Dead Author Research Articles

Entrenchment in Historical Corpora? Reconstructing Dead Authors’ Minds from their Usage Profiles

Data from eight historical corpora spanning the period between 1250 and 1871 are investigated with regard to occurrences of the ‘N+BE+that-construction’ (as in my concern is that [...], the idea was that [...]). The formal, semantic, and pragmatic changes of this construction are described on the basis of 1,588 attestations retrieved from the corpora. Following this, the usage profiles of individual authors are examined. It is shown that even authors who are comparable in terms of period and genre show significant differences with regard to the frequency of use of the construction, collocational ranges and preferences, the use of semi-fixed lexical expressions manifesting the construction, as well as their functional preferences. These differences are interpreted from the perspective of the so-called ‘Entrenchment-and-Conventionalization Model’ (Schmid 2014a and 2015). It is argued that the usage profiles of individual authors can provide insights into the ways in which the construction under investigation was represented in these authors’ minds, and that the observable collective long-term changes arise from the interaction of the cognitive processes in individual minds and the social processes taking place in the speech community.

“The Dead With Me”: Ausonius’s Parentalia as Memorial to the Poet

Is it possible to remember our dead without inscribing ourselves in their memorials? Soon after the accidental death of Roland Barthes in 1980, Jacques Derrida was asked to compose a memorial for his friend and fellow theorist. The text, Les morts de Roland Barthes, is a wrenching response not only to Barthes' death but even more to his Death of the Author— though without ever naming the essay. Derrida confronts the issues of death, authorship, and temporality so powerfully intertwined in Barthes' essay and transforms Barthes himself into the exemplum of the dead author on myriad levels. At the heart of Derrida's memorializing response is his struggle over the project—specifi cally his recognition that the reasons and intentions behind memorialization are always problematic—and his conviction that the dead honoree inevitably becomes a fabrication of and commodity for each person who memorializes him—something like the text of Barthes' essay in the hands of its readers (Derrida 2001.50):

Writers' Rooms: Theories of Contemporary Authorship in Portraits of Creative Spaces

This article analyzes two series of photographs and essays on writers’ rooms published in England and Canada in 2007 and 2008. The Guardian’s Writers Rooms series, with photographs by Eamon McCabe, ran in 2007. In the summer of 2008, The Vancouver International Writers and Readers Festival began to post its own version of The Guardian column on its website by displaying, each week leading up to the Festival in September, a different writer’s “writing space” and an accompanying paragraph. I argue that these images of writers’ rooms, which suggest a cultural fascination with authors’ private compositional practices and materials, reveal a great deal about theoretical constructions of authorship implicit in contemporary literary culture. Far from possessing the museum quality of dead authors’ spaces, rooms that are still being used, incorporating new forms of writing technology, and having drafts of manuscripts scattered around them, can offer insight into such well-worn and ineffable areas of speculation as inspiration, singular authorial genius, and literary productivity.

The Deaths of the Author: Reading and Writing in Time by Gallop, Jane (review)

Reviewed by: The Deaths of the Author: Reading and Writing in Time by Gallop, Jane Tristan Deveney Gallop, Jane. 2011. The Deaths of the Author: Reading and Writing in Time. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. $74.95 hc. $21.95 sc. 184 pp. Emily Eakin’s obituary for Jacques Derrida in the New York Times observes that his death marked the moment at which “the era of big theory came quietly to a close” (2004, D12). This equivalence between the death of Derrida and the death of his ideas prompts Jane Gallop’s reconsideration of authorship in her new book, The Deaths of the Author: Reading and Writing in Time (23). For Gallop, the ideas laid out by Roland Barthes in “The Death of the Author” (1968) and by Michel Foucault in “What Is an Author?” (1969) continue to offer new insights despite the obituary’s proclamation of the death of theory. Gallop insists, however, on a new reading of authorship in the twenty-first century: the strangeness of the relation between literal and theoretical death lies at the heart of her study, as a function of authors’ attempts to mourn their own deaths. Much of the recent critical work on the death of the author addresses the evolution of the role of theory in literary studies over the last fifteen years, and it is into this camp that Gallop falls. However, while critics like Loren Glass and Seán Burke in different ways elided the literal nature of rupture, Gallop is interested in such endings, particularly as the death, return, or persistence of the author affects the temporal modes of a text. She addresses how anxieties about literal death and the death of influence become tools for generating meaning. For Gallop, the question of the death of the author becomes one of connecting physical death with obsolescence and the perception of anachronism. She does this in a series of close readings of short passages from works by major theoretical figures (Barthes, Derrida, Sedgwick, and Spivak). As she writes, “the title of this book, The Deaths of the Author, is meant to refer to both the literary theoretical concept and the real life drama, to make it impossible to think either separately, to insist we think them together” (5). Doing so involves a reconsideration of the temporality of writing: the act of writing is inscribed, she suggests, with the author’s awareness of his or her own death as an approaching event that will affect not only bodily existence but theoretical influence. Writing becomes caught up with the change in status from living to dead (7). The erotics of the body in this moment of passage have a great deal to do with the ethics of memorialization, in which the anticipation of rereading is a kind of anticipation of physical return, of touch that is desired. The futurity of desire (which in this case is a desire for the persistence of the present moment) as something deferred or unsatisfied is connected, Gallop argues, with the dailiness of reading, with the return of the author in a particular moment of the reader’s life. [End Page 179] Motivating the desire for the present moment is an anxiety about failures of anticipation and about past assumptions that are recorded in print even after they have been proven wrong. The recording of these failures both sustains the moment of the past assumption and threatens to elide the author’s influence, so that writing risks the death of influence in the recording of such failures. Gallop suggests that “the printed word, necessarily anachronistic, is where the writer confronts her status as a dead author” (114). The argument here is less about reading the death of the author than it is about what it means to commit to writing at a time when authorial death has become a critical commonplace, something that remains in the back of the writer’s mind at all times. For Gallop, the death of the author is a moment not just of anticipation but of surprise, and what she finds most fascinating is the attempt on the part of the writer to make his or her text surprising as well...

The Undead in Byzantium. Some Notes on the Reception of Ancient Literature in Twelfth-Century Byzantium

This article proposes to look at twelfth-century of of classical literature and more specifically on portrayal of literary production as kind of with dead. Although it was not uncommon to reuse ancient models and integrate them into new texts before twelfth century, this paper argues that what was different in this period was awareness with which process of using earlier texts was carried out involving conscious interaction with previous model. This article suggests that this process should be referred to as the poetics of appropriation. What is more, it is argued that in Byzantium appropriation of previous literary models very often meant not only establishing specific relationship with text but also entering in a dialogue with work and/or its dead author. In twelfth century dead ancient authors were not only fully rehabilitated but, in fact, became almost unquestionably useful.

CONVERSATIONS WITH THE DEAD IN EARLY MODERN FRANCE

The aim of this article is twofold. First, it maps out the trajectory of the metaphor of reading as a conversation-in particular a conversation with the dead authors of classical antiquity-in early modern French writing (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries), though examples are also drawn from Latin, Italian, and Spanish literatures. And second, it explores what the topos of reading as a conversation might actually mean in terms of textual practice both for writers-how writers from Montaigne to Diderot converse with other writers in their texts-and for critics analysing how one writer is read by another.

Dead Poets' Property - The Copyright Act of 1814 and the Price of Books in the Romantic Period

This article exploits a differential increase in copyright length under the UK Copyright Act of 1814 - in favor of books by dead authors – to examine the effects of longer copyright terms on price. Difference-in-differences analyses, which compare changes in the price of books by dead and living authors, indicate a 50 percent increase in price in response to doubling of copyright length. By comparison, placebo regressions for books by dead authors that did not benefit from the extension indicate no differential increase. Historical evidence suggests that longer copyrights increase price by improving publishers’ ability to practice intertemporal price discrimination.

Silverman, Gillian. 2012.Bodies and Books: Reading and the Fantasy of Communion in Nineteenth-Century America

Reviewed by: Bodies and Books: Reading and the Fantasy of Communion in Nineteenth-Century America by Gillian Silverman Jessica Beard Silverman, Gillian. 2012. Bodies and Books: Reading and the Fantasy of Communion in Nineteenth-Century America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Pp. 226. ISBN 978-0-8122-4415-1. $55.00. Jacques Derrida writes of the deceased Louis Marin in The Work of Mourning: “In my relationship to myself, he is here in me before me, stronger or more forceful than I” (160). Derrida is describing the activity of reading the deceased Marin’s writing, in a moment that he will later describe as achieving psychic simultaneity with Marin in the shared space of the book. Derrida’s description of bodily boundaries made variously pliant—“he is here / in me / before me”—by the act of reading is a phenomenon well articulated by readers of the nineteenth century. Gillian Silverman’s book Bodies and Books is a careful investigation of these corporeal reading practices felt, experienced, and theorized by these readers. Silverman’s book chronicles readers’ representations of bodily engagements with the psychic and textual presence of the author. It is a thorough examination of nineteenth-century reading practices that situate the book as a “technology of intimacy” (19). Bodies and Books is made up of two chapters that historicize the act of reading within the contexts of technology and intimacy in nineteenth-century terms, followed by three case study chapters that read Herman Melville’s Pierre, Fredrick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative, and Susan Warner’s Wide, Wide World as reflective of different variations of this intimacy. Silverman’s insistence that the relationships encouraged by the book were communions and not communities opens [End Page 139] up these variations to relationships that cross bodily boundaries normally restricted by death, questions of race, gender roles, and familial relations. The case studies reveal tangled incorporations within the narratives themselves, usually driven by representations of reading or other textual consumption. Chapter one situates the reader within nineteenth-century reading practices shaped by technological advances that increased a reader’s access to texts. Silverman sees two distinct trends in reading that she calls “Railroad Reading” and “Wayward Reading”. Railroad reading reflected the period’s obsession with productive time, especially as it is found in conduct manuals directed toward women. Idle thinking and reading were considered antithetical to the efficiency reflected by the railroad model, which prioritized the mastery of the reading material and the betterment of the self. Wayward reading, in Silverman’s words, can be characterized by its “value of self-forgetting and to the gratifications of imagined contact with another” (24). This chapter’s thorough review of primary documents — nineteenth-century conduct manuals, reading studies, letters, journals, and works of fiction — is enhanced by Silverman’s careful synthesis and analysis that teases out the period’s anxieties around modernization and suggestive correctives to its chaos. Further, she suggests that the relationship formed between the text and the wayward reader is one of consumption, where the boundaries between reader and text/author are significantly crossed, resulting in their merger. The second chapter, “Books and the Dead”, examines the intimate relationships between “haunted” books and their readers. These relationships were formed with the dead author of the text, and often conceptualized communion via psychic connection, conjuring or total absorption of the authorial persona or point of view. In this section texts are consumed with anything but productive learning or thinking in mind. Readers form intimate spiritual bonds with the dead and are affectively drawn to their texts via the material body of the book. These bonds have their roots in the popular 19th century practices of mesmerism and séance spiritualism. Silverman frames the transgressive relationships readers formed with their texts as reactive to “antiseptic restrictions placed on nineteenth-century social life”, a point she fleshes out further in her case study chapters (68). In the case study chapters, Silverman focuses on the literature, letters, and journals of Melville, Douglass and Warner. Chapter three, “Textual Sentimentalism: Incest and the Author-Reader Bond in Melville’s Pierre” makes connections between Melville’s desire for literary originality on a linguistic level and his narrative play with...

<i>A Companion to Medieval Popular Romance</i> (review)

Reviewed by: A Companion to Medieval Popular Romance Helen Cooper A Companion to Medieval Popular Romance. Edited by Raluca L. Radulescu and Cory James Rushton. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2009. Pp. xiv + 209. $95. Critical interest in Middle English popular romances was almost nonexistent until some three decades ago. Early English Text Society editions, many of them very old, emphasized their linguistic features—they were regularly noted as the subject of parody in Chaucer's Sir Thopas—but there was no sustained interest in them on their own terms. There were indeed major problems in the way of according them the kind of attention that the academic community was familiar with providing. They are almost all anonymous by definition: if a romance is by a named author, such as Chaucer or Malory (or even the Gawain poet, whose eponymous title gives the illusion of removing him from the "anonymous" category), it is taken to fall outside the "popular" classification. Where we do have an author's name, we know nothing about him: "Thomas Chestre" might possibly be the man of that name who was taken prisoner in the Hundred Years' War at the same time as Chaucer, but given how common both names were, it is not very likely. [End Page 126] As Rosalind Field notes in her chapter on "The material and the problems," we may feel comfortable with the "Death of the Author," but we still need our dead author to be identifiable. Historical and historicist approaches are customarily thwarted since we have very little idea when most of the romances were written, their longevity assuring that most surviving manuscripts are copies made long after they were composed. For the same reasons, there are only a handful that can be firmly assigned to any particular region. Even the fact that they were written in English tells us very little, since, as a number of them pointed out, everyone in England understood English. Anglo-Norman and French romances, from which a good number of them are derived, had a more limited circulation among those who spoke French, though they were not necessarily as restricted as the "courtly" epithet for them might suggest: the royal court did indeed remain predominantly French-speaking for longer than most of the country, but high baronial courts, a number of gentry households, international merchants, and the big abbeys and monasteries and cathedrals contained potential audiences for romances in both French and English. That a romance is in English does not therefore inevitably mark it as aimed at a middle-class or less sophisticated audience, especially in the later fourteenth century when Chaucer opted for English for a readership that included the royal court. It is notoriously difficult to define romance, and adding "popular" to it doubles the problem. Almost every contributor to this new Companion spends some time on it, and the definitions vary widely. "Popular" has often been used as a synonym for mediocre or unsophisticated, but the extensive recent work on individual texts has made many such judgements seem ignorant or careless. The editors' introduction proposes a judicious rebalancing of unsophistication into "those texts in Middle English . . . which show a predominant concern with narrative at the expense of symbolic meaning" (p. 7), though that still might be taken either to rule out certain critical approaches or to eliminate any thoughtfully read text that proves to have hidden depths. Some contributors emphasize their interest in monsters and battles, others their concern with ordinary life and the domestic. Their generic affiliations, going backward, link them with folktales and legends; going forward, with fantasy and science fiction. A recent essay collection devoted to them was entitled Pulp Fictions, and by the sixteenth century, when large numbers were printed in cheap formats, they have some claim to being the first genre that deserves the term; but manuscript culture was always an elite process. Prose romances are normally excluded, often tacitly (though they too were regarded as pulp fiction by the Elizabethans), or because they fall outside the category of minstrel performance that the metrical texts seem to invite, however little we know about what that might mean. Alliterative romances also figure rather rarely: Sir Gawain and...

Intimate Enemies: A Discussion with Marlene van Niekerk and Michiel Heyns about Agaat and its Translation into English

Leon de Kock: Michiel, every translation has a feel about it. How did this one feel for you? Michiel Heyns: Much of the I was stimulated, and occasionally I had to ask Marlene what she meant. As you know, Marlene's Afrikaans is not just a matter of redoing the old thing, and that was sometimes strenuous, but by and large--I'm generalising now from the experience of seven months--it was stimulating, exciting, and very seldom boring. I round it a great experience, and I think I had a very good working relationship with Marlene. I felt I could always ask her things when really doubt. We lived about 20 km apart, and we'd meet once a week, or once a fortnight, to have an afternoon session, followed by a meal, perhaps. LdK: How would you characterise this translation? The level of co-authorship, the eo-translation here seems to be quite marked, as it was with Triomf. In such a case, I sometimes wonder whether one is beginning to talk about something more than just translation. MH: Yes, it's a collaboration; I suppose you did the same Triomf--we attributed copyright for the translation to both of us, because Marlene had a huge share the translation. Yes, it's not a matter of me sitting alone translating, and then presenting it to Marlene; there was an interaction all the time. I'm looking for a word for this ... Marlene van Niekerk: Co-creativity ... MH: Yes. It gave me perhaps an inkling of something you said yesterday, Leon [at Boekehuis Johannesburg]--that sense of freedom, that I could sometimes exceed the limit because I'd checked with Marlene, which I wouldn't have been able to do if I'd simply been working on my own. LdK: Yes, that's the other side of my notion that you should never translate anyone but a dead author; (1) you have more freedom this way, whereas if you were translating a dead author, you wouldn't dare. MH: No, you would not if you honoured his memory. This is where your word licence comes in, a sense, because the author can give you licence; of course the author can also deny you licence, but this case usually the licentiousness that you also talked about yesterday, was indeed licensed by Marlene, so that gives one a kind of freedom. MvN: I felt that Michiel brought a whole lot of his structures and of erudition to the text, took it into his structures and machinery, and, ja, I felt it was entirely gerymd. It was at some points quite explorative its sentences and quite improvisational its development of certain thoughts, and I thought, well, fine. If you put it into another of and creativity, you'll get something that works, and I was comfortable with it because I felt it was gerymd. What is the word I'm looking for? LdK: Congruent? MvN: Congruence. Concomitant. LdK: I felt that congruence. [To MH:] You got me reading T.S. Eliot this morning, the Four Quartets, and I felt the congruence, knowing Agaat, the strains of time future and time present. MH: Yes, and in my beginning is my ending and my ending is my beginning, which is an accurate description of the structure of the novel.... LdK: ... so, a sense, it was similar to what happened Triomft; the English version is slightly different and it's slightly, an extended version, almost ... MH: I think something potentialised. It was there to be brought out. So it's not as if you're imposing something on the original; you take a hint from the original and expand it; and because you're working a different language and it has a different cultural tradition, you can draw on that. As I said yesterday, I hope I'm not violating the work, but I'm pleased to hear you say you also found it, reading the Four Quartets; it resonates for me with this novel. LdK: I love that phrase machinery of erudition, because that's what writing is about, and it's quite unique to see this level of cooperation between two living South African writers, writing out of different languages and creating this one work, which is now . …

Caliban to the Audience: Auden's Revision of Wordsworth's Sublime

--A wish was now ingender'd in my fear / To cleave unto this Man --Wordsworth STRIDING UP TO HIM IN FURY, YOU GLARE INTO HIS UNBLINKING EYES and stop dead, transfixed with horror at seeing reflected there, not what you had always expected to see, conqueror smiling at conqueror, both promising mountains and marvels, but gibbering fist-clenched creature with which you are all too unfamiliar the only subject that you have the all too flesh you must acknowledge as your own. (1) In the middle of W. H. Auden's mid-career prose poem, to the Audience, Caliban describes what happens when, looking for Ariel, the imagination, the audience finds Caliban instead, disturbing reminder of the begged question of its existence: solid flesh, as it were, mysteriously linked to the less-than-solid imagination. Like Ariel, Caliban is ubiquitous presence who refuses to go away. As he reminds the audience at the very beginning of his address, even when it seeks the good, so great, so dead author to stand before the finally lowered curtain it is I who will always loom thus wretchedly into your confused picture ... (CP 422). Auden's poem circles around this begged question of existence as Caliban takes his audience through an impossibly circular, tripartite structure that adroitly performs the same begged question. address thus proceeds with recursively interwoven echo and apostrophe: in dense style of hyperbole and convoluted sentence structure. From the time it was published, the elaborate of the address suggested--and continues to suggest--to that the poem is about the ultimate and collapse of poetry, especially the imagination required to produce it. As such, and as the last section of Auden's long poem, The Sea and Mirror, A Commentary on Shakespeare's Tempest, Caliban's address does what many argue of Shakespeare's Tempest: it exposes its art as mere This way of thinking lends itself well to support the view of those who see Auden becoming anti-Romantic at mid-career, turning his genius to undermining poetry and serving as licensed jester. This way of thinking, however, ignores Auden's genius in using to expose and undermine the anti-Romantic (and anti-aesthetic) style of thinking characterizing Caliban's audience--and Auden's. It ignores Auden's central explanation of the piece, not in terms of what it attempts to represent but in terms of its unusual style performed by an inarticulate creature, Caliban, who speaks by borrowing from Ariel the most artificial style possible: that of the imagination. (2) Speaking the real Word, Caliban gets at the ineffable truth of human existence, the existence of born actors (CP 444). As Edward Mendelson observes, Caliban, in fact, is an artifice that embodies everything that is not an artifice. (3) Like the imagination for which he speaks, Caliban is an irritating, irrefutable, aesthetic entity impossible to deny or silence. In all of these respects, finally, Caliban plays highly Romantic role performing, rather than attempting to represent, the sublime, role this paper will investigate in three, interwoven venues as evidence of Auden's revision of the Romantic sublime. To begin with, as Auden defines it in his study of Romanticism, Enchafed Flood, the ultimate focus of the Romantic poet, who serves as the subject of his poetry, is his journey into himself. Here he finds an unsolved problem, perpetually both a stating and solving of the problem. (4) He finds the begged question of identity inherent in being human, the indeterminate identity there within the poet's consciousness, privy to his thoughts and feelings. discontinuity and dialectical tension that mark Caliban's observations in these ways, align him with what M. H. Abrams defines as the silent human in the greater Romantic lyric. In the tripartite form, that moves from outer to inner and back to outer landscapes, this auditor appears in the inner landscape, the landscape of the poet's thoughts and feelings. …

Brás Cubas em três versões

A crítica tem estudado em três registros o bizarro narrador das Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas: (1) segundo uma leitura formalizante, o defunto autor desenvolve o modelo da “forma livre” de Sterne; (2) a leitura cognitiva e existencial centra-se na figura do humorista melancólico; (3) a leitura sociológica está centrada no tipo social de Brás e no contexto ideológico do Brasil Império. Cada registro capta um perfil do narrador, mas nenhuma interpretação é,per se, suficiente para compreender a densidade do olhar machadiano. Em relação ao contexto brasileiro, o ensaio distingue três vertentes ideológicas. A hegemonia do liberalismo excludente rege a biografia inteira de Brás, que começa no período colonial. O novo liberalismo democratizante, formado nos anos de 1860-70, alimenta a sátira local do narrador. Enfim, o moralismo cético enforma a perspectiva geral da obra, refratária às certezas progressistas inerentes ao novo liberalismo

Reconstructing the deconstructed - hypertext and literary education

In this article I endeavour to connect two major achievements of postmodernism which, at first glance, may appear incompatible: deconstruction in literature and literary criticism on the one hand and constructivism in educational theory and practice on the other. Subverting traditional literary values such as authorial integrity and power, linearity and logic of plot, consistency of character, the distance between the reader and printed text as well as, above all, the death of the author, poststructuralism has long been recognized as a rather embattled concept. This is due to its evasiveness and hence relative inapplicability to literary criticism and pedagogy. Venturing to overcome this dilemma, the article will investigate the implications of educational constructivism. The chief aim is to link some of its concepts with postmodern literature in such a way as to facilitate didactic methodology in the field of poststructuralist literature. Literary hypertext- the so-called incarnation of postmodern literary theory - will be used as a stereotypical example of poststructuralist evasiveness. The article proposes that literary hypertext has considerable educational potential. Not only does the genre invite subjectcentred pedagogy, which allows students to learn according to their own interests and prior knowledge, but, paradoxically, it also defies the unviability of poststructuralist literature by resurrecting the dead author in collectiveness. The proposal will be illustrated by a case study report, describing the implementation of literary hypertext in an undergraduate German creative writing classroom.

Translating Triomf: The shifting limits of “ownership” in literary translation or: Never translate anyone but a dead author

Summary This essay teases out the paradoxes inherent in competing notions of (1) authorial “ownership” of a text and of its modes of signification in acts of translation, (2) the claims upon that text by a translator, and (3) the senses in which imaginative texts are “co‐owned” by readers, specialists, critics, teachers, reviewers and editors. Based on anecdotal evidence ‐ in this instance, an incomplete case‐history of translating the Afrikaans novel Triomf into English ‐ the essay builds an argument about the nature of translation in more general terms.

Dead Authors, Born Readers, and Defunct Critics: Investigating Ambiguous Critical Identities in A. S. Byatt's "Possession"

Dead Authors, Born Readers, and Defunct Critics: Investigating Ambiguous Critical Identities in A. S. Byatt's "Possession"

The Afterlife of Christina Rossetti by Alison Chapman (review)

Reviews Alison Chapman. TheAfterlife of ChristinaRossetti. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000. 213 pp. Alison Chapman's TheAfterlife of Christina Rossetti argues that the author is the central problem of representation and that Christina Rossetti is an effect, or more appropriately, an after-effect of literary and biographical life writing. Examined as a semiotic structure, the literary signature becomes a trope of ambivalence, signifying the poet's presence as absence and the poetry's meaning as inaccessible. Yet Chapman's analysis of the author as a process and product of representation is also a solid historical study, offering a subtle and sophisticated consideration of figures of loss and death that figure prominently in the reception history of Rossetti's work in relation to the afterlife as a trope in Rossetti's own writing and public selfimage . Chapman thus draws a significant connection between the biographical history and the poetry by noting that "subjectivities in Rossetti's poetry repeat the vacillation [found in the biographies] between presence and absence, accessibility and inaccessibility, which offers a figure for reading the signature Christina Rossetti" (6). Rossetti emerges here not only as a signature and cultural artefact but also as a model for a different kind of poetic subjectivity. Chapman's study of the representation of the life aims at a reconfiguration of reading practices that would allow access to the referent "without either reifying its presence or insisting on its absence." This would be, she argues, "reading in other ways, other wise"(27). One of the merits of this book thus lies in Chapman's ability to detect mutually constitutive structures of figuration and to explore their larger significance. For in approaching Rossetti from the perspective of the history of authorial representation, Chapman situates her study within the larger question of the relation between history and literature. Moreover, she insists that the relation between history and literature is all the more acute in the study of Victorian women's poetry, as that body of writing emphasizes tensions between feminism and new historicism . Chapman not only outlines and analyzes the methodological and critical complications arising from excavation of dead authors as 1 08volume 28 number 2 Reviews personality and individual presence, but shows how Rossetti's own subversions of the sentimental tradition, which defines the proper mode of expression for women poets as confessional and personal and thereby inherently autobiographical, raise questions about the project of recovery. Chapman thus seeks to break the cycle of nineteenth-century autobiographical readings of women's poetry, which, she argues, "in a self-sustaining circularity, produce the life as evidence for textual interpretation and the text as evidence for biography" (66). Consequently , she spends some time in the early chapters of the book questioning central premises of the project of recovery and new historicist methodologies for understanding authorship and demonstrating how they reproduce the very ideology that the poetry critiques. Rossetti herself self-consciously resists the ideology of self-representation, Chapman observes, and thus her poetry severely complicates historicist acts of interpretation. Chapters one and two address historical methodologies in terms of the gaze and the voice respectively. Chapman insightfully offers photography as a visual analogy to the process by which historically oriented approaches search for an authentic biographical subject. Both biography and photography, according to Chapman, are predicated upon an illusion of the presence of the referent "out there" and their focus on the object makes the referent into a fetish. Later in the book, Chapman will return to the analogy between photography and biography to parallelJulia Margaret Cameron's "out of focus" photography with Rossetti's poetic commentary on her brother's aesthetics of the feminine. In their shared interest in the spectral quality of their feminine subjects, representing them as excessively feminine, fleeting and posthumous, female poet and photographer alike unsettle the male gaze and return the look. Voice similarly functions as guarantor of presence. In lyric poetry such as Rossetti's, voice works as a metonymy in the nineteenth century, and persists today, collapsing woman into experience into text, enabling the lyric voice to be taken as the ultimate indicator of the historical personage. Chapman acknowledges that voice is heavily invested with the...

Authorship and Autography

The Single Most Influential Contemporary Statement on Authorship is Still the Obituary that Roland Barthes pronounced over thirty years ago (Burke,Death19). Partly by the stark extremity of its title, Barthes's essay “The Death of the Author” transformed New Critical distaste for the biographical into an ontological conviction about the status of language (Burke,Death16) and in so doing made the dead author far more influential than living authors had been for some time. If authorship is now a subject of contention in the academy rather than a vulgar embarrassment, it is largely because of the way that Barthes inflated the issue in the very act of dismissing it. Though the idea that “it is language which speaks, not the author,” seems to demote the human subject (“Death” 143), it may also promote the written word, and it has been objected from the beginning, by Michel Foucault first of all, that the notion ofécriture“has merely transposed the empirical characteristics of an author to a transcendental anonymity” (Foucault 120). Many later critics have agreed, and thus there have been a series of arguments, from the theoretical (Burke,Death) to the empirical (Stillinger), to the effect that the whole post-Saussurean turn exemplified by Barthes has not so much killed off the concept of the author as raised it to a higher plane of abstraction. But it may be that, approached from another angle, Barthes's essay will turn out to have its own relation to certain social and technological developments, and that these, in their turn, will help to situate the death of the author as a historical phenomenon.

Authorship and Autography

The Single Most Influential Contemporary Statement on Authorship is Still the Obituary that Roland Barthes pronounced over thirty years ago (Burke,Death19). Partly by the stark extremity of its title, Barthes's essay “The Death of the Author” transformed New Critical distaste for the biographical into an ontological conviction about the status of language (Burke,Death16) and in so doing made the dead author far more influential than living authors had been for some time. If authorship is now a subject of contention in the academy rather than a vulgar embarrassment, it is largely because of the way that Barthes inflated the issue in the very act of dismissing it. Though the idea that “it is language which speaks, not the author,” seems to demote the human subject (“Death” 143), it may also promote the written word, and it has been objected from the beginning, by Michel Foucault first of all, that the notion ofécriture“has merely transposed the empirical characteristics of an author to a transcendental anonymity” (Foucault 120). Many later critics have agreed, and thus there have been a series of arguments, from the theoretical (Burke,Death) to the empirical (Stillinger), to the effect that the whole post-Saussurean turn exemplified by Barthes has not so much killed off the concept of the author as raised it to a higher plane of abstraction. But it may be that, approached from another angle, Barthes's essay will turn out to have its own relation to certain social and technological developments, and that these, in their turn, will help to situate the death of the author as a historical phenomenon.

"Ah Toucoutou, ye conin vous": History and Memory in Creole New Orleans

IN THE CITY OF NEW ORLEANS, SHORTLY BEFORE THE CIVIL WAR, A WOMAN nicknamed "Toucoutou" sued her neighbor for slander. The neighbor had committed the insufferable offense of calling Toucoutou a woman of color in public. This offense did more than wound Toucoutou's pride. It also threatened her marriage to a leading white citizen, potentially rendering it null and void according to a Louisiana state law. If she were indeed a woman of color, her liaison with this white man would have been understood at the most as a "plaçage," and Toucoutou would have been not a wife, but a formalized mistress. 1 Actually, her position would have been exactly that of the neighbor who had accused her of being nègre. By instituting a slander case, Toucoutou hoped to preempt further damage to her reputation and become marked officially as white. Instead, her case failed miserably. In court, her supporting evidence unraveled bit by bit, until there was no doubt in the court's mind that she was of African descent. The Toucoutou case was a failed attempt at obtaining a secure social status as a white person, in effect a failed attempt at "passing." Ironically, this woman who used all of the resources at her disposal to prove her whiteness is remembered now, a century and a half later, only by her Creole nickname "Toucoutou." 2 Almost immediately, her case began to spawn cultural commentaries. During the period of the trial, barber and musician Joseph Beaumont, a Creole of color, penned a devastating critique of her actions and set it to music. 3 This song, "Toucoutou," mocked the woman's aspirations to whiteness, ensuring that the annoyingly repetitive [End Page 232] and catchy tune would follow her around the city and would live after her death. The story of Toucoutou continued to be pertinent in New Orleans, gaining in popularity throughout the rest of the century. By the time Creole of color activist and writer Rodolphe Desdunes wrote his community memoir Nos hommes et notre histoire (1911), he felt a certain obligation to address the legacy of Beaumont and the cultural memory of the "Toucoutou Affair." 4 A decade or so later, the cultural historian Edward Larocque Tinker picked up on Beaumont's and Desdunes's elucidation of the Toucoutou Affair. 5 One could still hear "Toucoutou" sung in the neighborhoods of New Orleans as late as the 1920s, and Tinker deemed it "probably the most cruel" of the Creole songs. In his attempt to rescue Toucoutou from "the malice or hatred of [the song's] long dead author," Tinker conducted a long search for the original court record and wrote the historical romance Toucoutou (1928). With this novel, Tinker established himself as the protector of Toucoutou's legacy. After writing the romance, Tinker buried the court records back into obscurity, insuring that those interested in the case would have to take his version of the circumstances surrounding the case as truth. Lieux de Mémoire Following Pierre Nora, one can understand the Toucoutou case as a lieu de mémoire, a site where "memory crystallizes and secretes itself" into the cultural consciousness of New Orleans. In his historiographical work, Nora distinguishes between two ways of conceiving the past, "history" and "memory." According to Nora, history can be understood as "an intellectual and secular production" while memory "installs remembrance within the sacred." 6 Nora describes these categories further: "Memory is by nature multiple and yet specific; collective, plural, and yet individual. History, on the other hand, belongs to everyone and to no one, whence its claim to universal authority." 7 The historian's attention to lieux de mémoire becomes relevant at a particular historiographical moment--when history becomes conscious of itself as a continually created narrative, as a process which itself has a history, and when memory loses its grounding in specific collectivities and rituals. "The study of...

Culture and Environment: From Austen to Hardy

AT the end of the twentieth century, the two most popular English writers of the nineteenth century are Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy. Year in, year out their books go on selling in paperback in quantities undreamed of by their modern-day successors. The agency which calculates the number of books borrowed from British libraries, for the purpose of paying the modest Public Lending Right fee to living authors, publishes a record of annual borrowings of dead authors: Austen and Hardy are consistently on top. In the United States, Austen*s stock was massively inflated in the 1990s as the result of a series of highly successful film adaptations. What is the source of their enduring appeal? There is a cynical answer to this question, which could be summarized as frocks and smocks. Austen stands for a lost world of elegance, of empire-line dresses, of good manners, of ladylikeness and gentlemanliness in large and beautiful houses. Hardy, meanwhile, represents nostalgia for a simple, honest, rustic way of life among hedgerows, haystacks, and sturdy English oak trees. Together they stand for the imagined better life of both the higher and the lower classes in a world where there is no place for the motor car. They represent the spirit of Philip Larkin's England of shadows, meadows, and lanes that are gone. The cynic will say that nostalgia for the old southern shires is a