Critical Form Research Articles

The Fields and Walls of the Imagination: A Topographical Sketch of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky

The Fields and Walls of the Imagination:A Topographical Sketch of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky Tim Langen Literary Theory is a puzzling thing: puzzling both in its essence and in its seductive pull on so many of the twentieth century's prominent academic minds. It is hard to imagine that any nineteenth-century thinkers would ever have predicted this pull. They might well have foreseen developments in physics, biology, and perhaps even computers; they might have expected more technological and humanitarian accomplishments. But could they ever have predicted the energy that would be poured into disputes over what imaginative literature is, and how it should be read? Listening from a seat in the early twenty-first century, the literary discourse of the twentieth sounds like a prolonged conversation about frames of reference.1 Does the literary work of art generate its own frames (at least to some extent), as the New Critics argued? Should it be read against the backdrop of "literature" in general, conceived either in the abstract or historically? Is it best considered a subset of linguistic practice? Psychological dynamics? Socio-political discourse? Economic activity? The totality of this conversation forms a kind of multi-dimensional puzzle, with frames intersecting or excluding one another and the whole thing lurching in spasmodic motion. Any object of inquiry requires a frame of reference, and usually several frames are possible. What makes literary theory especially puzzling is the peculiar nature of its object, which is, ultimately, the human imagination. When we set literary theory on the basis of human psychology, socio-economic history, or literary tradition, we are saying that these things dictate terms for the imagination. And surely they do, [End Page 45] to some extent. But it is remarkably difficult to conceive all this clearly. Imagination is the faculty of conjuring an alternate reality, something that does not (or does not yet) exist. It is the means of departure from the terms of our ordinary existence. Can we really say what its terms are? If we can, is it still imagination? If imagination is always a kind of departure, then what is its home? Ecology, another academic discipline that prospered in the twentieth century, offers an attractive parallel or paradigm. Etymologically the science of the home, ecology concerns itself with interactions between elements and their surroundings. Plants, animals, rocks, and rivers do not exist in isolation. The practice of isolating and analyzing them generates a large amount of precise information, but the enabling insight of ecology is that certain truths inhere in a situation, a place, even a home, rather than in the individuals who populate it. Ecology attempts to understand those dynamic relations among frames of reference (colony, habitat, ecosystem). The frames are numerous and their relations complicated, and ecology, therefore, is an extraordinarily complex discipline. Like any scientific discipline, it must isolate its objects of study; yet its fundamental object of study is interconnection, the opposite of isolation. Because of a common interest in the relations between individual specimens and their homes, or between elements and frames of reference, twentieth-century cultural and literary theory bears a striking resemblance to twentieth-century ecology. The most obvious convergence occurs in works such as Gregory Bateson's Steps to an Ecology of Mind, that attempt to treat ideas in terms drawn directly from the study of "natural" ecology. Bateson refers to interaction, "natural selection," "survival," "extinction or death," "economics," "region," and "stability of ... a system or subsystem" as concepts that may apply to mental as well as physical phenomena (1972: xv-xvi). Even where the parallel is not so explicitly announced, and even in cases where it may have escaped the notice of the theorists, it is strong enough to make us think they are discussing similar problems. For example, the Russian Formalist critics began their careers with rather flamboyant gestures of scientific isolation, but were soon propelled by the logic of their own ideas to discuss such complex, ecological-sounding [End Page 46] propositions as literary "environment" and "evolution."2 They wanted to make a science out of literary criticism; that science turned out to be a kind of ecology. In the Russian (and sometime Soviet) context, the most...

:Shakespeare Criticism in the Twentieth Century

2: The Age of Bradley 3: Formalist Criticism of Shakespeare 4: Shakespeare in the Theatre (and the Theatre in Shakespeare) 5: Shakespeare in History and History in Shakespeare 6: Shakespeare from the Margins.

Mastering Adolescence in the Age of Cultural Studies

Discussing his methodology in the introductory chapter of The Fin-de-Siècle Culture of Adolescence (1992), John Neubauer writes: “In contrast to this method [of New Historicism reading a whole age through certain paradigmatic texts, G.V.] I start with the study of literary structures and narrative modes, not as an exercise in formalist criticism but rather because I believe that they encode social and historical issues […] Distrusting the notion that single texts can reveal central attitudes of an entire age, I try to achieve reasonable comprehensiveness by discussing a large number of literary and nonliterary, canonized and noncanonized texts. I end up with a large but inhomogeneous corpus that, spanning a variety of ideologies, discourses, and national cultures, is interlinked primarily by the common theme [of adolescence, G.V.]” (1992: 10–11). Neubauer recognizes that reading late-19th-century history through the prism of adolescence inevitably yields an imaginary reduction of the age (in its double sense), whereby a whole historical period threatens to be condensed to a theoretical phase in the Bildungsnarrative of “the” individual, while the personal complexities of adolescence are flattened out as the dominant episteme of that time. In order to avoid this double epistemological pitfall of reading (personal) history as theory or theory as history, Neubauer focuses on the historical workings of the third term, literature, and more precisely on the heterogeneous intertextual web connecting “a large number of literary and nonliterary, canonized and noncanonized texts” and paintings from various periods and “national cultures.” Joyce, Mann, Goethe, Nietzsche, Kipling, Gide, Kirchner, Munch, Freud, the sociologist G.S. Hall, Mead, and a host of other famous and lesser known writers, artists, and scientists … All of them are read under the sign or image of adolescence, which by the end of the book has become as particular as universal, as richly diverse as the singular subject of modern literature.

A Realist Analysis of the Relationship between Logic and Experience

I undertake to explain how the well known laws of formal logic – Barbara Syllogism, modus ponens, etc. – relate to experience by developing Edmund Husserl's critique ofFormalism and Psychologism in logical theory and then briefly explaining his positive views of the laws of logic. His view rests upon his understanding of the proposition as a complex, intentional property. The laws of formal logic are, on his view (and mine), statements about the truth values of propositions as determined by their formal character and relationships alone. The laws thus understood explain how algorithms set up to mirror them can accomplish what they do to advance knowledge, even though they operate purely mechanically. Further, they explain the proper sense in which formal laws "govern," and may guide, processes of actual thinking. Husserl's theory is a realist theory in the sense that, on his interpretation, the laws of pure or formal logic hold true regardless of what any individual, culture or species may or may not think, or even if no thinking ever occurs.

Painting Gender, Constructing Theory: The Alfred Stieglitz Circle and American Formalist Aesthetics

After the closing of his first art gallery in 1917, photographer Alfred Stieglitz reemerged in the New York art world in the 1920s. He achieved his comeback in large part through the innovative means he used to promote himself and the artists of his inner circle. Stieglitz and a number of well-established critics drew on period conceptions of sexuality, gender, and cultural identity to characterize the artists he championed as the fulfillment of a shared vision of a vital, nonrepressed American art. In Painting Gender, Constructing Theory, Marcia Brennan examines how Stieglitz and the critics drew on early-twentieth-century discourses on sex and the psyche, particularly the theories of Sigmund Freud and Havelock Ellis, to characterize the artworks of the Stieglitz circle. Critics routinely described the often highly abstracted paintings of Georgia O'Keeffe, Arthur Dove, John Marin, Marsden Hartley, and Charles Demuth as transparent displays of the most intimate aspects of the self, taking both subject matter and painterly form to be guided by the artist's own gendered and psychic energies. Focusing on the key historical criticism and artworks, Brennan shows how the identities of all five Stieglitz circle artists were presented in terms of the masculinity and femininity, and the heterosexuality and homosexuality, thought to be embedded in their work. Brennan also discusses Stieglitz's relation to competing artistic and critical movements, including Thomas Hart Benton's regionalist art and Clement Greenberg's reformulation of formalism. Arguing that American formalist criticism consisted of a complex and paradoxical mixture of corporeality and disembodied transcendence, Brennan provides insight not only into the works of the Stieglitz circle but into the development of formalist criticism itself.

Formalist criticism and reader-response theory

Formalist criticism and reader-response theory

Performing Shakespeare in Japan by Minami Ryuta , Ian Carruthers , John Gillies (review)

172 Reviews interrogation, and the detailed referencing, notes, and bibliography leave the reader ready to plunge into deeper waters. No better single volume exists to enable this leap. Perhaps unsurprisingly in a broad survey, Taylor implicitly, sometimes explicitly, endorses the via media critical position. He quietly criticizes formalist criticism's tendency towards 'new absurdities and exaggerations in interpretation' (p. 91); he laments a preoccupation with sexual puns which 'up-ends the poise and balance of the dramatic situation' (p. 92); he regrets a criticism which gets 'out of hand' (p. 113) or is 'unhinged' (p. 18), and deems inappropriate 'the twentieth-century's obsession with the body' (my italics) and a 'vulgarized homoeroticism that obscures by its adolescent desire to shock' (p. 206). Conversely, praise is conferred on the reasonable and the moderate?like Raymond Williams's 'typically sensible manner' (p. 103). 'Some kind of compromise', Taylor writes in a characteristic weighing up of contrasting critical positions, 'is obviously in order' (p. 14). This is eminently sane and often judicious, but we might regret the implicit discouragement of critical radicalism. Taylor quotes Isobel Armstrong'scompellingcall to 'radicalize' Shakespeare (p. 185), and begins his volume with the important note that 'what seems to be marginal and eccentric now may well be the orthodoxy of the future' (p. vi). But the spirit of Taylor's middle way?'some kind of compromise'? rather undercuts this pleading. None the less, Shakespeare Criticism in the Twentieth Century will be welcomed by students of all levels of experience. It is a neat, compact, thoroughly useful text: eminently portable, and consultable, like those seventeenth-century duodecimos that summarized history or classical mythology for an aspiring readership. Taylor's vol? ume will prove an invaluable addition to those six billion words. University of Reading Adam Smyth PerformingShakespeare injapan. Ed. by Minami Ryuta, Ian Carruthers, and John Gillies. Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. 2001. xiii + 259pp. ?45; $74-95- ISBN 0-521-78244-9. In his Afterword' to this volume, John Gillies outlines some of the key issues which, at their best, the fourteen essays and fiveinterviews included here address incisively. 'Shakespeare appears in this collection', he argues, 'as a sign of the globalization of Shakespeare as a contemporary cultural value, and?paradoxically?as a sign of the endurance and reassertiveness of the local in the face of that global value' (p. 236). The 'contemporist movement'?embodied forJapan in the work of Antonin Artaud, Jan Kott, and Peter Brook?left a vision 'of how to unlock performance from its supplementarity to the text' (p. 241). At the end of the nineteenth century, Mejiperiod adaptors modernized Shakespeare forJapan; but the later 'globalized practice of making Shakespeare "contemporary"', which stimulated the 'proliferation of new theatre groupings', enabled not just anappropriationof, and genuflection towards, the foreign, but a reflection on its ' "pedagogical" cargo, problematizing the local effects of that cargo, historicizing them and groping towards a new synthesis' (pp. 239-41). Gillies concedes, none the less, that the interviewwith Ninagawa Yukio and Yoshihara Yukari's powerful essay on a Meji adaptation of The Merchant of Venice, among others, indicate the extent to which the local 'is at some stage mediated by a for? eign, global, and exoticizing gaze' (p. 244). The 'universaP Shakespeare of the late nineteenth century, for Yoshihara, is one of the occidental determinants of Japanese culture; part of the means by which, that is, the 'local or national culture of Japan' was 'invented and constructed' (pp. 21, 22). Western concepts of 'industriousness and industrialization', she proposes, would have been alien to the Japanese; Zeni, the adap? tation under consideration, sets part of The Merchant of Venice in the (earlier) Edo MLRy 98.1, 2003 173 period: this legitimates the 'modern, westernized Meji spirit' by giving the illusion that such ways of thinking already existed in that era (pp. 26, 27). Gillies, drawing on James R. Brandon (and Franz Fanon), suggests that there have been three Shakespeares in Japan: 'the Shakespeare of the canonic translations', a iocalized' Shakespeare whose 'plays are assimilated into indigenous theatre genres to the point of disappearance', and, more recently, a 'postcolonial, postmodern' Shake? speare (p. 238). In turn, these Shakespeares represent, he...

Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics, and the First American Avant-Garde (review)

Anarchist Modernism transforms understanding of early twentieth-century American art. Far from being a "quietist and apolitical" exercise in formalist abstraction, avant-garde art and art theory in the New York art world were directed towards radical social and political ends (2). Indeed, Antliff persuasively argues that anarchism lent "coherence and direction to modernism in the United States between 1908 and 1920" (ibid.). His book represents an alternative, therefore, not only to the depoliticized formalism that emerged with Clive Bell and culminated with Clement Greenberg, but also to Marxist-Leninist social history in the tradition of Meyer Schapiro and T. J. Clark. In his last chapter, "The Denouement of Anarchist Modernism," Antliff chronicles the rise of formalist critics, the ascendancy of the Bolshevik party, and the crackdown on World War I dissidents. More broadly, he restores the relevance of anarchism, and its impact on the theory and practice of art, to the history of "the First American Avant-Garde."

Reading Diversity / Lectures du Divers by Charles Forsdick , Susan Marson (review)

MLR,96.3,200 I 84I wellascritical essays andfiction, while a helpful index allows readers tofollow up individual texts ifthey sowish. There isalsoa useful bibliography. Part I dealswith difference inhuman relations, difference assource ofdissension andasrequisite ofindividuality. Itconcludes with anaccount ofSarraute's effiort to 'transmute diXerence into sameness', andherconversion ofphenomena similar to whatKristeva termed 'abjection' (ambiguity, indistinctness ofbeing)intoart, through anaesthetic capableof'transcending thelimits ofintersubjective relations while still subscribing totheir dynamic' (p.76). PartII, calling on feminist theorists from Beauvoir to Cixousand Irigaray, examines Sarraute's treatment ofthe('real'or metaphorical) bodyand sexual difference. Thevery physical impact oftheSarrautean text ischaracterized inone of JeXerson's many memorable formulations, as'a rhetoric ofthe body addressed to a bodywith theaimofpersuading thereader ofa certain truth aboutthemind' (p.go). Sarraute's refusal togender herwriting as 'ecriture feminine' is lucidly analysed anddefended (p.95).Jefferson makes theoften overlooked buttelling pointthatforSarraute's generation, 'feminism didnotmeanthedemandfor positive recognition of theirdiXerence, but,on thecontrary, a crusadefor acknowledgement ofthesameness ofthetwosexes'(p.98).Writing, for Sarraute, represents anescapefrom gender andaccesstothestatus ofundiffierentiated Cetre hUmaXn (P. IOI). Genre isthefocus ofPartIII,which outlines Sarraute's apparent acceptance of traditional categories ('essai', 'roman','poeme'),but her blurring of their boundaries. Commenting onthe provocative interventionism practised bySarraute asa critic/heretic, constantly undermining orthodoxy infavour of'the immediacy andspontaneity ofreaderly contact' (p. I29), Jefferson convincingly argues that her 'so-called critical writing isnotsomuch a form ofcriticism asa defence ofreading' (P. I30), aimingultimately 'to producea universal fusion whereboundaries, distance anddiXerences will nolonger exist' (p. I44).Jefferson further suggests that theputative generic diffierence ofEnfance, with itstendency toproduce authoridentity , is retrospectively counteracted bytheidentity-busting strategy oftune t'aimes pas,tobring itbackintothesameness of'a continuous fictional evolution' (P. I47). The bookis subtly argued and supported throughout bydetailed and perceptive textual analysis. The conceptual framework of'diXerence' seemed at timesconstricting; it squeezesout Sarraute's humour, and thediscussion of Sarraute's repetitions and variations did not,in myview,fithappily intoit: particularly inthenotable final chapter on'DeathandtheImpossible DiXerence', thesubstance ofthetexts under discussion seemed tooverflow thelexical frame. However, this iscarping, given theinnumerable insights andilluminations oXered bythis important book which noSarraute scholar will want tobewithout. UNIVERSITY OFWALES SWANSEA VALERIE MINOGUE Reading Diversity/Lectures duDivers. Ed.byCHARLES FORSDICK andSUSAN MARSON. (University ofGlasgow French andGerman Publications) Glasgow: University ofGlasgow. xooo. I72PP. Theseessays, edited from papersgivenat a conference heldin I998 at Royal Holloway, constitute a self-consciously interdisciplinary approachto Segalen. Including essays byspecialists inthefields ofarthistory andmusic as wellas of literature, thevolume is one ofthefirst genuine attempts to do justiceto the diversity, as indicated in thetitle, ofSegalen's interests andcompetences. The 842 Revzews Segalenian CDivers' appears as both thestructural andthematic inspiration ofthe volume. The unifying notion ofdiversity is treated in itsvarious manifestations The notion of'le Divers)as elaborated bySegalenhimself is thesuNJect ofCharles Forsdick's essay onthereception ofSegalen, inwhich heanalyses itsimplications forpost-colonial authors suchas EdouardGlissantn and Jean-Xavier Ridon discusses howrespecting the integrity of'leDivers' cancreate problems for a writer attempting toaccount for the otherness ofthe other. Thenotion of'leDivers' isthen extrapolated to embrace thediversity ofSegalenhimself: first, Segalentheart historian rescuing non-Buddhist statuary from academic oblivion (inan essay by NickPearce); second, Segalen asonehalf ofa creative relationship, byEdward J. Hughes (Segalen-Loti), SusanMarson (Segalen-Michaux) Philip Weller (SegalenDebussy ) andKenneth White (Segalen-Rimbaud). Someofthese pairings existed in reallifeas friendships, whilst theothers arelinks madebetween thecorpus of Segalen's work andthat ofanother. Therelationship between the body ofSegalen's workand hisphysical bodyis dissected in theessays byNoel Cordonier and Christian Doumet, whoboth suggest that thebody ofthemancanbeseendirectly as theliving texture ofhistexts, expressed through syntax, rhythms andnarrative structures. Finally, MarieDolle examines, in thelittle-discussed context ofhis religious beliefs, howSegalenswork cangiverisetoa diversity ofreadings ofhis historical person. Inattempting tocapture the diversity oftheir subject, these essays alsosucceed as accounts ofthegeneric diversity ofSegalen's output. However, in thelastanalysis, thisdiversity is shown to converge towards a unity: Segalen's poetry, prose andgeographical writings canallbesaidtofit into thegenre oftravel writing, andthis clarifies a number ofissues. Forinstance, thebody (person)-body (work) relationship gains a particular relevance intravel writing, asitswriter isone whomoves simultaneously through time, spaceandpage,andthetext becomes what SusanMarson calls'a mapofthesubject inhisdesires andregrets' (p. XI4). Thesediverse readings doindeed result ina detailed mapof'Segalen', andmake the volume a valuable contribution toscholars interested inboth Segalen andinhis favourite genre. UNIVERSITY OFWARWICK AKANE KAWAKAMI ICAuteur en souffrance: Essai sur...

Nathalie Sarraute, Fiction and Theory: Questions of Difference by Ann Jefferson (review)

Reviews 840 Reading J\Jathalie Sarraute. Dialogue andDistance.By EMERO'BEIRNE. Oxford: Clarendon Press.I999.Vi+ 259PP. On thecover ofEmerO'Beirne's bookisa sepiaphotograph ofNathalie Sarraute gazing quizzically at thereader from hergarden. The octogenarian author (the photo wastaken inI980)looks decidedly ill-at-ease perched onaniron bench and surrounded byempty chairs. Thisimage ofthewriter asa solitary figure, exiled in familiar surroundings, works well, however, as a visual restatement ofO'Beirne's subtitle, 'DialogueandDistance': bothcapture nicely thetension between isolisme andfraternite, between self andother, that drives allSarraute's work. Focusing onthe dynamics ofthis opposition, O'Beirne's concern iswith howtheSarrautean text speaks tothereader andhowthereader responds, with howmeaning isconstituted inthevery process ofdialogue. Shetherefore carefully andskilfully unpicks this dialogue, tracing itsevolution from novelto novelin thelight oftheories of intersubjectivity, inparticular, Lacan'sconception ofthe formation ofthe subject in language. Regrettably, O'Beirneomits consideration ofthehalf-a-dozen playsSarraute wrote intheI970Sand I980S,a curious omission, onemight think, in a study focusing on thedialogic aspects ofwriting, although sheclaimsthatdramatic dialogue isfundamentally diffierent from that found inthenovels. Herinterest, she argues, liesinthe'kindofdialogue [Sarraute] attempts toestablish through the textual address' andinthepresence intheproseworks ofa 'unifying authorial discourse' which sheclaims tobe 'necessarily absent from thedialogues ofdrama proper' (p 9). O'Beirne isright tostress theauthorial control ofmeaning inthe construction ofdialogue, butthis view ofthe limitations thus placed onthereader's creative freedom is nota newone in Sarraute criticism, and it is somewhat surprising that herbookdoesnotacknowledge this. Moreseriously, theassertion rather thanthedemonstration ofauthorial absence from thetheatrical dialogues invites argument: forinstance, can theauthor notbe said to be present at unconscious levels inthemetaphorical substructures that transcend theboundaries between individual speeches? A contrastive analysis ofSarraute's approach to dialogue across the two genres might havehelped tosettle the issue. On itsownterms, Reading J\/athalie Sarraute is,nevertheless, a finely honedand authoritative essay that extends thefamiliar linguistically-based approaches tothis author tochart with precision thewaysinwhich theforms ofthetext condition reader response. As such,itwillappealmainly tothosescholars forwhomthe fascination ofSarraute's writing isattributable more toits formal construction than toanyunderlying personal dimensions. UNIVERSITY OFNORTH LONDON JOHN PHILLIPS ;Nathalie Sarraute, Fiction and7heo7y. Questions ofDiference. By ANN JEFFERSON. (Cambridge Studies inFrench, 64)Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2000. Xiii + 2I4 pp- £37 5° AnnJeffierson herefollows upherexcellent work for thePleiadeCEuvres comybletes with a study ofNathalie Sarraute's treatment ofdiffierence, not asa theme ortheory, butasa constant preoccupation inher work. From a broad critical baseembracing linguistics, anthropology, literary and feminist theory, Jeffierson explores the paradoxes ofa writing that demands recognition ofitsdiffierence, butseeks toerase difference through identification with thereader inthesameness ofthetropisms. Thereislittle on Sarraute's plays, butJeffierson covers interviews andlectures as MLR,96.3,200 I 84I wellascritical essays andfiction, while a helpful index allows readers tofollow up individual texts ifthey sowish. There isalsoa useful bibliography. Part I dealswith difference inhuman relations, difference assource ofdissension andasrequisite ofindividuality. Itconcludes with anaccount ofSarraute's effiort to 'transmute diXerence into sameness', andherconversion ofphenomena similar to whatKristeva termed 'abjection' (ambiguity, indistinctness ofbeing)intoart, through anaesthetic capableof'transcending thelimits ofintersubjective relations while still subscribing totheir dynamic' (p.76). PartII, calling on feminist theorists from Beauvoir to Cixousand Irigaray, examines Sarraute's treatment ofthe('real'or metaphorical) bodyand sexual difference. Thevery physical impact oftheSarrautean text ischaracterized inone of JeXerson's many memorable formulations, as'a rhetoric ofthe body addressed to a bodywith theaimofpersuading thereader ofa certain truth aboutthemind' (p.go). Sarraute's refusal togender herwriting as 'ecriture feminine' is lucidly analysed anddefended (p.95).Jefferson makes theoften overlooked buttelling pointthatforSarraute's generation, 'feminism didnotmeanthedemandfor positive recognition of theirdiXerence, but,on thecontrary, a crusadefor acknowledgement ofthesameness ofthetwosexes'(p.98).Writing, for Sarraute, represents anescapefrom gender andaccesstothestatus ofundiffierentiated Cetre hUmaXn (P. IOI). Genre isthefocus ofPartIII,which outlines Sarraute's apparent acceptance of traditional categories ('essai', 'roman','poeme'),but her blurring of their boundaries. Commenting onthe provocative interventionism practised bySarraute asa critic/heretic, constantly undermining orthodoxy infavour of'the immediacy andspontaneity ofreaderly contact' (p. I29), Jefferson convincingly argues that her 'so-called critical writing isnotsomuch a form ofcriticism asa defence ofreading' (P. I30), aimingultimately 'to producea universal fusion whereboundaries, distance anddiXerences will nolonger exist' (p. I44).Jefferson further suggests that theputative generic diffierence ofEnfance, with itstendency toproduce authoridentity , is retrospectively counteracted bytheidentity-busting strategy oftune t'aimes pas,tobring itbackintothesameness of'a continuous fictional evolution' (P. I47). The bookis subtly argued and supported throughout bydetailed...

Poem as Song: The Role of the Lyric Audience

The article examines the phenomenon of lyric formalism--the view that poems wholly contain their meaning--from cultural and cross-cultural perspectives. It argues that the view presenting lyrics as pure self-contained expressions, not addressed to anyone, is part of a long cultural history that began in Romanticism and that led to the New Critics' formalism. It is culturally specific and must be studied as such. Through a reading of some key Romantic-era statements on the lyric by Wordsworth, Shelley, and Hegel, this article shows the increasingly problematic status of the lyric addressee as a cultural notion. On one hand the addressee was important as the beneficiary of the poet's genius, but on the other hand s/he was neglected as non-essential to the truest form of self-expression. Ultimately the lyric addressee was repressed, though never entirely. Since poems were not regarded as addressing anyone, they were not meant to directly communicate meaning from speaker to listener; meaning was rather generated somehow within the listener. What the listener received, then, was only the form or music of the poem which triggered his own inward responses. Thus thought and music were split off from each other in a way that did not happen in other poetic traditions, like that of Arab poetics. In modern Western culture, poems were divorced from songs in both the popular mind and in high literary theory. Song became regarded as opposed to communication, and the poem as pure thought or text without a performative framework. This segregation of song from poem, music from text, must be acknowledged as culturally specific and belongs to a certain literary period. A glance at poetry within Arabic culture offers other alternatives, where the musical dimension is not contrasted to the textual, but is joined to it. ********** Lyrical formalism--the view that poems are complete aesthetic units that wholly contain their meaning, as a vase contains flowers--is sometimes viewed as if it was imposed on poetry by the Russian Formalists and the American New Critics. There is a common impression that critics like Cleanth Brooks ripped poetry arbitrarily out of its personal, cultural, and historical context and stuffed it into their well-wrought urns, detached and self-complete. (1) But it may be that lyrical formalism in criticism came to reflect an already developing formalist tendency in literature generally, a tendency towards textual self-containment originating with the Romantics and pushed farther by the Modernists. (2) Reader-response theorist Jane P. Tompkins argues that the modern emphasis on the literary meaning of a text (its self-contained message), unlike the Classical or Renaissance emphasis on its social effects, implies that the inter-personal relations of author to audience became less important in the modern age. (3) Similarly, orality theorist Walter J. Ong sees the formalist tendency to regard texts as containing their meanings, rather than delivering the meanings of a writer to a reader, as a result of the turn towards mass literacy and thus to private reading. (4) Ong says that written texts, both literary and not, were increasingly regarded as what he calls independent fields, cut off from an immediate awareness of authors, means of distribution, modes of performance, and audiences. While poetry was the literary genre in which the closed field was most emphasized by New Criticism (perhaps because its short span could be isolated more completely), the closed and decontextualized text according to Ong was the norm across all genres, literary and non-literary. Accordingly, neither Tompkins nor Ong focuses on the lyric genre individually. But formalism is tied so closely to the lyric genre in both critical and pedagogical contexts that we must look beyond Ong's and Tompkins' theses. Literature professors are more likely to assign close readings of a poem rather than an excerpt of equal length from a novel, and most modern western readers--even those who have never heard of formalist criticism--feel lyric to be more closed-off from its readers. …

“Scheherazade, c'est moi”: Narrativist mimesis and the principle of metaphoric means in John Barth

Summary Since his retirement in the early nineteen nineties as a professor of creative writing from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, John Barth has published three new works: Once Upon a Time: A Floating Opera (1994) ‐ which he calls a “semi‐novel semi‐reminiscence”; Further Fridays: Essays, Lectures, and Other Nonfiction (1995) ‐a collection of essays; and On With the Story: Stories (1996) ‐ a collection of short stories. The title and contents of this latest work confirm my earlier hypothesis that Barth's entire later work is governed by the principle of what I have come to call “narrativist mimesis”; the ultimate form of poststructuralist mimesis. His fictions have over the years developed an ongoing critique of forms of mimesis, moving from realist and mythemic to poststructuralist and narrativist mimesis.1 Concurrently we also see in Barth's later fiction that not only the genesis, but also the viability and survival of fiction as such, are other major concerns. Part of his programme forthe replenishment of literature is a return to “the story‐teller's art”, in the form of narrativist mimesis, a return with a difference to “the springs of narrative”. This article investigates how his later fiction, that is, from his seventh novel, LETTERS (1979), onwards, is fed by contemporary literary‐aesthetic theory and guided by the principle of narrativist mimesis.

The Real and the Formal: Legal Realism Revisited

The article aims to pursue a reassessment of one fundamental binary opposition legal realism invokes - the real and the formal. While some of the realist objections to the formal, mechanistic concept of adjudication have been insightful, the realist writers have been for the most part unaware of some of the formalistic and ultimately self-refuting presuppositions of their own rhetoric. This article argues that realism betrays its very rationale and mimics the mainstream formalism, as it effectively supplants the formalistic considerations of law as a system of rules with its own markedly formalistic preoccupations of law as the right method or theory. The article ventures to indicate some of the realist associations with the earlier European realism, with that of Françoise Gény in particular, which have consistently been neglected in the traditional assessments of the legal realist critical legacy. In so doing, the article relies not only on deconstructive strategies, but it also greatly presumes both the Wittgensteinean argument on ‘privacy’ and Stanley Fish’s critique of formalism in literary and legal studies.

Poetry and Culture: Performativity and Critique

As the practices of New Historicism and the growing impetus of Cultural Studies push literary criticism toward cultural cri tique, poetry appears to be an increasingly marginalized genre. Mark Jeffreys, for instance, has described the ideological difficulties facing the lyric in recent criticism, and Paul Fry has been provoked into writing neo-Shelleyan defense of poetry as the temporary release of consciousness from its dependence on the signifying process.1 Reasons for this marginalization appear to come down to questions about the accessibility of poetry as tool for political criticism: poetry as highly organized form of language is too self-enclosed in its formalist processes to relate direcdy to social practices; poetry as predominandy bourgeois production is ideologically tainted; and lyric poetry as the privileged literary paradigm of New Critical aesthetics is associated with their now suspect claims of homogeneous unity and transhistorical essentialism. In short, the formalist demands of poetry would seem too pronounced to satisfy desire for broader based social and cultural criticism. No doubt suspicion of poetic formalism is in part the result of that separation of intrinsic and extrinsic analyses which Paul de Man noted in the 1970s. The development of formalist criticism in the twentieth century, he observed, had produced conception of form as a solipsistic category of self-reflection, where meaning is said to be extrinsic.2 Such separation of intrinsic (formalist) and extrinsic (social, historical) methodologies produced polarities of inside and outside, which de Man's attention to semiology intended to disrupt. Through unravelling discursive processes, he endeavoured to show how literary rhetoric suspends analytical logic, opening up the possibilities of figurai potentiality which he equated with literature itself (AR 10). De Man's disruption of inside-outside polari ties has largely gone unheeded among critics with social and political agendas, but what has also been given little attention is the potential for cultural critique engendered by referential aberration, by that suspen sion of normative referential logic which is frequently an effect of poetic

A metrics of advertising: Sound figures and processing responses

Sound figures are departures from language norms that use rhythm (sound intensity) and rhyme (sound identity) to establish metrical patterns. These figures are characteristic of poetry, borrowed by print and electronic advertisements to elicit consumer effects. The purpose of this article is to develop a metrics of advertising by adapting formalist literary criticism to advertising text and by generating hypotheses that link sound patterns to consumer responses. The article grounds advertising metrics in syllable‐stress theory, presents the method of metrical analysis, and demonstrates the use of the prosodic notational system by means of advertising examples. The methodological system enables hypothesis generation in consumer processing areas such as affective responses, dual entry routes, attention, short‐term memory, and long‐term memory.

The Wars We Took to Vietnam: Cultural Conflict and Storytelling (review)

Reviewed by: The Wars We Took to Vietnam: Cultural Conflict and Storytelling Tobey C. Herzog Milton J. Bates. The Wars We Took to Vietnam: Cultural Conflict and Storytelling. Berkeley: U of California P, 1996. 328 pp. As soldier-film director Oliver Stone noted years ago, Vietnam—the war and its aftermath—was and continues to be a “state of mind” for [End Page 412] many Americans. One result is a flourishing cottage industry of Vietnam veterans, citizens, politicians, historians, artists, literary critics, and others seeking meanings and lessons in the war’s events, in its social-historical period, and in the artifacts the war has spawned. In his well-written, eclectic, and impressively researched book, Milton Bates, a self-described “archaeologist of culture” and English professor, proposes one more context for defining this state of mind by examining the Vietnam War and its war stories, as well as the American culture that shaped them. This context becomes a wide-ranging historical, cultural, critical version of soldier-author Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam War story “The Things They Carried.” Thus, as Bates notes, he examines domestic wars and cultural conflicts that American soldiers took with them in their “rucksacks” to Vietnam and the war stories they brought back. Specifically, by using military historian John Keegan’s notion that “war is a human construction, a cultural artifact,” Bates analyzes how American cultural values and attitudes shaped the political and social actions and reactions related to this war, and how storytellers in oral histories, books, films, and television shows re-created this cultural text in their war stories. At the core of Bates’s argument is his notion that American involvement in the Vietnam War “intensified” specific “civil wars already raging in American society” during the 1960s. Consequently, these cultural conflicts (frontier ideology, race, class, gender, and generation) infuse Vietnam storytelling with ideology (politics) and form (poetics). For example, in his chapter titled “The Class War,” Bates describes various class divisions present in America during the 1960s and analyzes “how the working class was used for other people’s purposes during the Vietnam War and how it is still being exploited in our war stories.” To illustrate this notion, he argues that politicians and the war’s “managers” sent the working class abroad to fight the war while much of the antiwar middle class, including college students, ignored kindred liberal views and antiwar sentiments among the working class at home. Storytellers, such as Norman Mailer in Armies of the Night, Larry Heinemann in Paco’s Story, and Oliver Stone in his movie Platoon, transform these class conflicts and attitudes into thematic patterns of master-servant relationships, extended metaphors comparing war to work, and varying portraits of the working class. In examining American culture and American storytelling, Bates [End Page 413] engages in a broad survey of culture and literature with a breadth that contributes to successes and shortcomings in this book. He extends the previous research of, among others, John Hellmann (American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam), Walter H. Capps (The Unfinished War: Vietnam and the American Conscience), and cultural historian Loren Baritz (Backfire: American Culture and the Vietnam War). In the process of discussing the cultural wars, Bates maps a broad social-political landscape of America and a broad artistic and theoretical landscape filled with political/critical/social theory, philosophy, films, television shows, and literature—including important but often overlooked works. Under an overarching perspective of new historical criticism, he introduces at appropriate places cultural, gender, psychological, and formalist criticism in a manner that avoids the mind-numbing jargon and tortuous discussions that often mark such analyses. Throughout, Bates also manages to maintain a political balance—mentioning the excesses and achievements of the literary and political left and right. But he pointedly attacks “ivory tower feminists” (Susan Jeffords) and a few leftist cultural critics (Susan Sontag, Mary McCarthy, Norman Mailer), all of whom appear to dismiss the viewpoints and contributions of America’s female Vietnam veterans and members of the working class involved at home and in Vietnam with the war and its aftermath. This breadth of Bates’s approach also leads to some minor problems with the book, particularly the...

What Good Is Formalist Criticism? Or; "Forms" and "Storms" and the Critical Register of Romantic Poetry

What Good Is Formalist Criticism? Or; "Forms" and "Storms" and the Critical Register of Romantic Poetry

Ricoeur's Ethics

On surface, Paul Ricoeur's little ethic, presented in Soi-meme comme un autre,' has all makings of neo-Aristotelian version of virtue ethics. In studies seven through nine, there is repertoire of classical references to the good phronesis, and arete. Moreover, some have observed that since Ricoeur seems to subordinate his exegesis of Kant to his exegesis of Aristotle, we should read this work primarily as contribution to neo-Aristotelian ethics.2 Even Ricoeur seems to intend much since he subordinates deontological viewpoint to teleological perspective.3 As he points out himself, the plurality of virtues according to Aristotelian and medieval tradition should not be dismissed merely for sake of respect of rule in Kantian perspective.4 However, upon closer reading, I will argue that Ricoeur's contribution to moral philosophy cannot be easily categorized contribution to modern-day neo-Aristotelian ethics of virtue. My primary contention will be that what counts, ultimately, in Ricoeur's ethicomoral program is not virtue but attestation. The two should not be confused; attestation is not virtue. I For sake of contrast, let me preface my discussion of Ricoeur in light of one contemporary neo-Aristotelian agenda where virtues do count. In Alasdair MacIntyre's well-known work, After Virtue,5 virtues do count and they have the central place.6 At very start, let me make most obvious distinction in that Ricoeur is consummate hermeneut while MacIntyre remains what I would call proto-hermeneut. Let me explain. MacIntyre proposes virtue-centered theory of ethics that is planted within much larger present-day critique of ethical foundationalism and formalism. His program rejects assumptions about moral reason timeless source of insight into truth about justice and good. The arguments in After virtue disparage concern for metaphysical assumptions that might underlie form of good, natural law, human nature, rational choice, well epistemological notions of certainty, self-evidence, and priori necessity. Rather, MacIntyre forges what some have called post-foundationalist conception of rationality where very sense of 'foundations' is superseded by kind of socially-located, historical reconstruction.7 Hence, to pursue moral philosophy properly, MacIntyre argues for necessity to see what is operating at various interlocking layers of social practice, social character, and historical circumstance. However, instead of elaborating consequences to his historicist position, MacIntyre reasserts necessity to establish morality on basis of classical concept of virtue. MacIntyre's attempts to make his version of virtue intelligible has evoked numerous criticisms that I will not repeat other than to emphasize fact that, in end, he never really tells us much about virtue.8 I will agree with criticism that he does not provide modern detailed conception of virtues, but merely argues for possibility of doing so.9 This is amazing given fact that close to one third of book is devoted to historical survey of virtues. What most critics have missed however is tautological nature of his historicist approach to virtue. In every stage of concept (practices, narrative unity of life, traditions), MacIntyre presupposes existence and operative presence of virtue. As he himself is well aware, very history of practices he describes will have to be simultaneously history of virtues and vices.' Is this saying any thing more than where there are practices of type MacIntyre speaks of, certain virtues will be present, such that presence of virtue will point to way certain practices are performed? For example, in first stage, we are told that a virtue is an acquired human quality possession and exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices. …

Formal charges: the shaping of poetry in British Romanticism

Abbreviations 1. Formal intelligence: formalism, romanticism, and formalist criticism 2. Sketching verbal form: Blake's Political Sketches 3. The formings of simile: Coleridge's 'comparing power' 4. Revision as form: Wordsworth's drowned man 5. Heroic form: couplets, 'self', and Byron's Corsair 6. Teasing form: the crisis of Keats's last lyrics 7. Social form: Shelley and the determination of reading Notes Index.

Fiction as false document: the reception of E.L. Doctorow in the postmodern age

E.L. Doctorow, now a major member of the American literary establishment, has survived the controversy over his overtly political novels to become recognised as an artist whose place in the American tradition has been earned by his extension of it. This book surveys the reception of his novels, which span the era that saw traditionalist formalist criticism decline in favour of post-structural theories of language and culture. When Welcome to Hard Times (1960) was published, the scant notice it received praised its well-formed structure; by the time of Doctorow's major success, Ragtime (1975), the issues of politics, culture, and history loomed large on the critical landscape, and by the early 1980s, his work was seen overwhelmingly in terms of its postmodern style and scepticism, to such an extent that the theory of criticism drew attention away from his works themselves. Now, with current critical trends moving away from pure theory, his fiction has again become the main focus, with his later work as well as Ragtime/ receiving attention.