Critical Terminology Research Articles

Pearl from the Dragon's Mouth: Evocation of Feeling and Scene in Chinese Poetry (review)

© 1998 by University ofHawai'i Press Reviews 251 economic development. It would also serve well as a case study from which to generate discussion in graduate seminars. Eugene Cooper University ofSouthern California Eugene Cooper is an associateprofessor ofanthropology and EastAsian studies with recent research experience in the rural industrial sector ofZhejiangProvince. Cecile Chu-chin Sun. Pearlfrom the Dragon's Mouth: Evocation ofFeeling and Scene in Chinese Poetry. Michigan Monographs in Chinese Studies, vol. 67. Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University ofMichigan, 1995. xvi, 248 pp. Hardcover, isbn 0-89264-110-x. Sooner or later, every student oftraditional Chinese poetry and poetics has to grapple with the special vocabulary that Chinese poets have used to critique, qualify, and just talk about their art. As scholars have pointed out, much ofthis critical terminology is itselfpoetic—notoriously allergic to paraphrase, and as redolent with meaning as the most evocative lines of a Tang quatrain. In many cases, terms are drawn from the pool ofthe most common words and then organized into pairs. By pairing these everyday words in sometimes unexpected combinations , writers defamiliarize them, drawing attention to their specialized significance in the context ofliterary discussion. FengM1 and gu UT—"wind" and "bone"—is a pair that comes readily to mind, as does the ever untranslatable bi XL· and xingjPI. But one pair ofterms stands out as being particularly resistant to this type ofdefamiliarization: qingIff andjingS, sometimes translated as "sentiment " and "milieu," sometimes as "feeling" and "scene." Contrary to what one might expect, the very familiarity ofthese two words constitutes a challenge to the scholar with hopes of understanding either the meaning ofthis dyad, or the history ofChinese poetics through the lens it provides. The difficulty is compounded by the widespread, if tacit, presence of qingandjingin almost all aspects of traditional Chinese poetic thought. Yet this is the challenge taken up, first by the Song dynasty literati who brought the qing-jingcompound into the arena ofliterary discourse, and then by the many traditional scholars ofclassical poetics who inherited the questions thereby raised. Most recently, in Pearlfrom the Dragon's Mouth: Evocation ofFeeling and Scene in Chinese Poetry, Professor Cecile Chu-chin Sun sets out to provide 252 China Review International: Vol. 5, No. 1, Spring 1998 a chronological overview ofboth the theory and praxis of qing-jing discourse. Her ambitious study begins witii the Han dynasty exegeses of the Shijing and closes with the theoretical discussions ofWang Fuzhi and Wang Guowei, the Qing dynasty literary thinkers most closely identified with the use of these terms. Sun's book is the first full-length treatment in English exclusively devoted to studying "how the critical perception of this essential phenomenon has evolved throughout the Chinese tradition" (p. xiii).' Wisely wary of suggesting that hers will be the definitive and complete work on a vast and complex topic, the author warns that she has limited the parameters ofher discussion to "the most crucial phases" ofits evolution. She lends further precision to her goals by proposing to the Western reader a window on "what Chinese poets and critics themselves have perceived poetry to be" (p. ix), as distinct from, one assumes, presenting either a personal or a comparative view of the tradition. Sun walks us through the history of the "feeling-scene" issue of Chinese poetics in four "phases," apparently borrowing the nomenclature for each phase from James J. Y. Liu's Chinese Theories ofLiterature, the pragmatic phase, the affective phase, the aesthetic phase, and, finally, the synthetic phase.2 Although the terms are modern and carry a certain New Critical air ofscientific methodology, the periodization they describe predates that approach by at least a couple of centuries . Specifically, Sun associates the pragmatic phase with the Han dynasty, a period when the Confucian view of poetry as a didactic tool was dominant. She labels the Six Dynasties period the affective phase, when the rising influence of Taoism contributed to a new critical sensibility, liberating poetry from its didactic role and conferring upon it the power of expressing human emotion, usually through the evocation of imagery drawn from the natural world. The Tang dynasty , then, corresponds to the culmination ofboth the awareness and the application of the interplay...

Siren songs: gender, audiences, and narrators in the Odyssey

In Siren Songs: Gender, Audiences, and Narrators in Lillian Eileen Doherty shows us that the attitude of Odysseus, as well as of the Odyssey, is highly ambivalent toward women. Odysseus rewards supportive female characters by treating them as privileged members of the audience for his own tales. At the same time, dangerous female narrators--who threaten to disrupt or revise the hero's story--are discredited by the narrative framework in which their stories appear.Siren Songs synthesizes audience-oriented and narratological approaches, and examines the relationships among three kinds of audiences: internal, implied, and actual. The author prefaces her own reading of the with an analysis of the issues posed by the earlier feminist readings on which she builds. Should Odyssey be read as a closed text, that is, as one whose meaning is highly determined, or as an open text whose contradictions and ambiguities undercut its overt meanings?Siren Songs presents a feminist critique of the in an accessible manner aimed at a more general audience. All Greek is translated, and critical terminology is clearly defined.Lillian Eileen Doherty is Associate Professor of Classics, University of Maryland, College Park.

The Oxford Companion to Poetry in English

Reviewed by: The Oxford Companion to Poetry in English Michael North The Oxford Companion to Poetry in English. Edited by Ian Hamilton. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Pp. 602. $35.00. This new book is a massive biographical dictionary with a few additional entries on “topics, movements, magazines, and genres” (v). The 1500 poets included make a suitably diverse group with substantial representation from Australia (120 poets), Canada (110), Africa (60), Asia (40), New Zealand (35), and the Caribbean (30), in addition to English and American delegations of about 550 each. Thus the volume makes good on its claim to represent twentieth-century poetry in English and not just twentieth-century English poetry, and this is an important distinction. Beyond this tally of names and nationalities, however, the Companion is a good deal less open and diverse. The number of “topics” included is not very great, and the treatment of “movements” and “genres” seems to show a definite bias. How companionable one finds this volume, then, is likely to depend a great deal on the extent to which one shares its taste in twentieth-century poetry. With 1500 individuals represented, it might seem that no one significant can have been left out, and this is very nearly the case. David Antin, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Robert Service are all missing, and yet the very diversity of this short list suggests that sheer accident is the only explanation for their omission. On the other hand, ignorance of Dunbar does allow Lewis Turco to say quite inaccurately of Langston Hughes that he was “the first American black to make a living as a writer” (240). And the fact that there are other possible candidates as well, [End Page 86] including William Stanley Brathwaite and Fenton Johnson, who are also omitted from the Companion, shows how thinly it has penetrated into African American poetry. Of the women poets of the Harlem Renaissance such as Georgia Douglas Johnson, Anne Spencer, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Angelina Grimke, none are included. Even the Harlem Renaissance writers who are covered are often described in terms so cursory as to be inaccurate. For example, Turco also claims that Hughes was the “first black American to write civil rights protest poetry that was identifiable as such” (241), a mistake that might have been avoided by timely reference to the entry in this volume on Claude McKay, whose fierce beadle of self defense, “If We Must Die,” was nationally known when Hughes was still in high school. In another curious entry, Turco says flatly of Jean Toomer that he “was not part of the Harlem Renaissance” (546), which oversimplifies, at the very least, the role of a poet who is listed as one of the “major figures” of the Harlem Renaissance elsewhere in this very volume (213). So little inspired is Turco by Toomer’s work itself that not one word of description or analysis is expended on it, merely an extreme case of the general practice in these entries, which are long on the life and short on the art. This may be just as well, since the critical terminology brought to bear on the African American poets is both peculiar and inconsistent. Robert Hayden, for example, is included along with Gwendolyn Brooks in a bizarre list of “postmodernist blacks,” though his own entry points out that he was “always a formal poet” (221). There is little in the entry on Brooks to suggest how she may have come to be classed as a postmodernist, especially since that entry focuses so heavily on subject matter as to miss her significant shift from received to experimental forms. This last omission, however, is merely one instance of a lack of interest in formal innovation widespread in the pages of the Companion. One of the few truly dismissive entries, beside that visited on the unfortunate Alfred Austin, is the one on Allen Ginsberg. “The recent surge of interest in formal verse,” we are told, has restricted Ginsberg’s influence to “ageing members of the New York School and San Francisco’s college radicals” (188). Even readers outside these two notorious intellectual fleshpots may have missed this “recent surge of interest in formal...

The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics

The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics is a comprehensive reference work dealing with all aspects of its subject: history, types, movements, prosody, and critical terminology. Prepared by recognized authorities, its articles treat their topics in sufficient depth and with enough lucidity to satisfy the scholar and the general reader alike. Entries vary in length from relatively brief notices to substantial articles of about 20,000 words.The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, published in 1965, established itself book as a standard in the field. Among the 215 contributors were Northrop Frye writing on allegory, Murray Krieger on belief in poetry, Philip Wheelwright on myth, John Hollander on music, and William Carlos Williams on free verse. In 1974, the Enlarged Edition increased the entries with dozens of new subjects, including rock lyric, computer poetry, and black poetry, to name just a few.The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics accounts for the extraordinary change and explosion of knowledge within literary and cultural studies since the 1970s. This edition, completely revised, preserves what was most valuable from previous editions, while subjecting each existing entry to revision. Over 90 percent of the entries have been extensively revised and most major ones entirely rewritten. Completely new entries number 162, including those by new contributors Camille Paglia, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Elaine Showalter, Houston Baker, Andrew Ross, and many more. New entries include those on cultural criticism, discourse, feminist poetics, and Chicano poetry.Improvements cover several areas: All the recent developments in theory that bear on poetry areincluded; bibliographies of secondary sources are ex-tended; cross- references among entries and through blind entries have been expanded for greater ease of use; and coverage of emergent and non-Western poetries is dramatically increased. Indeed, a hallmark of the encyclopedia is its world-wide orientation on the poetry of national and cultural groups.The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics is a comprehensive reference work dealing with all aspects of its subject: history, types, movements, prosody, and critical terminology. Prepared by recognized authorities, its articles treat their topics in sufficient depth and with enough lucidity to satisfy the scholar and the general reader alike. Entries vary in length from relatively brief notices to substantial articles of about 20,000 words.The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, published in 1965, established itself book as a standard in the field. Among the 215 contributors were Northrop Frye writing on allegory, Murray Krieger on belief in poetry, Philip Wheelwright on myth, John Hollander on music, and William Carlos Williams on free verse. In 1974, the Enlarged Edition increased the entries with dozens of new subjects, including rock lyric, computer poetry, and black poetry, to name just a few.The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics accounts for the extraordinary change and explosion of knowledge within literary and cultural studies since the 1970s. This edition, completely revised, preserves what was most valuable from previous editions, while subjecting each existing entry to revision. Over 90 percent of the entries have been extensively revised and most major ones entirely rewritten. Completely newentries number 162, including those by new contributors Camille Paglia, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Elaine Showalter, Houston Baker, Andrew Ross, and many more. New entries include those on cultural criticism, discourse, feminist poetics, and Chicano poetry.Improvements cover several areas: All the recent developments in theory that bear on poetry are included; bibliographies of secondary sources are ex-tended; cross- references among entries and through blind entries have been expanded for greater ease of use; and coverage of emergent and non-Western poetries is dramatically increased. Indeed, a hallmark of the encyclopedia is its world-wide orientation on the poetry of national and cultural groups.

Essayism: Conrad, Musil and Pirandello (review)

Reviewed by: Essayism: Conrad, Musil and Pirandello J. H. Stape Thomas Harrison . Essayism: Conrad, Musil and Pirandello. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992. 276 pp. $35.95. Harrison opens his study with a highly labored and decidedly leaden opening chapter, drawing on Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and the German idealists, to define "essayism" as at once a provisional and flexible perspective of deliberate uncertainty and an approach to individual ethical determinations in the absence of any validating priority. He then proceeds to offer six elegantly crafted and frequently illuminating essays, each independent from the other, on his three selected authors. The study's basic thrust is philosophical with the first part exploring the ontology and epistemology of essayism and the second focusing on its aesthetic and ethical consequences. As a result of his emphases, Harrison declines to pose formalist questions relating to the narrative, stylistic, and rhetorical strategies Conrad and Musil employ or, in Pirandello's case, the dramaturgy invented, to frame and support the essayism of a given text. As a consequence, his larger arguments are not always as thoroughly convincing as he might wish them to be even though he usefully marshals to his assistance the various writer's theoretical statements and artistic manifestos and calls upon wide and even impressive reading in Conrad, Musil, and Pirandello scholarship and in aesthetics and philosophy generally to support his observations. The precise "how" of Conrad's and Musil's stories and novels or of Pirandello's plays is—one would assume it to have been definitively established by this point-inextricably connected to the "why" of their variously defeated heroes. While posited as a specifically modernist condition, greater attention to essayism's literary precursors, particularly in the nineteenth century, might also have bolstered the case made here. The main value of this work lies, however, less in its stylish theorizing than in its nuanced and sophisticated exegesis of concerns and cruxes in individual texts, some of which, like Conrad's Lord Jim and Musil's The Man without Qualities, have by now received considerable critical scrutiny. In short, the practical critic happily wins out over the potentially useful but at times self-limiting theoretical superstructure elaborated to contain and illuminate central aspects of the three writers discussed. Aside from Musil's writing, which specifically formulates the essayistic and provides Harrison the model and occasion for his own exploratory discussions, the choice of these writers is nowhere fully justified. Since very few connections are made between them, this choice finally appears, despite some belated fancy footwork in the Conclusion, simply eccentric or arbitrary, an impression that a considerably more developed and sustained discussion of modernism might have largely mitigated. [End Page 421] Despite some of its methodological shortcomings this is a stimulating and highly informed work. Harrison's not entirely felicitous title coinage seems unlikely to become standard critical terminology, but, more importantly, he succeeds in asking, whatever the occasional awkwardness of their formulation, pertinent and often original questions and in providing enlightening perspectives on how to deal with them. J. H. Stape Japan Women's University, Tokyo Copyright © 1993 Purdue Research Foundation

The Unexpected Guests: Patterns of Xenia in Callimachus' ‘Victoria Berenices’ and Petronius' Satyricon

Much of the fascination that Petronius' Satyricon holds for its readers originates in the work's gleeful violation of traditional categories of classical genres. Critical terminology makes explicit the issue of unconventionality, as it is reduced to the neutral word ‘work’ in describing the Satyricon, which, as far as we can tell, belongs to no single category (e.g. novel, romance, satire), but appropriates elements from many sources in both poetry and prose. Perhaps if we had more evidence with which to compare the work, such as a greater selection of Menippean satire or proto-novels from antiquity, we might be able to identify it more accurately. But the suspicion remains that the intense variety of its evocations, allusions, and parodic passages differentiates it clearly from its component genres without allowing it to settle firmly in any one established genre. A certain amount of ‘Kreuzung der Gattungen’ is, of course, typical of both Alexandrian and consequently Roman texts. But the Satyricon seems to revel in its generic instability; it plays with the notion of ‘literariness’ by revealing impulses from non-literary forms such as mime and subliterary prose fiction, raising this material to an unfamiliar level of literary sophistication even as it debases other traditional genres (e.g. epic) through parodic techniques. One of the results of this open experimentation with style and decorum is an extremely dense fabric of literary (and sub-literary) allusion which some would label ‘literary opportunism’. The reader quickly learns to expect intertextual pyrotechnics, swift changes from the sublime to the ridiculous, and humorous incongruities in plot and form, as the stylistic disorder of the text reflects the topsyturvy Petronian world. The modern reader's response to this profusion of referents is to explore the recognizable categories and sources embedded in the work, to tease out the familiar elements in the hope of gaining a better understanding of the whole. Since a great deal of the allusion in the Satyricon functions parodically, there is yet another step necessary in the interpretation, namely taking into account the effect of the decontextualization of language and events from the source material and their recombination and transformation into the new text.

DISCONTINUITIES IN AMERICAN CULTURE AND THE POETIC RESPONSE

Mutlu Konuk Biasing. American Poetry: The Rhetoric of Its Forms. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987. 248 pp. Lisa M. Steinman. Made in America: Science, Technology, and American Modernist Poets. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987. xiv + 219 pp. These are two very different kinds of books on modern American poetry to come out of Yale University Press in 1987. Biasing's study explores rhetorical parallels between the great nineteenth-century models, Poe, Emerson, Whitman and Dickinson, and modern or contemporary poets who build upon their formal strategies; it is a book for literary specialists, relying a great deal on contemporary critical terminology and engaging in very close analysis of the poetry it discusses. Steinman's book will be of interest to a wider group of readers, as it ranges over American poetry from 1910-1945 (especially Williams, Marianne Moore and Stevens) in a less specialized way, exploring the relationship of American poetry to the larger cultural context in which it was written, and especially to the new science and technology of the day. These books are not really comparable, but each is valuable in its own way, enlarging our understanding of the modern dilemma for American poets through very different focuses. They are part of a long line of critical studies centering on the innate contradictions of the poet's position in American culture. James E. Miller, Jr., called attention to the problem in The American Quest for the Supreme Fiction (Chicago, 1979), the problem of the American poet, who must absorb contradictions as vast and numerous as America itself. Ross Labrie's study of Howard Nemerov (Boston, 1980) argued that the poet retains his faith in the imaginative process despite the chaos of particulars that surrounds him and the inevitable collision with ' 'the hard surface of the external world" (144-145). Cary Nelson in his study of such poets as Roethke, Kinnell, Duncan, Rich and Merwin, Our Last First Poets (Urbana, 1981), explored this collision further, arguing the inevitable destruction of language before modern history and science; in Rich's terms, we enter "the paper airplane of the poem, which somewhere before its destination starts curling into ash and comes apart" (100). This image, long before Challenger, seems to me to be part of an essential American myth concerning language, science and history. Bonnie Costello's study of Marianne Moore (Cambridge, 1981) argued more positively for Moore's endless struggle to encompass in words what she knew must elude her; Moore celebrates "the world's elusiveness, its superiority to our acts of appropriation, seeing the world's freedom as intrinsic to our own" (3). In Poet's Prose (Cambridge, 1983), Stephen Freedman studied the Emersonian tradition, arguing for an indigenous American strain of exploratory poetry, with a strong philosophical bent, turned back on its own medium of language. Joseph Kronick's American Poetics of History (Baton Rouge, 1984) beginning also with Emerson, shifted the ground again from straight historical inquiry to the rhetorical interplay of language. And in Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry (Cambridge, 1984), Charles Altieri argued a poetics of conjecture that explores the absolutely constitutive role of language, but ended by questioning the ultimate direction of contemporary criticism and poetry, which only seem to lead to more "relative standards" (207).

On the Necessity of Criticising Criticism

In this opinion piece, Ann Saddlemyer explores the problems of the critic and theatre historian faced with incomplete evidence from the past and an increasingly unsatisfactory critical terminology for present day theatre, with particular reference to the work of women in Canadian theatre.

Comic Patterns in Goldsmith’s Plays

C O M I C P A T T E R N S IN G O L D S M I T H ’ S P L A Y S H . G R A N T SA M P SO N Queen’s University I n the Westminster Magazine for i January 1773 Oliver Goldsmith pub­ lished “An Essay on the Theatre; or, A Comparison Between Laughing and Sentimental Comedy.” 1 This essay has been interpreted by most critics as a serious description of eighteenth-century theatre history and of Goldsmith’s dramatic theory; Kirk, for example, has called it “this most important of his many pronouncements on drama.”2 In it Goldsmith discusses the “weeping sentimental comedy so much in fashion at present” and contrasts it with the “laughing, and even low comedy, which seems to have been last exhibited by Vanbrugh and Cibber.” He suggests that the “principal question, there­ fore, is whether, in describing low or middle life, an exhibition of its follies be not preferable to a detail of its calamities?” These categories of laughing and sentimental have generally been accepted by critics and historians of the eighteenth-century theatre, who have used them as the basis for discussing the development of the comedy of the period.3 Goldsmith and Sheridan (who is usually bracketed with him) are regarded as opponents of the pervasive sentimental comedy. They are, as classified by Nicoll, the “reactionaries.”4 “With these authors,” writes Macey, “there comes at last a noteworthy though not unequivocal attack on sentiment in the drama.”5 Leff has suggested that the “history of the Georg­ ian theatre is dominated by two playwrights, both of them termed satirists of sentimentalism.”6 However, the extent to which these writers are satirists is open to debate. While apparently criticizing sentimental attitudes repre­ sented, for example, by Honeywood and Lydia Languish, the plays evince moral values which are themselves essentially sentimental; for example, as Schiller has pointed out in connection with The School for Scandal, “the major transgressions are no longer those against manners, but those against virtue.” 7 The anti-sentimental plays by Goldsmith and Sheridan, as Rodway says, “must seem, to anyone familiar with the Restoration mode they pur­ ported to revive, to be themselves affected by the usurping Genteel or Senti­ mental mode they purported to attack.”8 E n g l is h S t u d ie s in C a n a d a , x , i , March 1984 The uncertainty concerning the extent of satiric attack in this group of plays has led to uncertainty concerning the interpretation of individual plays and passages. Macey has noted that “in Sheridan’s Rivals (1775) we have an interesting parallel to the ambivalence of Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer.” 3 This ambivalence is, at least in part, the result of the unsatis­ factory critical terminology which has been applied to the plays. In 1972, an important study by Robert Hume suggested that “the perspec­ tive given by the concept of a struggle to reassert laughing against senti­ mental comedy is quite misleading,” and that “we need to be very suspicious of an uncritical acceptance of the terms of Goldsmith’s essay” ;10 “quite prob­ ably,” he argues, “the piece is essentially a puff to prepare the way for She Stoops to Conquer, first staged two months after the essay’s appearance” (238). By a careful and comprehensive examination of contemporary come­ dies Hume shows that the categories of “laughing” and “sentimental” are not supported by the theatrical facts. He then provides a detailed reading of Goldsmith’s essay to show that it is essentially a rhetorical achievement;11 he guesses that “Goldsmith was about to have a fairly farcical mainpiece pro­ duced, and certain apparent trends in taste could have given him consider­ able cause for alarm” (262); he feels that the “Essay” was designed to prepare the way for a more sympathetic reception of She Stoops to Con­ quer.12 The implications of Hume’s rigorously researched study suggest that be­ cause the categories “sentimental” and “laughing” were not intended by Goldsmith to provide an accurate description of eighteenth-century drama and do not fit our...

The Three Masks of American Tragedy by Dan Vogel (review)

Book Reviews • THE THREE MASKS OF AMERICAN TRAGEDY, by Dan Vogel. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974. 180 pp. $6.95. American tragedy, argues Professor Vogel, is definable through an examination of central nineteenth and twentieth-century works which illustrate specific "masks" derived from earlier periods of tragedy. Moreover, in spite of the regional and thematic differences among works examined, certain American plays and novels share a distinct tragic spirit and tone which belie the common critical assertion that there is no such thing as American or, for that matter, modern tragedy. In presenting his case, Mr. Vogel demonstrates a sound grasp of tragic theory and American literature. His individual analyses of such works as Absalom! Absalom! and Mourning Becomes Electra are incisive and serve his central thesis well; his discussion of the necessary background to the specific masks worn by American tragic figures - those of Oedipus, Christ and Satan, respectively - is generally cogent and sensible, particularly in the long opening section ofthe book which shows how the Oedipal hero assumes such diversely American personae as Ephraim Cabot, Willy Loman, Thomas Sutpen and Willy Stark. The suggestion that Job was a type oftyrannos who, along with Oedipus, especially appealed to American tragedians is among the most interesting speculations of the book, for it shows clearly how Job's role as common man is eventually linked to Aristotelian elements of tragedy. While one might resist yet another attempt to portray Willy Loman as tragic hero, one must credit Professor Vogel with as forceful an argument as has yet appeared, dependent as it is upon literary history rather than the limited emotional response upon which such "proof' usually rests. The paradox of Christian tragedy is epitomized for Vogel in the fate of Billy Budd, "not only a handsome foretopman, but an innocent, flawed Adam and a condemned Jesus" (p. 128). Thus, an age of Christianity, despite Vogel's 201 202 BOOK REVIEWS acknowledgment that there exists a basic incompatibility between tragic and Christian doctrine, results in the inevitable development in America of figures like Dimmesdale who, "after experiencing the fall ofAdam and suffering ofJob" (p. 126) die like Christ. In the brief final section of the book, Vogel focuses upon Captain Ahab and Joe Christmas, "diabolical villains with Christological veneers who turn out to be heroes" (p. 141). The Three Masks ofAmerican Tragedy is consistently an interesting book that nevertheless suffers from its own complex of quasi-tragic flaws. While properly crediting the importance to his study of critics like R.W.B. Lewis, Bernard Knox and a host of other significant literary analysts, Vogel is willing to quote Richard Watts, J. Donald Adams and Brooks Atkinson when their remarks appear to help him prove his point. A similar absence ofjudgment occurs in the analyses ofsome of the primary works. While declaring that the tragic world of An American Tragedy "does not admit a tragic tyrannos" (p. 59), Vogel is elsewhere in the book strangely unwilling to distinguish among the relative achievements of the works he describes. Winterset, while useful in a discussion of American tragedy, is finally a bad and pretentious play; to take the playas seriously as Vogel does is implicitly to suggest that virtually every work considered is an equally accomplished work of art. Critical terminology is at times confusingly rendered. Why, when he speaks of Milton's Adam, does Vogel equate "realism" with "tragedy"? Why does he limit the terms to describe catharsis to those of Aristotle, pity and terror, when so much else in the book rightly enlarges the Aristotelian frame of reference? Why, in a work otherwise aware of Melville's contribution to American tragedy, does Vogel ignore "Benito Cereno" and, especially, Robert Lowell's adaptation of that work in The Old Glory? How can a discussion of American tragedy ignore The Iceman Cometh and Long Day's Journey into Night? One could go on: A seven page analysis of Desire Under the Elms disregards O'Neill's conscious use of the Hippolytus; Vogel seems unaware of Eric Bentley's important and relevant study, The Life of the Drama, and Robert Brustein's equally appropriate Theatre ofRevolt. Vogel's prose style is frequently inflated: Out...

Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love by Alexander Leggatt

Reviews 363 The author tries manfully to reduce the complexities of the plots to in­ telligibility: he is as successful as the material allows. The handbook nature of the volume is most evident here, though the author adds a brief critical comment to each summary. While it is something of an exaggeration to speak of “an analysis of the plays,” Mr. Pronko does propound a thesis about Feydeau and his work. He sees the farce as a “serious” genre, a forerunner of the Ab­ surd. The subject matter of the plays does not differ essentially from the melodrama of Dumas fils and Augier or even from the slice-of-life theatre of naturalists like Henri Becque. Feydeau’s farce presents man at the mercy of his own weaknesses—hypocrisy, lust, and greed—in a chase after satisfaction in a meaningless universe. In Pronko’s own words, “The world of Feydeau is the world of the Absurd in which man is invariably pitted against forces that resist his search for happiness and meaning, and rarely allow him to attain even the more realistic goals of peace and pleasure” (198). It may well be that Estragon and Vladimir descend lineally from Feydeau’s cuckolds and cocottes, but certainly not directly. In Feydeau the audience inevitably knows the secret that the characters are struggling to unknot; this superiority of playwright and audience by no means characterizes the playworld of Samuel Bec­ kett. However artificial, the society of the farce has its norms; and order, however superficial, is restored at the end. If man cannot have it all— peace and pleasure—he can, in the farce, finally tell why. Mr. Pronko’s thesis is provocative and his information helpful. As compendium with commentary, Georges Feydeau fills a gap and performs a needed scholarly service. THOMAS E. PORTER University of Detroit Alexander Leggatt. Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love. London: Methuen, 1974. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1974. Pp. xiii + 272. Cloth: $14.00. Paper: $6.75. In his prefatory remarks Alexander Leggatt discards an approach which seeks the unity of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies either as separate plays or as a series. He intends rather to explore the internal variety of the nine romantic comedies examined in Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love. (The Merry Wives of Windsor is reserved for discussion as citizen comedy in the author’s recent study Citizen Comedy in the Age of Shakespeare.) Leggatt is particularly interested in comic tech­ nique, specifically the “interplay of opposing styles and visions” in each of these plays. Through his study he hopes to illuminate Shakespeare’s “dynamic art—growing, changing, self-questioning” (p. xiii). “Dislocation” is the term most frequently employed by Leggatt to designate the comic device or strategy of juxtaposing what the author describes somewhat interchangably as different dramatic “modes,” “idioms,” or “styles.” Though one could wish for clearer definitions 364 Comparative Drama and discriminations in his critical terminology, Leggatt’s larger point is clear. He sees Shakespeare as examining and testing in his romantic comedies different perspectives, different ways of viewing experience— the experience of love most particularly in these plays. Shakespeare’s concern is to insure that a multiple rather than a single understanding of experience prevails. Thus, in The Comedy of Errors Shakespeare moves beyond the single market-place vision, the practical world of Plautus, by introducing an idiom of fantasy and mystery. A courtesan to one Antipholus is a devil to the other. Leggatt has some difficulty with The Two Gentlemen of Verona, perceiving in this play Shakespeare’s portrayal of a singular view of love, a negative view of love’s burdens and vulnerabilities. Leggatt lo­ cates the differing perspectives in the lovers themselves, particularly in the character of Julia, who can be at once engaged in and detached from the experience of loving. In The Taming of the Shrew the different idioms result quite obviously from the two inner plots, the romantic, conven­ tional world of the Bianca plot contrasted with the lively and unorthodox world of the Petruchio plot—the twist being that Petruchio’s behavior is itself conventionalized. He is a performer, a play-actor, a gamesman. He orders Kate’s behavior, and in...

The Ancient View of Greek Art: Criticism, History, and Terminology

What did the ancient Greeks think about their own art? J.J. Pollitt attempts to answer this question by studying the critical terminology of the ancient Greeks-the terms they used to describe and evaluate sculpture, painting, and architecture. Although Greeks and Romans with a wide variety of backgrounds and interests-including artists, philosophers, rhetoricians, historians, and guidebook writers-wrote about art in antiquity, very few of their works have survived. Mr. Pollitt has therefore had to draw largely on works of authors who, while discussing some other subject, make passing references to art for the purpose of analogy or illustration. By carefully assembling and organizing these fragments, he presents a coherent view of art criticism in ancient Greece. This study is divided into two parts. The first part provides a general history of Greek art criticism and its sources. The second is an extensive glossary which collects, translates, and analyzes passages from Greek and Latin authors in which important critical terms are used. The book can therefore be used by art historians and classicists as both a scholarly text and an important work of reference.

Skiagraphia Once Again

Depth by graphic means-linear perspective, foreshortening, hatching-was mastered by Greek draughtsmen by about the middle of the fifth century B.C., but the first flowering of true painting took place later in that century: only then did painters learn to create modulated color surfaces. There are three categories of techniques for that purpose: the gradation of colors through mixture, overlaying or glazing, and patching. Apparently painters blended their colors in the pigments, in a preparatory and recondite process: custom-blending was unknown. At least Plato, Aristotle and others are strikingly ignorant of basic mixing formulas. Overlaying of colors appears on white-ground lekythoi of the late fifth and early fourth centuries and is first attested in literature in Aristotle (under the terminus technicus rtrrokX, De sensu 44ob). The one color technique widely attested for the later fifth century (and, in fact, often equated with the birth of painting) is the one called or shadow painting. In modern studies the term is rendered as shading, chiaroscuro or as perspective and shadow-effect combined. These interpretations, however, are based mainly on post-Hellenic sources, which reflect only a vague memory of the technique. Examination of ten references in Plato, two in Aristotle and a passage in Pliny, N.H. 35.29, translated from a Classical treatise on colors, shows that the technique featured patches of strongly contrasting colors, which intensified each other when viewed from close-up but blended into luminous effects when seen from the appropriate distance. In other words, skiagraphia was an impressionistic technique, using divisions of bright colors and relying on the phenomenon of optical color fusion. Of the extensive scientific literature produced during the Hellenic age, little remains, but its vestiges show that the Greeks were familiar with optical color fusion, the mutual alteration of contiguous colors and the difference between the additive and the subtractive color systems. The skiagraphia technique was the artistic expression of that knowledge. Between the painted pinakes of Pitsa of about 535 B.C.1 and the frescoes from the Tomb of the Diver at Paestum2 dated at 480 B.C. subtle changes in color technique may be observed: the Pitsa pain er drew his figures in contours and filled in the outlines with flat colors. The Paestum frescoes reveal an attempt to create a certain plasticity of the human figures through the gradation of color (applied to the brown-to-red tones only).' On the best preserved Pitsa tablet six (possibly seven) colors are used, but they are rather arbitrarily applied. The Paestum painter uses five (in addition to the various shades of rusty reds there are white, black, blue, and green) but the bold horizontal strokes of blue, representing the kline cushions against the predominant reds of the banquet scenes, show that the artist is aware of the dramatic effect of color contrast.4 Still, the Paestum paintings are essentially drawings and the approximately contemporary works of Polygnotus, which later ages experienced as archaic,5 were probably very similar in technique, whatever their much disputed 80og may have been. Clearly the art of painting set itself apart, as Pliny put it,6 in the later fifth century, i.e. paint rs learned in some manner or manners to * SPECIAL ABBREVIATIONS Bruno, Form and Color: Vincent J. Bruno, Form and Color in Greek Painting, Diss. Columbia U. 1969 (University Microfilms 70-6942). Chevreul-Birren: M.E. Chevreul, The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colors and their Applications to the Arts, transl. from the French, with a special introduction and explanatory notes by Faber Birren, New York, 1967. Gombrich, Illusion: E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, Princeton, 1960. Napoli, Tuffatore: Mario Napoli, La Tomba del Tuffatore, La Scoperta della Grande Pittura Greca, Bari, 1970. Overbeck: J. Overbeck, Die antiken Schriftquellen zur Geschichte der bildenden Kiinste bei den Griechen, Leipzig, 1868 (reprint 1959). Pollitt, Terminology: J.J. Pollitt, The Critical Terminology of the Visual Arts in Ancient Greece, Diss. Columbia U. 1963 (University Microfilms 64-3129). 1 Orlandos, EAA s.v. Pitsa, with an illustration after a water color. 2 Napoli, Tutfatore. 3 Napoli, Tubfatore, figs. 5-9. 4 Approximately the same blue is used with good effect for the scarf of the dancing young man on the West wall, Napoli, ibid., fig. 3. 5 Quintilian (12,1o,3) speaks of illa prope rudia ac velut juturae mox artis primordia. Although Pliny calls Polygnotus nobilissimus (34,85) and credits him with innovations (35,58), he says about Apollodorus, who lived in the later fifth century, that he made all earlier painting obsolete (35,60). On the possibility that Polygnotus painted transparencies, see n. 37 infra. s . se ars ipsa distinxit ... N.H. 35,29. The full passage is quoted in the text below. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.105 on Fri, 07 Oct 2016 05:00:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

The Aristotle-Coleridge Axis

George Saintsbury wound up one of the final sections of his History of Literary Criticism (1917) with the sub-biblical declaration: 'So then, there abide these three, Aristotle, Longinus, Coleridge.' We are not concerned just now with all the figures in this arresting triad: the supposititious Longinus is printed in all the anthologies of literary-critical texts and has long received the subdued respect that we extend to documents of archaeological or genetic interest. The other two figures have a more pervasive ambience – Aristotle often as a menacing undertone, Coleridge as a mercurial presence that with luck one might be able to ignore. If we consider the succession of translations of Aristotle's Poetics achieved in this century alone, the interminable discussions of the nature of tragedy in schools of English (and elsewhere), the post-war wave of neo-Aristotelianism at the University of Chicago, and the intrusion into critical terminology of a number of Aristotelian terms (often mispronounced, and not seldom introduced with less scrupulous regard for propriety than in search of an honorific effect), we could hardly say that Aristotle had not put in an impressive appearance in twentieth-century literary criticism. Coleridge's writing has attracted no such diligent attention: it is said that he wrote in English, and he is alleged to be 'a romantic.' It is true that four or five important studies of Coleridge's criticism have been published in recent years, and that a few cautious suggestions have already been made en passant that there is some connection between Aristotle and Coleridge, but this has not (as far as I know) been pursued in circumstantial detail, partly perhaps because both are difficult to explicate, partly because Aristotle and Coleridge are commonly thought to represent opposite poles in criticism. I am aware therefore that my title is mildly scandalous, and that it is all the more scandalous for the unrepentant use of the definite article – The Aristotle-Coleridge Axis.

Pathos in the Poetics of Aristotle

The past thirty years have brought us much closer to the meaning of many puzzling terms employed by Aristotle in the Poetics. But there are still many whose meaning may never be established with any certainty, partly because of inconsistencies or deficiencies in the argument and partly because of our own ignorance of the dramatic and critical terminology of the fourth century. For example, it is reasonable to assume that the terms used by Aristotle to describe his three μ⋯ρη of tragedy—пεριп⋯τεια, ⋯ναγνώρισις, and п⋯θος—were all part of the technical vocabulary of the contemporary theatre, and that if only we were familiar with that vocabulary, we should not find Aristotle's vagueness and carelessness in explanation such a hindrance to understanding.

The Painter as Critic: Hazlitt's Theory of Abstraction

Hazlitt's early interest in painting and philosophy profoundly influenced his subsequent work as a literary critic. His view of abstraction as a process of individuation rather than generalization, developed between 1805 and 1812, was an improvement on the nominalist and conceptualist theories of the eighteenth century and anticipated the findings of modern philosophy. In its development, Hazlitt was clearly influenced by his training as a painter and his general conclusions find support in the writings of contemporary and nearcontemporary painters and art critics. His theory has important esthetic implications and provides a philosophical and psychological rationale for the new critical movement toward particularity in the evolution of which painting was a major influence. Since it was within this tradition that Hazlitt worked, it also determined the nature of his response to literature and the manner of its expression in his criticism. The influence of painting on his critical terminology suggests caution in accepting the view that music replaced painting as the dominant analogy in the literary criticism of the early nineteenth century.

A liturgical language in a linguistic perspective

It may seem strange, now that the hierarchies of the world have begun to put the Council's recommendations into practice, to see an introductory article on a linguistic framework for discussing liturgical language. But there are several good reasons why such a perspective is necessary. First, any decisions licensing the use of certain forms and withholding others must always be kept under review, as language is in a continual state of change. In a hundred years time, the language of today may well seem as archaic as the (never-defined) ‘Victorian English’ which biblical translations are frequently accused of being in. One must beware of complacency. There is bound to be further modification, and much future discussion. Secondly, the perspective would be valuable as a therapy for much recent popular discussion, whose utility is lessened by using undefined or irrelevant critical terminology, when words are condemned for being ‘ugly', ‘un-English', ‘incorrect', ‘debased', and so on – all highly subjective and misleading criteria. Thirdly, a linguistically-orientated basis for discussion would provide a means whereby the public's suggestions and views could be of use to any committee working on the liturgy. At the moment, sporadic opinions sent to the Catholic press about the kind of language vernacularization should bring make interesting reading, but because of the haphazard, occasional origins of this information and the variety of critical principles on which views are based (everything from a vague impressionism to a precise logic), the resultant mass of data is unco-ordinated, of little generality, and hence of little assistance. But it is just this knowledge about popular attitudes to language which a committee needs.

George Eliot and the Climate of Realism

Critics have attempted with diverse terminology and divergent points of emphasis to classify George Eliot's novels within the body of realistic fiction. She has been called a naturalist as well as a realist distinct from a naturalist; both her intent to depict the features of “the lowliest, … the least attractive person” and her inclination to shy away from “the animal” have been noted; she is cited as “the finest example extant of the thoroughgoing realism which came to be known as naturalism,” while attention is given, too, to her ability to exalt and idealize human nature and create morally uplifting examples of it in art. Undoubtedly the imprecision of our critical terminology accounts in part for the varying statements about her position. To this must be added the likelihood that critics are moved in various ways in their studies of the complex world that George Eliot describes and find in this world ample strands of evidence for whatever view they wish to emphasize. It is not the purpose at present to supply new and arbitrary definitions of “realism” and “naturalism,” nor to impose upon the reader a narrow unified view of George Eliot's work, but rather to examine the bearing of a broad and liberal trend of realism which can be observed to precede her rural novels in a body of critical discussion not often fully appreciated.

The Vocabulary of the New Criticism

THE term can mean almost anything; in its most generalized use it can refer to all modern criticism, in its most restrictive to only the critical agrarians of Vanderbilt. A paper on New -Critical terminology must obviously make some compromise, and my particular compromise will involve only I. A. Richards, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, R. P. Warren and Cleanth Brooks, as representative of an historical movement beginning with Principles of Literary Criticism and continuing through The Well Wrought Urn. Scholars antagonistic to the New Criticism frequently point to the specialized vocabulary of the movement as evidence of its confusion and untrustworthiness. Surely, they say, critical system which prompts the publication of a long and complicated glossary of its terms1 cannot be of general use. Yet it is apparent also that any system of literary criticism, if it is ever to become a system rather than a collection of purely relative impressionistic statements, must create a specialized terminology and that in doing so it must generally follow one of two paths: it must either create totally new terms or adapt old ones to its purposes. And it is apparent also that either of these two operations will at first occasion difficulties. The first of these two possibilities, the creation of an entirely new coinage, is the method generally adopted by the physical scientist, who forms new combinations of dead roots, and is chosen by him mainly, I think, because it allows him to use a terminology completely uncluttered by any connota-

Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice in the Eighteenth-Century Mode

It is no difficult task to cull from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice passages reflecting the period's taste in art and employing a critical terminology made widely current throughout the eighteenth century by many formal discussions of aesthetics. Thus, for example, two performances at the piano by Elizabeth Bennet, the heroine, and her sister Mary, are evaluated in terms of the familiar antithesis, drawn in innumerable essays of the period, between “art” and “nature.” Elizabeth performs first and the author comments: “Her performance was pleasing, though by no means capital. After a song or two, and before she could reply to the entreaties of several that she would sing again, she was eagerly succeeded at the instrument by her sister Mary, who having, in consequence of being the only plain one in the family, worked hard for knowledge and accomplishments, was always impatient for display.” As for the sister, however: “Mary had neither genius nor taste; and though vanity had given her application, it had given her likewise a pedantic air and conceited manner, which would have injured a higher degree of excellence than she had reached. Elizabeth, easy and unaffected, had been listened to with much more pleasure, though not playing half so well.”