’ (Hasan, 2004: 16). It follows that changing the position of ‘register’ in the theory changes the nature of the concept. So while alternative uses of the term ‘register’ – such as in Martin’s genre model (e.g. 1992) and Halliday’s model – may advance a shared program for language description and explanation as a route to social change, they must be seen as more than terminological variants. One consequence of the productivity of Martin’s approach has been that the Hallidayan line of register theory has not had sufficient critical explication. This paper therefore begins with a brief review of the register concept. It then exemplifies the term, as postulated by Halliday, with a registerial analysis of surgical interaction, drawing on Hasan’s context modelling (e.g. Hasan 1995, 2004, 2009a), and adopting what Matthiessen (1993) calls a ‘metafunctional slice’ with ‘multistratal coverage’. By accounting for choice at different strata, we seek to ‘relate wording to context via meaning which acts as the interface between the two’ (Hasan 2009a: 182).

Television as Lover, Part I: Writing Dirty Theory

Treating television as a semiotic system, this article charts the various pleasure/meaning/identity configurations that are possible when audiences engage televisual texts. Reflecting on the uniquely postmodern character of television as a communication medium, it is argued that traditional hermeneutic and interpretive approaches to television such as artistic or ideological criticism should be accompanied by alternative approaches rooted in erotics. Developing the simile “television as lover,” the article theorizes a transgressive pleasure of television viewing that undermines hegemonic ideology by transforming viewers from patrons into producers. The concluding section explores how such a practice necessitates fundamentally shifting the aim of criticism from critical explication to critical pedagogy. A follow-up article models this approach to television by undertaking a sustained auto(erotic)ethnography.

Proosallinen näyttämö

Prosaic Stage – On the theatre of Walter Benjamin Article asks the role and signification of theatre in the thought of Walter Benjamin by comparing his essays on Brecht´s epical theatre from the 1930´s with his doctoral thesis of 1919 on the literary theory in the Romanticism of Iena. The approach makes possible to present a more general question concerning the reasons why theatre is reinvented during the past century precisely as a scenic art and as an art of director. In his thesis, Benjamin defends an idea of a different kind of Romanticism which, against the prevailing bourgeois ideas, is politically revolutionary and “sober” by its expression. By assuming novel as the paradigm of work of art, the romantic literary theory accomplishes itself in the idea of “poetry as prose”. Benjamin´s own “Brechtian turn”, as well as the epical theatre he analyses, can be explained as a consequent continuation and critical explication of the former “prosaic turn”. In the “gesture” (Geste), which according to Brecht constitutes the basic element of scenic representation, can be recognized the same “estranging” and “retarding” dynamics and structure as in the “connexions” (Zusammenhang) of the romantic prose. Correspondingly, the “scenic turn” in modern theatre motivates itself by a more general historical change which, still today, continues to dislocate the modes of representation and social existence.

"Oh, so many startlements...": History, Race, and Myth in O Brother, Where Art Thou?

I was born in 1950 and so did not live through and have no memory of the Depression. Still, I feel in ways as if it is part of my experience, for I heard many stories of it from my parents and grandparents. My father's father owned a farm supply store that failed with the stock market collapse in 1929. He never held another job, though he was only in middle age. Apparently the experience ruined his spirit. He moved his family from the Grant Park area of Atlanta to a small town about ten miles south called College Park. This was an important step in the events that made my coming on the scene possible. My mother's father began his career in Orange, Texas, in the early 1920s as a race car driver, mechanic, and stunt pilot. With the onset of the Depression in the South, he began to dust crops and moved with his family back and forth through the Gulf states--Louisiana and Mississippi especially--dusting against the inexorable progress of the boll weevil. My mother remembers moving sixteen times in four years and attending thirteen different schools. She recalls spending one Easter morning waking up in the family car, parked on the side of a Florida road. Finally, tired of dusting, my grandfather moved into commercial flying. He settled with his family in College Park and became a pilot for Delta Air Lines. Thus another necessary moment. My father and mother met, married, and here I am. For many people of my era the Depression, which we didn't live through, was a real and palpable experience. We knew about it, heard family tales about it, shared in its history and folklore. It was part of our heritage. Thus for me at least, and I suspect for many people of my post-World War II generation in the American South, O Brother, Where Art Thou? speaks in a particular way, as if some of its scenes linger on the verge of memory, as if it is family history, or might have been, as if Ulysses Everett McGill is the paterfamilias of us all. Reviews of O Brother, Where Art Thou? tend to praise the film but often describe it as a work of fluff, with much comedy and great music but no substance. For example, Robert Horton of Film.com wrote that particular excursion into screwball madness is often heavenly, and frankly leaves critical explication somewhat unnecessary. Joel and Ethan Coen, the film's directors and screen writers, described O Brother as a Ma and Pa Kettle movie but with really big production values and as the Lawrence of Arabia of hayseed movies. Parallels to Homer's The Odyssey were seen as superficial, and both the Coens claimed they had never read the poem. (1) This is doubtful. The Coen brothers make films replete with literary references, and it is difficult to believe they escaped reading Homer. Besides, this film really does draw a number of witty and clever parallels with the Greek epic. On the other hand, the plot of The Odyssey, with its tall-tale-telling hero and his fantastic exploits, is so ingrained in the cultural consciousness that even if one didn't actually read The Odyssey exposure would still come through movies, cartoons, and comic books. Many reviews also note a connection to the 1941 Preston Sturges comedy Sullivan's Travels, which chronicles the efforts of a film director famous for his comedies to learn about the life of the downtrodden so he can make a film about suffering called O Brother, Where Art Thou? One might imagine that the Coens' O Brother, Where Art Thou? is the movie that Sturges's director really ought to have made. The Coens' film does use a number of conventions from the Sturges comedy--a quest-based travel plot, quick-fire repartee between characters, a concern with the Depression and the poor, with convicts and people on the lam. Both films take a decidedly serious turn at the end. Both also have a scene in which convicts watch a film. In Sturges's comedy this scene is the central dramatic moment. The director, John Sullivan, changes his name, abandons his assistants, and goes out on the road, incognito, to learn about the poor. …

Beyond Nancy Fraser's 'perspectival dualism'

The bifurcation between economically and culturally orientated perspectives has become a central trope in critical thinking on the problems of social justice and injustice. This paper attempts a critical explication and assessment of Nancy Fraser's recent work on this problem. She attempts to transcend the culture-economy divide by proposing a 'perspectival dualism' in which distinctive 'economic-redistributive' and 'cultural-recognitive' logics of justice are analytically distinguished and practically combined so as to furnish a balanced strategy for left-critical praxis. The paper seeks to demonstrate how and why Fraser's dualistic perspective fails, insofar as it is untenable to confine recognitive claims to the realm of culture, since they can be seen to underpin both redistributively and culturally oriented manifestations of social struggle. An alternative, multi-axial and 'metatheoretical' conception of recognition is offered, one which, it is claimed, can encompass both economic and cultural struggles within its theoretical ambit.

William Hogarth and the Tradition of Sexual Scissors

William Hogarth and the Tradition of Sexual Scissors Aaron Santesso* (bio) Did you ever hear my definition of marriage? It is, that it resembles a pair of shears, so joined that they can not be separated; often moving in opposite directions, yet always punishing anyone who comes between them. Sydney Smith The opening plate of William Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress (Figure 1) shows Moll Hackabout arriving in London, on the verge of her descent into harlotry and hardship. 1 Amid the drama and tension of the scene, a viewer might overlook or dismiss the pair of scissors which hang from Moll’s belt. But with Hogarth, we dismiss or ignore “superficial” material at our peril, for he loved to use seemingly insignificant characters and props to convey significant ideas. Does Hogarth hope to convey a message through Moll’s scissors? Previous critical explanations of the scissors fall into two categories. One group of critics sees them as a descriptive detail confirming Moll’s original honest, hardworking nature and wholesome intentions. In his Commentaries (1794–99), for example, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg uses Moll’s scissors to support his sentimental reading of Moll: “At her side hangs a needle-case and a little pair of scissors, and from her right arm a small bundle: they were probably put there by the poor weeping mother when she said goodbye, for occupation and refreshment on the journey.” 2 In this type of reading, the critic moves from the presumed nature of the character to the details, which are then interpreted in light of that character. Numerous sentimental readings have appeared since Lichtenberg: a modern example is the claim that “the ingenuous country girl” who is “protected only by her father” is “distinguishable amid the London crowd by the plain kerchief that covers her shoulders, the fresh rose pinned to her bodice and [End Page 499] the pair of workmanlike scissors dangling from the bag she carries.” 3 In sentimental readings, then, incidental details such as the scissors are enlisted (or ignored, as by Lichtenberg) only to support a previously determined interpretation of Moll as an innocent victim of the corrupting forces of the city. A second group of critics interprets Moll’s scissors as markers of profession. In this view, Moll, seeking employment as a seamstress, wears the scissors to “tell people her trade . . . [j]ust as carters carry a whip and maids a broom at a hiring fair.” 4 This explanation is overliteral: Moll is not at a hiring fair. 5 Nevertheless, at one level the scissors are probably intended, as Ronald Paulson suggests, to “indicate her intended profession,” 6 for Hogarth does occasionally use scissors in this way (e.g., the barber’s scissors in The Adventure of Mambrino’s Helmet). Yet Moll’s scissors may have a further, previously unnoticed dimension of meaning, symbolic as well as realistic. While Paulson, for example, interprets Moll’s goose (at the bottom corner of the scene) as not merely a sign that she is to meet her cousin, but also a foreshadowing of her unhappy career and fate, he does not consider a similarly prophetic role for the scissors. 7 N. F. Lowe has advanced a parallel argument about Hogarth’s use of beauty spots. Lowe suggests that the seemingly innocuous spots are open to “a more sinister interpretation” and function as an important moral clue. Lowe points to the beauty spot on the woman in the Before and After series, and to the man’s shocked expression in After, as evidence that the woman “is not so innocent.” 8 “Hogarth’s constant portrayal of loose women with black spots,” he concludes, “suggests that we are meant to associate them with venereal disease.” 9 Thus, an apparently realistic detail can also encode a moral meaning. This paper will explore the moral implications inherent in Moll’s scissors. In challenging earlier approaches to critical explication of Moll’s scissors, this paper will also challenge the prevalent sentimental interpretation of Moll herself. While noting the cautionary aspect of A Harlot’s Progress, one critic maintains that “it is a tale of the vulnerable position of women in a society whose laws, customs and members...

A New study guide to Steinbeck's major works, with critical explications

A New study guide to Steinbeck's major works, with critical explications

FROM COLLECTION TO CYCLE: POETIC NARRATIVE AND TONAL DESIGN IN MAHLER'S "LIEDER EINES FAHRENDEN GESELLEN"

Although a number of the important sources for Mahler's Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen are missing, and most of the others were left undated by the composer, the extant sources, together with recent ancillary research results, constitute a sufficient body of evidence to enable us to infer a developmental history for a work that is recognized by most observers as the first mature masterpiece by Mahler, as well as a pathbreaking work in the history of the orchestral song. But most importantly for present purposes, I hope to show that the establishing of a work history for these four songs is indispensable to a full, critical explication of their coherence as a genuine, poetic and musical ?cycle? of songs.1 Most authorities on the subject tell us that Mahler wrote the Geseilen-Lieder m 1883 or?not quite as wide of the mark?in 1884. As so often, such misinformation is rooted in apparently credible evidence. Mahler himself is responsible for the later date: his well known letter to Friedrich Lohr (?I have written a cycle of [Lieder], six of them so far?

"Race" and Hermeneutics: Paradigm Shift--From Scientific to Hermeneutic Understanding of Race

As concept, is plurisemous. Its referents are not limited to visible morphological markers of difference. Social behavior, psychological profiles, economic activities, aesthetic forms - these are some of many indicators by which racial identities are assigned or withheld, claimed or rejected, celebrated or deprecated. In racialized nation states (the United States, Canada),(1) can be quite hazardous. Participation in or exclusion from various sectors of national life - economy, politics, education, recreation, arts - may depend on racial identity assumed by or even assigned to individuals or groups of individuals. To speak, therefore, of in contexts such as these is not merely to address oneself to an abstract concept. Rather, it is to intervene actively in discursive field that is highly charged by sense not only of past and ongoing grievances but also of present investments. In following pages, I shall examine those investments as they pertain to theories of interpretation. Beginning with premise that is one of communities of existing |out there' in world, and that its effectivity in production and interpretation of culture belongs in the province . . . of hermeneutic I will argue that, as systems of understanding, hermeneutic theories also stand in need of interrogation from point of view of ideology of and practices of racial discrimination (Appiah, 21-37). I will also argue that, contrary to Henry Louis Gates's position, African peoples have several systems of interpretation; that, though each may have certain similarities to others, they are not same; and, finally, that any comparison between these systems and European model must point not only features of similarity or equivalence but also those of contrast, contradiction, and difference. Studies which restrict themselves to pointing similarities between strategies of deconstruction, say, and Yorubaderived New World Signifying overlook ideology of race. Even after we have disposed of melanin, we cannot dispose of ideology. ideology of may or may not, in its operations, rely on biology. But, as experience of our daily lives shows, and as examples from interpretation theories (Mailloux; Gates, Signifying; Gadamer), essays on curricular change in post-independence Kenya (Ngugi) and literary criticism reveal, it does its presence felt. I have derived premise outlined above - i.e., that it is in ideology rather than in biology that we may find meaning of - from Kwame Anthony Appiah's essay The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and Illusion of Race. essay's objective, Appiah writes, is to discuss the way in which . . . Du Bois . . . came gradually, though never completely, to assimilate unbiological nature of races. (22) phrase gradually, though never completely, to assimilate is signpost to conclusion Appiah intends to draw, by end of his essay, from Du Bois's work: that races are unbiological. To arrive at this conclusion, Appiah undertakes systematic and critical explication of Du Bois's thoughts on as recorded in The Conservation of (1897), Races (1911) and Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward an Autobiography of Race Concept (1940). evidence, he contends, points to reluctance on Du Bois's part to dispose entirely of belief that is an essence of (34). Du Bois's work was a pretext for adumbrating argument he never quite managed to make (35): truth is that are no races . . . . Talk of race is particularly distressing for those of us who take culture seriously. For, where works . . . it works as an attempt at metonym for culture; and it does so only at price of biologizing what is culture, or ideology. . . . What exists out there in world - communities of meaning, shading variously into each other in rich structure of social world - is province not of biology but of hermeneutic understanding. …

Criticism, Literary History, and the Paradigm: The Education of Henry Adams

Literary historians have persistently regarded The Education of Henry Adams as a “paradigmatic” text. While “historical explanations“ stress the book's historical achievement, “critical explications” portray it as a failure of historical consciousness that achieves its success in the ahistorical arenas of aesthetic integration and imaginative projection. To relate the products of “explication” with the aims of “historical explanation,” I regard the work's true “paradigm achievement” as an inquiry into “historical being.” For Adams this achievement embodies disciplinary formulation and professional commitment and thus coordinates historical speculation and self-cultivation. One must assess the ethical density and cultural significance of the text before explaining its historical identity. The Education, despite its origin in epistemological chaos, makes the past eternally relevant to the present; for it is a personal and theoretical discovery of how the narrative structures of history and selfhood create the possibilities of individual and social life.

Habermas’ theory of communication: A critical explication

The theory of communication proposed by German philosopher Jürgen Habermas has important implications for argumentation scholars, contemporary rhetorical theorists, and students of human interaction processes. This essay explicates and evaluates essential features of Habermas’ theory and indicates ties among Habermas’ concepts and the work of several speech communication scholars.

A Reading Of Ionesco's The Killer

.IN 1963 IONESCO GAVE A SERIES OF ANSWERS to the question, "Why does a writer write?" One of them was, "[I write] because I wish to understand the world; because I would place, at least for myself, a little order in that immense chaos." Strange words to the ears of those who have come to believe that Ionesco shows us the chaos of the world by putting chaos onstage, who would agree, for instance, with the Dictionnaire de litterature contemporaine, which states that the theater of Ionesco is "the most perfect antithesis one could imagine to the theater of Sartre, where the thought always precedes the theatrical expression," and concludes, "Each play of Ionesco defies critical explication . . . to apply it . . . is to risk making oneself into one of Ionesco's own comic characters." This is quite false; Ionesco is not practising Dada, even in The Bald Soprano; his plays are just as well constructed to transmit ideas as Sartre's, but in a more sophisticated way. The way varies—in Rhinoceros it is very close to allegory; in The Killer, a much more complex work, it is a group of symbolic correspondences. Several of these have been identified in critical articles, generally within a comparative study of several plays, but there has not yet been an attempt to bring them all together and show that they make sense, or "order," together. With mild defiance of Ionesco's remarks about critics, I should like to make such an attempt.