Critical Prose Research Articles

David Lurie and the ‘Disease of Romanticism’: The Transnational and Transcultural Afterlives of Goethe and Kleist in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace

My paper studies J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) to understand the transnational, transcultural mutations of two key figures of German Romanticism: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Heinrich von Kleist. Coetzee’s novels are reflections and reproductions of his extensive reading of politics and literature; these texts grant the lives and works of old masters a renewal, a re-introspection, and most importantly, a resurrection into contemporaneity. Set in post-apartheid South Africa, Disgrace operates as a site of racial and sexual contentions. Through the character of David Lurie, Coetzee initiates a dialogue between the 'visions' of the former colonizer and the ‘revisions’ of the newly emancipated colonized. While the scholarship on the Romantic element in Disgrace (Beard 2007; Easton 2007; Hawkins 2009; and Cass 2013) is predominantly centred on the afterlife of British Romanticism, more particularly, on the roles Byron and Wordsworth play in shaping plot and action, I attempt to read the novel in the light of Coetzee’s critical prose to understand how he draws upon the German Romantic tradition. If Wordsworth and Byron are evoked to characterize the outer, more conspicuous texture of the novel, then the inner, hidden threads that stitch the form and content together are borrowed from Goethe and Kleist. I argue that Coetzee’s romantic sensibility is as much German as British. These two traditions are brought together in Disgrace to re-enact four major leitmotifs of Romantic literature—desire, transgression, punishment, and finally, salvation—in a transformed political dispensation.

Attention Seeking: Tristan Tzara's Art Critical Prose Poetry

This article examines Tristan Tzara's innovative art critical writing of the 1940s and shows how the poet's engagement with European avant-garde painting developed ideas that shaped Paris Dada during the 1920s. Focusing on essays about Joan Miró and Paul Klee, it is argued that Tzara employed an unorthodox language for writing about art and promoted a distinctive style of art critical prose poetry. His approach to art criticism is shown to raise specific issues about attention by problematizing how audiences might have regard to words, sounds, and pictures simultaneously. Taking his cue from the distinctive ontologies he finds in works by Miró and Klee, Tzara uses language to perform with painting rather than conveying ideas about it. In a distinctive linguistic performance that borders on music, Tzara's art critical prose poems are seen to mobilize elements of language and visual art in non-hierarchical, undirected ways, thereby prompting a complex phenomenological exercise in attention. Cet article examine les essais critiques sur l'art que Tristan Tzara a écrit pendant les années quarante et montre comment l'engagement du poète avec la peinture d'avant-garde européenne lui a fourni l'occasion de développer des idées qui ont façonné les débuts de Paris Dada. En se concentrant sur des essais sur Joan Miró et Paul Klee, il est soutenu que Tzara a créé un langage peu orthodoxe pour écrire sur l'art et a promu un style distinctif de poésie en prose critique. Cette façon d'aborder la peinture soulève des questions spécifiques sur l'attention en problématisant la manière dont le lecteur pourrait considérer simultanément les mots, les sons et les images. S'inspirant des ontologies distinctives qu'il trouve dans les œuvres de Miró et de Klee, Tzara utilise le langage pour jouer avec la peinture plutôt que de transmettre des idées à son sujet. Dans une performance linguistique distinctive qui frôle la musique, les poèmes en prose critique de Tzara mobilisent des éléments du langage et de l'art visuel de manière non hiérarchique et non dirigée, provoquant ainsi un exercice phénoménologique complexe de l'attention.

Working Title

Working Title

The “Gorky” Hoax by Boris Sadovskoy

The contextual analysis of Gorky’s letter to Sadovskoy (included in his memoir “Gorky in Nizhny”), which assessed the addressee’s poem “Ivan the Terrible”, made it possible to establish that this was a hoax. At the same time, additional arguments are proposed to prove the hypothesis put forward by I.N. Sukhikh that the letter by A.P. Chekhov to Sadovskoy published by the latter was also a hoax. It has been established that Chekhov’s letter and Sadovskoy’s article “L.A. May” from his collection of critical prose “Russian Kamena” served as sources for writing the “Gorky” letter. For his polemical purposes, Sadovskoy constructed the logic of Gorky’s letter in such a way that it produced a historical anachronism in Gorky’s assessments of the reign of the Tsar Ivan the Terrible: with his pre-revolutionary judgments, projected at the time of their publication, Gorky, as it seems, supported Stalin’s position on Ivan the Terrible and the oprichnina and, moreover, predicted it for decades. It is substantiated that the thesis about the ballads of Alexey Tolstoy, cited in Gorky’s letter, is associated primarily with Sadovskoy’s self-reflection, who always acknowledged his involvement with the artistic searches of this poet. In the aesthetic system of Gorky, the work of A.K. Tolstoy occupied an insignificant place, and the appeal to him in the literary disputes of the proletarian classic was not typical.

Listening in, reaching out

Listening in, reaching out Michaela Coplen Lynley Edmeades. Listening In. Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2019. 96 pp. A$27.50. ISBN: 9781988531786 I am taking up space in the British Library. My belongings exceed their bounds—I can tell from sideways glances that my desk-mates do not approve. But I need the extra room; I am reading Listening In today. I am Googling for references, noting each favorite phrase, referring back to Lynley Edmeades's first collection and her critical prose. At first, I do not notice that I am inside one of the poems: "The Bee Elle," Edmeades's soundscape portrait of the British Library. Here the essential weirdness of an academic workspace is on display—this bell jar under which silence has different textures. Edmeades's speaker is tapping me on the shoulder, drawing my attention to the faces around the room, each of us "hooked up to various elsewheres/as if our bodies don't matter" (24). She is pointing out the humor here: the embarrassment of embodiment, where a shuffle or an elbow bump might rupture the scholarly air. It is a piece that encapsulates the phenomenological tension that moves through this collection—a play between mind and matter that reflects the act of listening itself. Listening In is the second collection from the New Zealand poet Lynley Edmeades. The title is drawn from a piece in her debut, As the Verb Tenses—a collection motivated by an interest in linguistic (de)construction, where "doingness" (17) bridges detached abstraction and embodied feeling. These obsessions continue throughout Listening In, where Edmeades's attention to pacing, control, and "The Order of Things" (14) is keenly honed. Readers are Edmeades's "over-hearers, their little coves of ears … listening in" (As the Verb Tenses, 20). The collection evokes the parallels between acts of reading and listening, where objective stimulus (e.g., sound waves, words on a page) is filtered through a subjective process of "meaning-making." One "un-translation" early in the collection instructs readers to "clean their ears," warning that the "(g)listener will be forced to inspect every sownd carefully" (46). Through jolting punctuation and formal manipulation, Edmeades interrupts the rhythms of everyday language—an auditory defamiliarization that alerts us to our subconscious expectations by subverting them. Despite only occasional engagement with received forms, the collection is united by formal qualities. There is an abiding sense of anaphora; Edmeades constructs "a sculpture/with moving pieces" (78) by [End Page 303] establishing fixed patterns and variously unfixing them. In a three-part ekphrastic sequence ("Loveliness Extreme," "Extreme Loveliness," "Extremely Love"), Edmeades plays on pottery, fragments, and translation—she shapes and breaks a form, then kaleidoscopes the pieces. In "Remainder," a repeated structure becomes the scaffolding across six stanzas, but the Mad Lib–style substitution of key phrases heightens absurdity at every turn. It is a formal approach that suggests possibility but also limits—the form lapses in the final stanza, with the words "something something something" (40) standing in as an empty container. It is these intentional imperfections that ground Edmeades's avant-garde in a human element. In true postmodern fashion, the poems happily show their seams—as when a strictly rhymed sonnet gives way in the turn of "Like a Vase": I'd like to stay in bed, be solublewhen the days are floppywith possible,have nothing on the confidence of rain.Instead, my plans leak and my measuresare inaccurate, like a vase. (29) The slant between "soluble" and "possible" embodies the experience of "listening in" on Edmeades's work; as the form begins to slip, it is the artifice of poem-building itself that comes into focus. The poem draws attention to its faltering as the reader notices, creating a simultaneity—a tube through which Edmeades whispers the last lines of this "ars poetica" directly to the reader. Edmeades's use of "found" texts similarly collapses and elides timelines. From a phonetic translation of a speech by New Zealand Prime Minister John Key ("Speetch") to a quantification of US President Donald Trump's inaugural address ("Again America Great Make") to a collage of quotes from UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher ("Ask...

Agustín Espinosa y el Siglo de Oro: cartografías literarias de un crítico

This paper tries to show the influence of the classical tradition of the Golden Age in the avant-garde, specifically in the essayistic and creative work of the Canarian writer Agustín Espinosa García. His pages on Góngora, Lope de Vega, Calderón and, to a lesser extent, Cervantes are a reference of the best critical prose of the first third of the 20th century in the Canary Islands. Apart from his attention to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Espinosa developed keen notes on the Romancero, the Enlightenment or French poetry, among many other aspects of his insatiable intellectual curiosity. The recovery of Góngora in the magazine La Rosa de los Vientos (in parallel to Grupo del 27) was not the only project to revitalize the classics, regenerated and installed in the hour of modernity according to the criteria and concerns of the “new literature” where tradition and avant-garde dialogue.

Cortázar and Music by Nicholas Roberts

MLR, .,   literary production, this study destabilizes hegemonic anglophone subjectivities of the modern and posits the Global South as a key site in the articulation of a plural modernity in which aesthetics and the politics of social justice are inextricably intertwined. E B L Cortázar and Music. By N R. (Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures, ) Cambridge: Legenda. . xii+ pp. £. ISBN –– ––. Alongside literature and politics, music is an inescapable presence in the work of Julio Cortázar. In this thorough and wide-ranging study, Nicholas Roberts provides a detailed analysis of the myriad ways in which music appears in the novels, short stories, and critical work of the Argentine. In the process, he reveals that music was no mere leitmotiv, but rather provided the structural tools for key works. Cortázar loved music, wrote passionately about his preferences, and created memorable characters—Horacio Oliveira, the stuffy French critic Bruno, Johnny Carter—for whom music is more than just entertainment or pastime: it is the stuff of life itself. Roberts divides his subject’s musical interests into three broad genres: la música culta, or classical music; tango, Argentina’s (and Uruguay’s) beloved national sound; and jazz, from early New Orleans stylings through to later free experiments. e Introduction looks at Cortázar’s theories on music, especially in his early prose criticism (such as ‘Elogio del jazz’ and ‘Soledad de la música’), and how ideas around language, textuality, and repeatability are drawn from music to inform his literary practice. Cortázar was a frank and honest essayist, and a very generous epistolarian, but his philosophical ideas have aged less well than his fiction. Today a marriage between surrealism and existentialism may lack the urgency it had for the fledgling writer in the s; but the stories that emerge from the same intellectual milieu retain their power to move and perplex. is is a way of saying that the opening pages are something of a slog, and this is not entirely Roberts’s fault—the author himself concludes that Cortázar’s fiction is a far better source than his meta-textual elucubrations (p. ). Subsequent analytical chapters are much more engaging. Despite his lifelong love of jazz, classical music also played an important role in Cortázar’s thinking and fiction. is is explored in the first chapter, with reference to the late story ‘Clone’, which revolves around performances of madrigals composed by Carlo Gesualdo. e second chapter looks at Cortázar’s more explicitly political writing—for many critics his least satisfying work—and the role played by Chopin, for example, in ‘Alguien anda por ahí’, read in the light of an earlier attempt at (Cuban) revolutionary fiction, the Che Guevara-themed and Mozart-scored ‘Reunión’. Chapter  turns to tango, and Cortázar’s ambivalent feelings towards a music at once deeply conservative in its values and profoundly linked to nostalgia towards the homeland he had le in the s but which remained the ‘here’ of his writing  Reviews (and, until dictatorial intervention prohibited, where he published his work). In this and other chapters, Roberts draws productively on archival material, including the Cortázar manuscripts held in the Benson Collection, Austin. e final three chapters all focus on jazz. is weighting is justified by the profound impression, from an early age, that the music of Duke Ellington, Jelly Roll Morton, Dizzy Gillespie, and Charlie Parker had on Cortázar, alongside its repeated appearances in some of his best fiction—the novel Rayuela, or the pivotal short story ‘El perseguidor’, itself a ciphered version of Charlie Parker’s darkest days. Roberts argues, in short, that Cortázar’s exploration of improvisation, freedom , and translation in jazz and writing about jazz points to a view of the genre as ‘ultimately characterised by and as a self-perpetuating, relentless tension’ (p. , emphasis original). Roberts is not blind to the more problematic aspects of Cortázar’s work— the rather dated gender politics and some questionable depictions of the black musicians whose music is, nevertheless, central to his conception of ‘swing’, that undefinable characteristic of the sounds he adored. But in contrast to, say, Neil Larsen, in his...

Postures of Dying: Eliot, Seneca and the Elizabethans

Abstract This article analyses the substantial intertextual relations between Eliot’s ‘Gerontion’, Seneca’s tragedies, and Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, particularly in the depictions of dying speeches. It demonstrates, too, that ‘Gerontion’ is a prominent example of how Eliot’s poetry anticipates the issues explored in his critical prose—in this case, notably ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’ and ‘Seneca in Elizabethan Translation’. Further, the article relates the use of what Eliot called ‘saturated’ images in early modern drama and his own poetry with his theories of poetic creation and originality. In so doing, it argues that, contrary to the accepted critical narrative, the famous description of a ‘profound kinship’ with an unnamed ‘dead author’ that Eliot describes in ‘Reflections on Contemporary Poetry’, may not primarily and exclusively refer to Jules Laforgue.

Afterword: “Talking Against Time” in The Age of Innocence

Abstract In The Writing of Fiction, Edith Wharton argues that “the attempt to produce on the reader the effect of the passage of time” is one of the “central difficulties” confronting any novelist. In none of her own works of fiction is that difficulty resolved more successfully than in The Age of Innocence. This study demonstrates the extent to which an awareness of time occupies the core of Wharton's novel: time as it elapses, and time as it shapes the experiences of her characters. In old New York of the 1870s, people are strictly constrained by myriad inviolable routines and rituals, forced to be perpetually mindful of clock and calendar. The suspicion that their world is in the process of being gradually but irreversibly altered is pivotally captured when several characters, envisioning future inventions like the telephone, are said to be “talking against time”—a then-familiar but seldom elucidated colloquialism. Her own response to the acceleration of the social and technological changes that overtook old New York illustrates how Wharton, too, may be said to be “talking against time” in her later critical and autobiographical prose.

Circles of Interpretation, Analytical Signposts. Criticism of the critical prose of A. B. Šimić

Poetry can do without the authorial aside. Yet, this is true for all literary genres. What happens, though, with poets’ critical pieces when these pieces – structured in order to highlight, in general theoretical terms, either an aesthetic phenomenon or a cluster of generic artistic features – surpass the realm of self-reflective ambitions of the poets themselves? In that case, we talk about a versatile or prolific author. The multi-directional nature of that agency, its dialectical essence, implies a possibility of autonomous existence of critical forms of expressing stances and judgments, independently of poets’ personal poetic standards. It is A. B. Šimić’s oeuvre that presents a fertile ground for discussing this complex issue of literary onto-theory: the history of reception of integral, that is, a separate study and evaluation of his poetry/ critical prose, proves in valid terms both uncertainty and arbitrariness in anti-theoretical approaches up to date to critical pieces of artists (in Serbian poetry, Šimić’s counterparts in this respect are poets Laza Kostić, Momčilo Nastasijević, and Miodrag Pavlović). This study tendency demands another segment of general discursive practice of literary critics be clarified. It is a constant conflict between principal interpretative concepts, so-called leading/major literary paradigms. With regard to this, the cognitive-logical power and aesthetic-critical integrity of the interpreter of the aforementioned relations come forward. Consequently, this is fully visible in the way A. B. Šimić’s status of critical prose changes in the Yugoslav and, in particular Croatian, literature of the 20th century.

Hagiography as a Platform for Internal Catholic Debate in Early Modern Europe: Francisco de Ribera's La Vida de la Madre Teresa de Iesus (1590) and the Defense of a Contemplative Way Inside the Jesuit Order

AbstractBy the end of the sixteenth century, the Society of Jesus was redefining its ever-growing organization. Starting with the generals Mercurian and Acquaviva, the order attempted to leave behind the open spaces devoted to retired forms of prayer so as to put the full weight of the institution on its practical ministries. However, such an advance against contemplative prayer did not lack challenges. The present work aims to rescue a hardly studied critical prose in the midst of those changes: the case of the Spanish Jesuit Francisco de Ribera. This article suggests that Salamanca's professor used his words to defend contemplative prayer. For this purpose, he utilized a device of great scope in the Catholic universe during the Counter-Reformation: the hagiographic narrative. It is proposed here that the vita appears as a mechanism of dispute not only outside but also inside Roman Catholicism. In this sense, the hagiography was a platform of debate within the order. Far from being a purely repetitive text, Ribera's biography of the Castilian visionary and reformer Teresa of Ávila shows the exaltation of a form of prayer that he gladly projected to the group of all believers and especially to the Society of Jesus.

Magisterial Writing Experiment

Magisterial Writing Experiment Henry Sussman (bio) Sonnets Walter Benjamin Carl Skoggard, ed. and trans. Publication Studio Hudson www.publicationstudio.biz/books 394 Pages; Print, $20.00 Decades before Jacques Derrida bestowed écriture upon the critical world, this a radical whose downbeat on inscriptive media trumped the set-pieces of disciplined discourse, Walter Benjamin plied the turbulent currents of what can be best described as a General Writing. With respect to his own writing practice, particularly after the Habilitationsschrift debacle of 1925, Benjamin revels at the frontiers of a writerly polymorphous perversity. A scriptural hermit crab, he simply luxuriated in the squatter's life, taking up residence in one writerly ecology after the next, making, with a vengeance, its formal constraints, as its idiosyncrasies, his own. Not only is the cycle of seventy-three sonnets that Benjamin, over a ten-year period, dedicated to his youthful intime, Christoph Friedrich Heinle, a labor of love. So is their recent English-language translation, illuminated both by an informative prefatory essay and by meticulous notes on each and every work, by Carl Skoggard. It was with "Fritz" Heinle that Benjamin shared the inebriating joy, at Freiburg and in Berlin, of his first mature independence. Heinle, sensing mega-turbulence in the offing, together with his lover, Rika Seligson, asphyxiated himself just at the outbreak of World War I (on August 8, 1914 in Berlin). Under Skoggard's loving care, the Sonnets emerge as an integral niche within the sprawling cathedral of Benjamin's multifarious lifetime writing-adventure. In his illuminating essay, Skoggard accounts for the dominant features that he encountered in rendering the Sonnets' singular landscape: the truncated rhythm, the eyeopening caesurae, "long-breathed enjambments," "sprung syntax," and the interlinear stutter-steps proceeding directly from Benjamin's translation theory. Skoggard's translations themselves lavish as painstaking care on the details of rhyme, meter, scansion, and syntax as they do to the broader mythological and historical frameworks just as indispensable to the Sonnets' productive assimilation. The sonnet cycle dedicated to Heinle was, first and foremost, very much of a piece with Benjamin's unflagging commitment to General Writing. For the subgroups that the Sonnets invariably form as the reader explores the contours of their body correspond to the compelling subgenres of elucidation and theoretical oversight resulting from the diverse discursive occasions of Benjamin's critical prose. Benjamin was neither "slumming" nor launched on a paean of aesthetic exaltation when he devoted a significant block of writing-time to a sonnet cycle in turn dedicated to a comrade with whom he shared "full-service" friendship, ranging from shared undergraduate jaunts and aesthetic takes on the contemporary to idealized love. In composing the Sonnets, as in devising a modernist urban patois and display for One-Way Street (1928), as in reformatting supersized Proustian autobiography to the specifications of a Berlin Childhood Circa 1900 (1950), Benjamin is once again appropriating, in the full philosophical sense of the word, a traditional compositional format, in this case a highly over-determined one, to his multifarious writing practice. Along the way, he significantly gestures to all the traditional literary art forms that might be implicated by such a pitched twentieth-century poetic lament: classical mythology, epic, elegy, prayer, mystical revelation. But the Sonnets, for all the devotion and intimacy toward Heinle with which they are infused (along with the melancholy evolving over time into the telling Benjaminian mood) are less mourning-pageant than magisterial writing experiment, undertaken both with the conceptual rigor and stunning improvisation embedded in his signature. The cycle of the Sonnets, in sum, may be regarded as a modernist kaleidoscope refracting not only Benjamin's literary fascinations, but the turbulent battleground of his (often antithetical) lifetime friendships. For décor, a significant subgrouping of the poems depends on classical mythological trappings emanating from any number of sources. Chief of these, as Skoggard is well-aware, may be the still-recent rediscovery of Hölderlin, as filtered through the George Circle, triggered by an edition of the Pindaric odes and a separate study by Norbert von Hellingrath. The mythology attached to Heinle's truncated potential, the epic scale of the feelings between him and Benjamin, emerge with particular lucidity...

Recurrence and Remembrance: Reading J.H. Prynne's “Reach Up” and “Morning” from <em>Al-Dente</em> (2014)

The recent poetry of the British neo-Modernist J. H. Prynne has often been characterized as an increasingly disparate and intractable body of work. Two poems from Prynne’s collection Al-Dente (2014), “Reach Up” and “Morning,” are approached here on the assumption that these are parts of a consistent poetic project. With a recourse to Wordsworthian transcendentalism and to Prynne’s own critical prose, a tracing of the poems’ embedded networks of eclectic references uncovers a potential organizing theme: the dialectic between existential continuity and corporeal mortality. In “Reach Up” the individual experience of the present moment, and its subsequent recollection within marked time, is a way of deflecting the ongoing reality of corporeal mortality. “Morning” extends this concern by questioning how self-experience and memory are communicated and absented via language, and by placing individual acts of remembrance within a wider historical ambit of human expression.

Introduction: Read This Sitting Down

Introduction:Read This Sitting Down Jonathan P. Eburne (bio) Back in 2013, when Amy Elias and I sat down to discuss the possibility of founding a scholarly journal for the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present—we were on the phone; "sit down," she said. "I want to talk to you about starting a journal together"—I raised the notion of publishing a humor issue. "Oh," Amy said. Amy had been sketching out her vision for the journal's inaugural issue, a brilliant collective meditation on Art and the Commons (Volume 1, No. 1). Then I introduced the possibility of the special issue I am introducing to you now. The ensuing pause in the conversation felt uncommonly long. I grew anxious that Amy, who had invested so much of her time and intellectual energy into establishing ASAP as a major scholarly organization, might have thought that I was joking—or, worse, that I was, myself, a joke. "No, wait," I said. "I'm serious." "OK," she noted. "Sure. A special issue on comedy. That makes sense." "Ah," I continued, "Well, no, that's not really what I mean. I'm not talking about a special issue about comedy. I'm talking about a humor issue, an opportunity for people to write things in funny ways, as a kind of experiment." "Oh," she said again. As I sit here at my computer composing these lines—my final editorial assignment for ASAP/Journal; I've done a lot of sitting over the past seven years, as editors do—I arrive at an impasse. In reality, Amy Elias expressed nothing other [End Page 455] than enthusiasm toward the idea of a humor issue of ASAP/Journal. She, like me, considered it a vehicle for opening up ways to experiment with scholarly voice and form, and as a way to explore arts criticism meaningfully through an expanded set of genres and mediums, whether comix, graphic criticism, or performance. She was not underwhelmed, nor was she even skeptical. I've made this all up. But it's nonetheless tempting to tell the story this way, as the dull thud of a lead idea-balloon striking the ground. Why is this so? For one, its misprision manages to register the inflated ambitions of the project, however ironically: it casts the prospect of writing humorous arts criticism as an idea so outlandish, so rashly imaginative as to be unimaginable. On the flip side there is also, simply, fatigue. Oh, one of those. There's a filament of truth in each of these considerations. The demands of contemporary scholarship have become familiar to the point of mortification—not to mention the demands faced by contemporary scholars, artists, and institutions of higher education today, particularly precariously employed and queer, trans, and BIPOC artists and scholars. Scholarly writing, no less than artistic practice or grantwriting, is an exercise in prestige and survival, as much as an instrument of creative thinking and the communication of new ideas. Who can afford to play games? All the same, what might it mean to make such writing funny? Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Is it a thing at all? In the pages of this special issue you will encounter a rich mosaic of writing and image that explores the affordances of humor as a mode of critical reflection in and on the contemporary arts. Very little of it is salacious or crude, although there is the occasional dick joke here and there, particularly in Allison Harris's essay on "Cocksman Charisma," or, depending on your optic, in Aurélie Matheron's playfully Marxian assessment of Maurizio Cattelan's banana. At the same time, it's a given that a certain number of the jokes will fall flat, especially here in the introduction. I can assure you: humor isn't easy. As Cathy Park Hong notes in a recent essay on Richard Pryor's stand-up, it's virtually impossible to bullshit one's way through comedy, "because the audience cannot be convinced into laughter."1 [End Page 456] The prospect of integrating humor with argumentative critical prose thus faces, at best, an aporia—and at worst...

A Study on the Pyeongjeom criticism in Yu Eon-ho’s Yeonseok

본고는 유언호(兪彦鎬, 1730～1796)의 문집 『연석(燕石)』에 수행된 평점비평의 특징적 면모를 고구하고 그 의미를 밝힌 것이다. 현전하는 유일본 자료인 장서각본 『연석』을 주 텍스트로 삼아 논의를 진행하되, 학계에 새로 소개된 『연석』 관련 자료들을 참고하여 『연석』의 평점비평의 배경을 살폈다. 이를 통해 『연석』에 평점비평을 행한 주체가 박지원(朴趾源, 1737～1805)과 유한준(俞漢雋, 1732～1811)임을 확정하였다. 『연석』에 수행된 평점비평의 방식은 크게 권점(圈點)과 평어(評語)로 나뉘는 한편 붉은색과 푸른색의 두 종류로 구분된다. 붉은색이 박지원의 것, 푸른색이 유한준의 것이다. 『연석』에 사용된 권점과 평어는 명대(明代)의 대표적인 평점비평서인 모곤(茅坤, 1512～1601)의 『당송팔대가문초(唐宋八大家文鈔)』 및 18세기 조선에 유통되었던 평점비평서들에 보이는 방식들을 공유하면서도 차별된 성격을 내포한다. 특히 평어에서 대상 작품과 연관된 다른 작품 혹은 작가를 인용하여 제시하는 경우, 『연석』의 평어에서는 조선 시대 선배 문인 및 당대 문인으로 인용 범위가 확장되고 있다는 점이 이전과는 다른 특징이다. 그 밖에 평비자가 자신의 글을 인용하거나, 평비자가 알고 있는 사실 정보 및 관련 일화를 부연 서술하는 방식 등이 『연석』 평점비평 방식의 독특한 면모라고 할 수 있다. 이어서 평점비평의 배경과 방식을 바탕으로 ‘권점’과 ‘평어’의 측면에서 『연석』 평점비평의 의미를 밝혔다. 먼저, 『연석』이 ‘유언호-박지원-유한준’의 세 시각이 포개어진 텍스트라는 점에서 기호화된 ‘권점 비평’ 역시 독특한 비평 행위로 간주할 수 있음을 밝혔다. 이를 통해 권점 비평 행위를 대화적 지평에서 분석할 수 있다는 가능성을 모색했다. 다음으로는 평어를 통해 평비자가 자신을 ‘서명’한 경우를 살펴보았다. 이는 특히 박지원의 평어에서 확인된다. 한편 이 같은 성격의 평어는 평비자가 자신을 전면에 내세우는 것일 뿐만 아니라 대상 작품과 평어가 상호 조응하는 비평 방식임을 밝혔고, 이는 박지원이 『연석』에 평점비평을 하고 난 시점보다 이후에 행해진 『청성잡기(靑城雜記)』나 『풍석고협집(楓石鼓篋集)』에 보이는 이덕무(李德懋, 1741～1793), 이의준(李義駿, 1738～1798) 등의 평어에 보이는 비평방식과 유사함을 밝혔다. 요컨대 『연석』은 18세기 후반 조선 문인들 사이의 상호 평점비평이 성행하던 시기에 등장한 평점비평서로서 당대의 평점비평이라는 시대사적ㆍ문화사적 의미를 가늠할 수 있는 척도이자, 박지원과 유한준의 산문 비평의 실제와 그들의 비평가적 면모 및 지향을 파악할 수 있는 근거가 된다고 할 수 있다.This paper is the first attempt at examining the characteristics and the significance of the pyeongjeom criticism(評點批評) in Yeonseok(燕石) written by Yu Eon-ho(兪彦鎬,1730∼1796). The argument of this paper is based primarily on analysis of the only existing manuscript copy of Yeonseok(燕石), which is currently stored in Jangseogak library, and also uses secondary information provided by another researcher regarding other newly discovered materials related to Yeonseok to scrutinize the background of the pyeongjeom criticism in Yeonseok and prove that the writers behind this pyeongjeom criticism are Park Ji-won(朴趾源,1737∼1805) and Yoo Han-joon(俞漢雋, 1732∼1811). The criticism presented in Yeonseok can be generally divided into two categories. One is ‘Kwonjeom’(圈點)(emphatic dots), and the other is ‘Pyeong-eoh’(評語)(critical words and phrases). The pyeongjeom criticism can also be distinguished by colour. Red is used to mark the criticism composed by Park Ji-won and blue is used to mark the criticism by Yoo Han-joon. The characteristics of the kwonjeom and pyeong- eoh used in Yeonseok can also be found in the Ming dynasty’s representative book of pyeongjeom criticism Selected Works of Writings by the Top Eight Great Writers of the Tang and Song Dynasties(唐宋八大家文鈔), written by Mao Kun(茅坤), and in the pyeongjeom criticism that circulated in the late 18th century of the Chosun Dynasty. However, even while sharing similar methods as these other examples, the pyeongjeom criticism in Yeonseok also has its own distinctive character. This thesis sheds light on both the shared methods and the distinctive aspects of the pyeongjeom criticism in Yeonseok. After analyzing the general features of kwonjeom and pyeong-eoh, this paper examines the way they function and interact within the text of Yeonseok. As kwonjeom is conveyed semiotically, it is difficult to decode its meaning, so many studies dealing with pyeongjem criticism have overlooked its function. However, this thesis evaluates the use of kwonjeom from the perspective of viewing it as a unique form of criticism and thereby demonstrates that Park Ji-won and Yoo Han-joon’s use of the kwonjeom can be considered as a dialogic effort. In regard to pyeong-eoh, this study examines how the critics Park Ji-won and Yoo Han-joon use their own writing from previous compositions as critical comments. This is especially true for Park Ji-won’s criticism. As a result, the pyeongjeom criticism in Yeonseok can be considered a unique style of criticism that engages in a dialogue with its subject text rather than offering a simple assessment, resembling the style of criticism practiced by a little later by writers like Lee Deok-mu(李德懋, 1741∼1793) and Lee Eui-jun(李義駿, 1738∼1798) in Cheongseongjapgi(靑城雜記) and Punseok-Kohyupjip(楓石鼓篋集). In conclusion, Yeonseok can be considered a means for gaining a sense of the historical and literary significance of the interactive style of pyeongjeom criticism which became popular practice in the late 18th century between Chosun literatures as well as an authoritative source of reference for gaining an understanding of Park Ji-won and Yoo Han-joon’s prose criticism and their critical demeanour and inclinations.

Reading Elizabeth Bishop: An Edinburgh Companion. Edited by Jonathan Ellis. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019. Pp. xii+346.

<i>Reading Elizabeth Bishop: An Edinburgh Companion</i>. Edited by Jonathan Ellis. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019. Pp. xii+346.

Thinking through Style: Non-fiction Prose of the Long Nineteenth Century. Edited by Michael D. Hurley and Marcus Waithe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xiv+359.

<i>Thinking through Style: Non-fiction Prose of the Long Nineteenth Century</i>. Edited by Michael D. Hurley and Marcus Waithe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xiv+359.

Curious Self-Evidence: Graphology and Gusto in Marianne Moore's Critical Prose

Curious Self-Evidence: Graphology and Gusto in Marianne Moore's Critical Prose

ЛИТЕРАТУРНО-КРИТИЧЕСКИЕ РАБОТЫ Д. С. МЕРЕЖКОВСКОГО 1893-1894 ГОДОВ: ЖАНР, ТИПОЛОГИЯ, СВОЕОБРАЗИЕ

The article analyzes the genre-typological originality, structure and range of problems of D. S. Merezhkovsky’s literary-critical works written in 1893-1894. The author traces how the literary-critical method of Merezhkovsky evolves, the genre palette of his works expands. The paper establishes the links of literary criticism with critical prose. The essay “Noveishaya lirika” (The Newest Lyrics) reveals the influence of symbolism on the literary-critical thinking of D. S. Merezhkovsky. Basing on the study, the author determines the genre forms of D. S. Merezhkovsky’s essays: a literary-critical essay, an obituary essay.

ЖАНРОВОЕ И ХУДОЖЕСТВЕННОЕ СВОЕОБРАЗИЕ ОЧЕРКА Д. С. МЕРЕЖКОВСКОГО «КАЛЬДЕРОН»

The article analyzes genre and typological originality, structure and artistic peculiarities of D. S. Merezhkovsky’s essay “Calde-ron”, which still has not captured researchers’ attention. The author identifies its genre as a critical prose essay though the paper indicates Merezhkovsky’s interest for literary studies. The article establishes level of objectiveness/subjectiveness of the literary critic’s arguments, identifies the means used to create Calderon image, and discovers the elements of early symbolism and their influence on Merezhkovsky’s philological thinking.