Literary-critical Discourse Research Articles

Memory Narratives about the Post-War

The object of the article are the memoirs of postwar freedom fighters, liaison agents and others who aided partisans, which Romualdas Kaunietis had collected for over four decades and which were published as a series of ten volumes, titled Memories of Aukstaitija Partisans, Memories of Aukstaitija and Žemaitija Partisans, Memories of Freedom Fighters, and Years of Fighting for Freedom and Losses. The article aims to answer questions about the ways in which these memories create a specific content and whether they have the potential to become an integral part of the memory culture. The research is based on memory theories and is focused on genre definitions, traumatic experience, strategies of memory narratives and multilayer structure of the books. The aim of the article is to include polyphonic memories in the discourse of literary criticism. Keywords: memories, testimonies, post-war fighting for freedom, individual and collective memory, memory culture, trauma, narrative strategies. DOI: https://doi.org/10.15823/zz.2018.1

Borders of (Non-)Compromise: Oles Honchar in Reception of Ivan Koshelivets

The paper traces the reception of O. Honchar’s personality and works in publications of the journal “Suchasnist” in 1960s–1990s. The author of the paper bases her research on the multi-genre publications by I. Koshelivets, which had utterly polemical tone, and reinforces her observations with the other scholars’ ideas regarding the specifics of interpreting the text.
 Adhering to the presumption of fact and the aesthetic criteria for assessing the work of literature, a Western critic put his maxims against a historical background and in a broad European literary context.
 Defending his anti-cult position in regard to the writer’s personality of O. Honchar, I. Koshelivets evaluated the works of the Ukrainian Soviet literature classic based on the ground of artistic truth exclusively. Despite the fact that O. Honchar mastered the language skillfully and had an indisputable gift of a writer, he always adhered to the ‘boundaries of the permitted’, which made him to limit the scope of themes and adhere to the artificial style with its varnished reality and false poetic flavor. Paying tribute to the fact that O. Honchar supported the Ukrainian sixtiers and always had a pro-Ukrainian position, I. Koshelivets still kept his principled position for decades.
 The critic considered the literary work of O. Honchar as a sample of socialist realism with its indisputable taboos. In particular, he analyzed in detail the most known Honchar’s novel “Cathedral”. According to I. Koshelivets, it got its fame mostly due to the party functionaries that made a relatively weak piece of literature a political event and gave it some extra-literary value, so that the issues of style and literary features became secondary. The author of the paper states that in the conditions of a totalitarian society and ideologically controlled literary process, the talent of O. Honchar couldn’t be realized properly, anyway.
 This controversial topic of I. Koshelivets’s interpretation of the works by Ukrainian Soviet literature classic has been perceived within the oppositional literary-critical discourse as a kind of challenge undermining the ‘foundations’ of the national culture. Although without its detailed consideration the history of Ukrainian literature will be incomplete.

ДОДАТКОВІ ЗАСОБИ ПІДСИЛЕННЯ ВИРАЗНОСТІ ПРЕТЕРИТАЛЬНИХ ФОРМ ДІЄСЛОВА В СЕРБСЬКОМУ ЛІТЕРАТУРНО-ХУДОЖНЬОМУ ДИСКУРСІ

The article deals with an outstanding role of secondary means of enhancing the stylistic expressiveness of preterit verb forms in the Serbian literary discourse on a large diachronic cut, which, along with explicit means, enrich their figurative potential. Such factors include the negative particle не; the negative amplifying particle ни; the particles ено, ето, год, ала; the conjunction junction и; the adverb баш; the preterit forms based on verbs with prefixes or polyprefixed verbs etc. Not only semantic and formal peculiarities of tense verb forms, but also their morphologic and word-formative features come into notice in this respect. In the first instance, negative particles and conjunctions as parts of reiterations act as expressive additional means of preterit semantics enhancing. B. Stancović and V. Ognjenović, R. Petrović often resort to this method’s use. Satirical works by E. Kosh abound with use of the intensifying negative particle «ни» and the conjunction «и» in masterfully built sentences with inverted word order. Various particles decorate not only prose and drama (S. Ranković, B. Nušić), but are also found in the discourse of literary criticism (L. Nedić). The Serbian literary works discourse of different historical periods witness that in general additional means of figurative expressiveness do not double but considerably complete, enrich and harmonize various semantic and expressive range plans of explicit means of past tense grammatical designation. The second prefix’s semantics is particularly interesting in this regard. The research illustrates, in particular, that the second prefix’s role does not come down just to perfectivization of imperfective verbs with prefix. The prefix, which is added to a verb that is already prefixed, modifies its meaning without changing the main verb’s meaning. However, sometimes, like the first prefix, the second prefix has both grammatical and lexical function.

Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination by Kristen Lillvis

Reviewed by: Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination by Kristen Lillvis James Arnett POSTHUMAN BLACKNESS AND THE BLACK FEMALE IMAGINATION, by Kristen Lillvis. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017. 144 pp. $44.95 cloth. Kristen Lillvis's Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination demonstrates how emergent theories of posthumanism and black humanism provide generous new angles through which to look at contemporary African American literature. In this critical work, Lillvis elaborates a genealogy of black women's literature and culture that takes us from canonical neo-slave narratives of the 1980s, such as Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) and Sherley Ann Williams' Dessa Rose (1986), through the funhouse mirrors of Janelle Monáe and Erykah Badu, to the works of Gayl Jones, Octavia Butler, and Julie Dash. Ambitiously covering literary, musical, and visual narratives, this text productively periodizes contemporary black women's writing and demonstrates continuities between past-facing and future-oriented narratives. Lillvis's text is a welcome addition to the creative, critical, and theoretical work surrounding the current moment in black literatures, which we might characterize as Afrofuturist—while acknowledging important critiques of the term—and which urgently calls for an evaluation of literature, culture, and politics of the present as it looks towards an increasingly uncertain future. Lillvis explains in the introductions to the book and to each chapter how contemporary eruptions and flashpoints of racial tension call for a reconsideration of some texts whose scholarly criticism and apparatus has unfairly burdened them, limiting an appreciation of their contemporary applicability and vitality. Indeed, Lillvis's work consistently engages with the weight of literary critical discourse on each of these texts, doing due diligence to situate each within the field of scholarly secondary texts. In the first two chapters in particular, Lillvis strives to bridge the gap between black humanisms and posthumanisms to demonstrate how these artists are "transforming the past into a present source of power for black women authors and characters" (p. 6). In her reading of Morrison's Beloved and her more recent A Mercy (2008) in chapter one, Lillvis endeavors to explain the "posthuman liminality" of Beloved and Sethe and how both characters experience "liminal temporalities" in the continuities of past, present, and future in their fraught mother-daughter relationship (pp. 11, 13). In chapter two, Lillvis focuses on the possibility of black-white solidarities in spite of historical and ideological contingencies and violences in Williams. In chapter three, she turns to the fierce theme of reproductive justice and self-narration in Jones's Corregidora (1975) and, in chapter four, the horizon of multiple gendered temporalities and racialized consciousnesses in Butler's Kindred (1979). Chapter five explores the communicative transversality of black womens' relationships in the short fiction of Sheree Renee Thomas [End Page 246] and Dash's Daughters of the Dust (1991). This final reading points out how, for instance, multiply constituted and temporally and subjectively liminal consciousness is "developing through connections to others—particularly mothers—across space and time" (p. 116). Lillvis's stated project—to draw together black humanism and post-humanism into a hybridized and generative "posthuman blackness"—is ambitious; she wants to describe the "boundary crossings that exist within posthuman cultures [that] enable black subjects to make connections to diasporic history in the present and also imagine the future as a site of power" (p. 8). There is great difficulty in preserving the ambivalence between a poststructuralist, posthumanist rejection of binaristic thinking in favor of multiplicities and Lillvis's focus on primarily biological, feminine gendered kinship structures. She acknowledges that there are inherently some difficulties in her project: "locating power within the bonds that exist between mothers and children in diasporic cultures can be a dangerous project" (p. 116). Nevertheless, Lillvis capably situates a Deleuzean posthumanist multiplicity as an evolution of DuBoisian double consciousness and Fanonian triple consciousness (chapter four) and then goes further, implicating Glissant's notion of transversality (chapter five). Perhaps the shortcoming of the work is not in what it fails to do but in what it fails to name itself doing, if that is not too fine a point to make. The productive labor of mothering is the central focus of nearly all...

Universal, Normative, and Indispensable: Exploring the Emphasis on Eurocentric Literary-Critical Perspectives in the Criticism of the Black Zimbabwean Novel

Literary-critical discourse on the Black Zimbabwean novel constitutes one of several platforms on which the self-other dialectic in Zimbabwe finds expression. This is especially the case at the level of literary-critical theory where the tendency is to advance arguments that frame Afrocentric and Eurocentric literary-critical theories as mutually exclusive. In this article, I explore the scholarship of Flora Veit-Wild and Ranka Primorac on the Black Zimbabwean novel with a view to discoursing the ways in which it can be argued that in their discussion of the corpus, the two scholars are anchored in the Eurocentric framework. In pursuing this objective, I focus on the critics’ reliance on Eurocentric literary-critical theories and apparent discomfiture with Afrocentric benchmarks in their criticism of the Black Zimbabwean novel. Thus, I argue in this article that while the version of critical discourse discussed here speaks to the complex and contradictory ways in which cultures find places of translation and dialogic engagement where history is made, the overall impression created by Veit-Wild and Primorac in their criticism of the Black Zimbabwean novel is that Eurocentric perspectives are universal, normative, and indispensable.

Lexical-semantic means of expressing the attitude of the subject of speech to objective reality in the literary-critical discourse

The article touches upon means of expressing the objectivity and subjectivity of evaluation in literary-critical discourse. We establish those nominative and communicative language items ranging from word to text that perform the function of evaluation expression and forming complex structures serving to convey additional axiological nuances. In our article, we relied on the structural components of evaluation: the subject of evaluation, that is, the person (or socium); object of evaluation — a thing or phenomenon; estimated predicate; the nature of the assessment (or the scale of assessment); estimated stereotype and assessment of motivation. We found out that the main function of the semantic-stylistic category of evaluation is the expression of the attitude of the subject of speech to the objective reality during the communication. Studing the lexical-semantic expression system in the literary-critical discourse and analyzing axiologically-tagged lexemes, we found out that all lexemes can be divided into two groups: with general and partial value. After a comprehensive analysis, an attempt is made to differentiate between the means of expressing objectivity and subjectivity represented by the author’s assessment.

Life boxes. To the question of metaphysical searches of V. Rozanov

The article defines the literary-critical discourse of V. Rozanov, his relevance in the cultural space. The way of critic from undeliberate reflexive strategies to the systematization of his concept, the essence of which is in the synthesis of the concepts – God, nature, people, sex, family is determined. It is indicated that the searches of V. Rozanov are connected with understanding, executed in his own founded Thesaurus. The speech is also about genre styled special features of Rozanov's individual philosophy which is embodied in the lyric-epic texts. It – is emphasized the development of metaphysical ideas from the article "Holy Miracle of Genesis" to the cycles of the "Boxes", and its constituent "Dropped leaves", "Passing" and etc. It is noted that the criticism of the seemingly objective information contains the inner subjective condition of the soul, description of sanctity. It's obvious of intimacy of the researched monitoring objects (life - genesis).

Liberty and the Literary: Coloniality and Nahdawist Comparative Criticism of Rūḥī Al-Khālidī’sHistory of the Science of Literature with the Franks, the Arabs, and Victor Hugo(1904)

AbstractIn 1902 Rūḥī al-Khālidī produced what may be the first modern work of comparative criticism in Arabic. In his History of the Science of Literature, Khālidī (1864–1913), a Palestinian polyglot, used the discourse of literary criticism to develop a modern understanding of liberty, but at the cost of obfuscating the coloniality on which this notion of liberty was predicated. The following discussion examines colonial relations of power in the rise of modern Arabic literary criticism as registered in Khālidī’s comparative treatise. Thus the ensuing analysis employs the conceptual apparatus of decolonial thought to explore Khālidī’s contribution to the nineteenth-century Arab cultural renaissance and modernization, known as the Nahda.

Poetic journeys and other metaphors underlying literary criticism of poetry in English and Russian

The paper sets out to examine the metaphoricity of the discourse of literary criticism dealing with poetry. The research carried out in the framework of contemporary metaphor studies relying, first of all, on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory and its followers, attempts to uncover metaphors structuring the discourse of literary criticism in two distinct cultures - English and Russian. The methodology of the investigation is based on the key principles of the metaphor identification procedure (STEEN et al., 2010) and metaphorical patterns (STEFANOWITSCH, 2006). The results suggest that the main source domain for conceptualizing poetry in literary criticism in both languages is a person. However, this domain features much more prominently in English, whereas the domains of sound and music, painting and journey are more relevant in Russian. Many metaphors are inevitably evaluative - employed to express the writer's positive or negative attitude.

The Prestige of Violence: American Fiction, 1962–2007 by Sally Bachner, Roth and Trauma: The Problem of History in the Later Works (1995–2010) by Aimee Pozorski

<i>The Prestige of Violence: American Fiction, 1962–2007</i> by Sally Bachner, <i>Roth and Trauma: The Problem of History in the Later Works (1995–2010)</i> by Aimee Pozorski

“Our Mother-Tongue”: The Politics of Elizabeth Elstob’s Antiquarian Scholarship

This essay examines the heretofore neglected political context of Elizabeth Elstob’s published defenses of Anglo-Saxon antiquities, evaluating her High Church Tory allegiances and uncovering the relationship between her own motives as a feminist antiquary and contemporary political debates that mixed partisan ideology with emergent cultural standards of patriotism and politeness. The essay’s comparative investigation of Elstob’s prefaces to her English-Saxon Homily (1709) and her Rudiments of Grammar for the English-Saxon Tongue (1715) shows Elstob shifting away from conventional antiquarian rhetoric and objects of study toward the polite discourse of literary criticism where she posits the patriotic instrumentality of the English monosyllable.

The Literary Theory of American Afro-centrism

The Literary Theory of American Afro-centrism Xiomara Santamarina (bio) For those new to Henry Louis Gates’s landmark monograph, the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of The Signifying Monkey offers a bewildering editorial apparatus. The anniversary edition includes two prefaces, one original and one new; an original introduction and a new one; and finally, an epilogue—really an imprimatur—by W. J. T. Mitchell, the editor of Critical Inquiry, a journal for the academy’s all-stars. If this overdetermined layering of commentary doesn’t offer an example of “signifyin(g)” it’s hard to see what does. Representing classic Gates virtuoso volubility, the editorial material ranges across many genres: a conversion narrative, a bildungsroman, a memoir of institutional enterprise, and an aesthetic manifesto. Planting his explorer flag with zeal and conviction, Gates reaches the heights not of the North Pole but of formalist race theory. Signifying Monkey broke new ground when it appeared in 1988. It made visible a wide historical range of early, unknown texts by African American authors along with extensive readings of more familiar authors, like Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright. Gates’s linking of early authors to modern authors was highly generative: building on the earlier work on slave narratives by Frances Smith Foster, Robert Step-toe, and others, he challenged the omission of nineteenth-century texts from discussions of black literature by putting these in conversation with twentieth-century African American literature and theory. In so doing, Gates sought to carve a new route in literary criticism, intending to sail clear of the Scylla and Charybdis of competing Eurocentrist and Afro-centrist literary theories of race difference. The “blackness of black texts” he asserted, was indigenous to and constitutive of a “tradition” anchored in the vernacular of black wordplay, parody, and critique known as “Signifyin(g)” (132). By yoking a distinct, black vernacular to then-prominent deconstruction theory Gates appeared to bridge the divide that kept black [End Page 855] literary theory invisible to the academy at large. If theory, according to Jonathan Culler, can be described as “[the] pugnacious critique of common sense” (4), signifying appeared to be a classic application of the practice. But Gates’s effort to theorize black authors’ Bloomian anxiety about earlier African American texts points tellingly to his own anxiety about his role during the prominence of critical literary theory in the 1980s and ’90s. As he recalls about the institutional culture of English departments at that time, “Our burden was that we had to represent the tradition, in our writings and in our persons, in our comportment and in our demeanor, as members of the faculties of English and American studies departments, to show skeptics that ‘our’ literature was just as complex as theirs, the literature that had been created by white males” (xiv). This imperative to personally represent the race—as “complex,” no less—extended to the conditions of entry for the study of black literature. If African American literature was devalued and seen as transparent, it wasn’t because the methods and ideologies of literary study in the academy were founded in structures of white race privilege (and class); Gates attributed the invisibility of a black literary tradition to a “lack of sophisticated scholarly attention to it” (xxii). His was a rectifying effort “to lift the discourse of Signifyin(g) from the vernacular to the discourse of literary criticism” (xxi). With this formulation Gates invoked a key metaphor from the late nineteenth-century black elite ideology of “uplift” that was the backbone of a middle-class black Talented Tenth’s “civilizing mission” (Gaines 14). Notwithstanding these conservative class politics it did appear that African American literary critics had to be inside the academy in order for black literature to be respected. As to his motivation, in his new introduction Gates recalls wondering “if [Africans] had been theorizing about their aesthetic practices and principles all along, as Europeans had” (xi). Notwithstanding the discovery of an African trope of origin narrativized outside of Western time, the search for a “signifying” trope remained ironically anchored to an Anglo-European consensus that inescapably figured African Americanist theory in relation to its belatedness. Today we could describe...

POETS AND POETRY IN LATER GREEK COMEDY

The comic dramatists of the fifth centuryb.c.were notable for their preoccupation with poetics – that is, their frequent references to their own poetry and that of others, their overt interest in the Athenian dramatic festivals and their adjudication, their penchant for parody and pastiche, and their habit of self-conscious reflection on the nature of good and bad poetry. I have already explored these matters at some length, in my study of the relationship between comedy and literary criticism in the period before Plato and Aristotle. This article continues the story into the fourth century and beyond, examining the presence and function of poetical and literary-critical discourse in what is normally called ‘middle’ and ‘new’ comedy.

Infrapolitics and the (Non)Subject: On Ethics, Politics, and Radical Alterity

Infrapolitics and the (Non)SubjectOn Ethics, Politics, and Radical Alterity Andrew Ascherl (bio) In his recent book, Latinamericanism after 9/11, John Beverley offers a pointed assessment of Alberto Moreiras’s contributions to Latin American cultural studies over the last decade. Beverley orients his commentary on Moreiras’s recent work by examining it as “both a critique but also a new form of Latinamericanism” that operates primarily as a critical practice bearing a strong resemblance to deconstruction (2011, 43). Beverley identifies Moreiras as part of a loosely-connected group of contemporary scholars who have come to represent a deconstructive tendency or intervention into Latin American cultural theory, and he makes a number of objections to the way in which this collective theoretical intervention has presented its various critical projects (which, for Beverley, are related primarily through their shared debt to deconstruction) as sympathetic to a generalized Leftist or emancipatory political [End Page 179] position. Acting as a force for immanent critique within Leftist political thought, such deconstructive interventions in Latin American cultural studies have concentrated their critical force on “certain forms of literary and literary-critical discourse associated with the nationalist or populist left in Latin America, or with positions of ‘solidarity’ with Latin America from abroad” (Beverley 2011, 44). This has resulted in a generalized suspicion of regional or national political forms like those that make up the recent “turn to the left” of several Latin American populist governments that some have called the marea rosada. According to Beverley, the misgivings deconstructive Latin Americanism has about this political shift to the left—and what he sees as an imperfect yet promising movement in Latin American politics—contradicts Moreiras’s “claim that the work of deconstruction prepares the ground for a ‘transformative’ politics” (Beverley 2011, 51). In other words, Beverley views this critical tendency as counterproductive to the development of the transformative politics for which Moreiras seems to indicate his support. For Beverley, it is precisely because of its melancholic attachment to the historical failures of emancipatory political projects in Latin America that deconstructive tendencies in Latin Americanist theory (like Moreiras’s recent work in particular) are unable to make good on the promise of adequately preparing the ground for political transformation. Rather, in its emphasis on “maintaining what Moreiras calls the ‘irruptive’ force of thought, as against the possibility of its commodification or reification,” the work of Moreiras and his fellow travelers in Latin Americanist deconstruction cannot shake off a nagging attachment to political failure, thus preventing these theorists from recognizing contemporary efforts to rebuild transformative political movements in Latin America (Beverly 2011, 53). While it was, once upon a time, the case that deconstruction performed the useful function of freeing Leftist political thought from the chains of the type of anachronistic theoretical frameworks that lead to catastrophe and defeat, nowadays, especially in the wake of the marea rosada, deconstruction itself seems out-of-date in its refusal to abandon a rigorous program of critique of the Left’s shortcomings. Beverley explains: To the extent that the defeat of the Left was due to the inadequate or outmoded character of its discourse—and in particular the inadequacy of that [End Page 180] discourse in the face of globalization and the collapse of communism—then deconstruction could (and did) serve as a place for revitalization. And to the extent that deconstruction is by definition a project of radical dedifferentiation, it could be said to be both in its theory and practice “anticipatory” in some sense of an egalitarian society. But with the resurgence of an actual political Left in Latin America, whatever its limitations might be, deconstruction can no longer command the strategic role it claimed for itself in the articulation of Latinamericanism, even as a critique of those limitations. (2011, 55) For Beverley, this inability to maintain itself as a prefigurative or anticipatory form of transformative politics means Moreiras’s deconstructive Latin Americanist theory has become primarily “a critique of political-cultural articulation as such,” and its immanent political orientation is something along the lines of a “procedural liberalism or ‘republicanism’ (with a lowercase r) in the mode of Hannah Arendt” (2011, 56). And, while Beverley stops short...

Minding Our Keys and Cues: On the Critical Governmentality of Literary Modernism in India

This essay is about the often unremarked legislative control exercised by a certain set of modern(ist) assumptions in contemporary Anglophone Indian literary-critical discourse. Its chief aim is to call for and contribute toward rupturing this modernist hegemony. The essay identifies the major traits of the critical consensus and then discusses its harmful effects on Anglophone Indian literary studies, first, in the hope to persuade that such a consensus indeed exists, and second, to encourage a fresh re-examining of the terms of debate that currently monopolize Anglophone Indian literary studies. The latter task, it suggests, is not only desirable, but urgent.

A Convergence of Book History and Literary Criticism. Case-Study: Henry Lawson in 1890s Sydney

This essay is a literary case-study of the short-story writer Henry Lawson in 1890s Sydney. A book-historical habit of attention to the material circumstances of the original productions is brought to bear. Once the historical and biographical background is established, the essay is shaped around two exemplary acts of Lawson reception, which are simultaneously examples of traditional literary-critical discourse getting into trouble. The critics make certain judgements about what they take to be aesthetic problems, not realizing that they could be fundamentally clarified on a material or book-historical basis. The broader aim of the essay is to raise questions about the role of book-historical method in literary criticism—or, at least, in literary criticism as it could be conducted in the future if the dispersed strands of the neglected concept of the work were regathered and rethought.

The Other Poet. The Ancient Reception of Hesiod

The Other Poet is a doctoral thesis exploring the role of Hesiod in the ancient imagination. Its central question is concerned with the way that Hesiod was given shape in the collective memory of the Greeks. This study thus deals with the processes of remembering and forgetting that created his image, with its meaning and relevance to Greek identity, and more particularly with the different manifestations of his image in Greek literature. It is one of the main tenets of this book that Hesiod\'s image was to a large degree formed by the ancient picture of Homer: Hesiod is decidedly different when presented as allied with, opposed to or simply without Homer. Within this specific framework, this thesis conceives and investigates Hesiod as a concept in later literary-critical discourse, as a locus that was informed with values and qualities, and more generally as a cultural and panhellenic icon constructed and reconstructed by later Greek authors who employed and so re-created him in their own texts.

What Matters Who Hears? Edmund Wilson and the Pragmatics of Literary Critical Discourse

Attention to literature, it is commonly believed, is attention to how what is said is said, along with what is said. Whether understood as New Critical irony, deconstructive textuality, the referential density of literary discourse in the new historicism, or the overdetermined signifier of cultural studies and ideology critique, the foregrounding of the way in which discourse comes to expression - to the point of breaking the confines of the volume and surmounting the identity of the author - distinguishes literature as an object, and literary studies as a discipline, from all others, such as philosophy or history.

Review of *Read It Again*, by Chris Wallace-Crabbe

Read It Again is the fourth collection in Chris Wallace-Crabbe's critical career, a career that has run alongside, or perhaps beneath, a rich and productive poetic career. Since Australian literary critical discourse is so tissue-thin, it is a contribution to be profoundly thankful for. Each of his collections of essays and extended reviews is built in more or less the same way: there is a central core of concerns that the other pieces relate to either closely or tangentially. These concerns have changed as the career has progressed and reflect interestingly on the changing fashions of scholarship and literary criticism since the 1960s. This is not to suggest, though, that Wallace-Crabbe is in some way an innocent or calculating reflector of the Zeitgeist, for beneath the concerns I have been describing is a fundamental interest in the nature of poetry—his own art. Over his career, we have the sense of a man asking pretty much the same basic question but asking it in academic and critical contexts which have changed rapidly.

Notes towards a semiotics of parasitism

The metaphor of parasites or parasitism has dominated literary critical discourse since the 1970s, prominent examples being Michel Serres in France and J. Hillis Miller in America. In their writings the relationship between text and paratext, literature and criticism, is often likened to that between host and parasite, and can be therefore deconstructed. Their writings, along with those by Derrida, Barthes, and Thom, seem to be suggesting the possibility of a semiotics of parasitism. Unfortunately, none of these writers has drawn enough on the biological foundation of parasitism. Curiously, even in biology, parasitism is already a metaphor through which the signified of an ecological phenomenon involving two organisms is expressed by the signifier of “[eating] food at another’s [side] table”. This paper will make some preliminary remarks on semiotics of parasitism, based on the notions of Umwelt (Jakob von Uexküll) and structural coupling (Maturana and Varela). It will look into the phenomenon of co-evolutionary process in community ecology. With reference to empirical history, the project will briefly survey the literary and medical praxis of the 17th century England where large number of creative writings referred to the phenomenon of parasitism, which was deeply embedded in religious practice (e.g., the Eucharist) and political life (e.g., the courtier ecology in monarchy) of the times. Finally, it will touch upon the possible ‘parasitic’ relationship between language and biology.