Expression Of Spirit Research Articles

Geometry and Music: Rita Dove's 'Fifth Sunday'

Abstract The eight short stories in the collection are considered as a short story sequence or ensemble. They are linked with Joyce's Dubliners in terms of epiphany and naturalistic motifs in an analysis of the effect of socially prescriptive worlds upon the African-American protagonists. The relationships of ideology and form through the symbolic functions of geometry and music as organizing principles are discussed. 'The Vibraphone' is compared with Joyce's 'The Dead' on the theme of belatedness, and, in enacting the conflicts between verbal narrative and musical expression, is read as metafiction. Rita Dove's collection of short fiction published in 1985,[1] takes its title, as she has explained in an interview, from the idea of there being some leeway, some place for individual expression, even in the most regulated forms of institutional control: Fifth Sunday is also the title of the lead story and refers to those occasional months where there are five Sundays. In the church I attended when I was growing up, fifth Sunday was youth Sunday, and the entire service -- all except the sermon -- was conducted with the church youth. Using that title for the book was an intuitive decision, one I can't really articulate -- I suppose there is the sense of a fifth Sunday as something special -- once in a blue moon -- as well as the idea of being in control only occasionally, and in strict accordance with the social rules.[2] She went on to say that the eight short stories all 'feature individuals who are trying to be recognised as human beings in a world that lives to pigeonhole and forget' (p. 165). Her interest in the possibilities for individual expression of spirit within very socially prescriptive worlds unites the stories thematically: their variety of form is an index of the diversity of that expression. 'Fifth Sunday', the lead story, moves to its concluding negative epiphany with a Joycean assurance. Dove herself invites the analogy in stating that several of the stories 'are fairly traditional, a la Joyce's Dubliners' (p.164). 'Fifth Sunday' deploys naturalistic motifs to track and drag the romantic desires of Valerie, the teenage protagonist, within the confines of an urban American black church. As in 'Araby' in Dubliners, 'Fifth Sunday' mirrors the painfully limited environment against which youthful fantasy presses, but Dove is ideologically acute in revealing that Valerie's romantic longings and aspirations are not an escape, but the most marked internalization of the narrow constrictions of her social group. The revelation of the conclusion is how readily Valerie is re-absorbed into the petty downside of her society. The preparation of effect to make such a conclusion both an unpleasant shock and also inevitably proved, is finely done. In this tightly controlled narrative the imagery which acquires a structural value is that of geometry. The opening sentence condenses the essential framework with a poetic economy: 'The church stood on a hill all to itself, at the intersection of Prospect and Maple' (p. 3). The church is the focus of all Valerie's social aspirations, and it suggests a fine vantage point, exclusivity, with nature and culture amicably combined and coded in the names of the streets. However, it becomes apparent that the parts of the area available to blacks, even relatively prosperous respectable ones such as Valerie's father, are rundown and decayed. The park, in which 'birds sat as if drugged in the trees' (p. 4), is a geometric construct which facilitates transit. The second paragraph lays down the ironic markers precisely: Catercorner from the church was a park. It was everything a park should be: green, shaded, quiet. Stout black poles marked its perimeter at regular intervals, and strung between each pole were two chains, one at waist-level and another six inches from the ground. The park itself was segmented by two concrete paths that cut it on the diagonals, like a huge envelope. …

The Spirit and Its Letter: Traces of Rhetoric in Hegel's Philosophy of Bildung (review)

Reviews169 goal of theoretical heterogeneity. Not only do all the articles reveal a similar approach, but their endnotes often cite the same critical sources, and the overwhelming impression is a validation of Anglo-American Women's Studies, informed by European semiotic sophistication. However, while it was not the editors' intent that their chosen articles should seem uniform, this is not really a defect in the book. In fact, the reader (particularly, perhaps, the woman reader) is left with the sensation of having participated in the articulation of a powerful shared experience. The similarity of the pieces, finally, grows out of a generation of scholarly feminists coming to terms with the effects of paternal authority—familial, intellectual, and academic—in their own lives and work. Whitman CollegeRoberta Davidson The Spirit and Its Letter: Traces ofRhetoric in Hegel's Philosophy o/Bildung, byJohn H. Smith; xii & 283 pp. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988, $35.75. A process offormative education stands between us and Hegel's philosophical writings. The great merit ofthis book is that it illuminates the rhetorical training which permeates them. Hegel's education lay in the rhetorical practices of an earlier age. He worked to master classical languages through the rhetorical and stylistic exercises he practiced. Smith's thesis is that Hegel's early writings and the PL·nomenology itself are colored by this formative educative process. The central concept is that of Bildung, the process by which individuality is formed out of the common materials of culture. Hegel's task is to deal with the philosophical positions arrayed before him without becoming simply one alongside the others. His solution is to accomplish for philosophy the traditional goal of classical rhetoric, to forge a style of one's own out of an identification and transcendence of traditional forms. Smith's analysis puts the PL·nomenology in a new light: Hegel's accomplishment is as much rhetorical as philosophical. Now we can see clearly the strategy and tactics behind Hegel's use of metaphor, trope, and rhetorical device to catch the unwary consciousness and propel it beyond itself. Each stage in the development is a rhetorical exercitatio; taking up, varying, and translating the traditional or customary forms and expressions of spirit. The collapse of each paradigm of truth and reality in the Phenomenology is, at the same time, the forging of an individual. The schoolboy outgrows the mechanical work of acquiring the grammar of dead languages, as he later outgrows those imitative exercises which once took up so much time. Similarly, 170Philosophy and Literature both Hegel and Spirit come into self-conscious being through a process of overcoming otherness in past forms. Through this process Hegel's philosopher is to come into possession of a purely conceptual prose medium in which the richness of the Absolute Idea is exhaustively displayed. The organic metaphors used to describe the dialectic actually cover up its rhetorical origin. Hegel uses rhetorical devices while playing down their use. Not only do individual metaphors and tropes inhabit the Phenomenology, but its very structure is tropical. The cognitive configurations of Spirit are also onesided allegiances to favored tropes: metaphor, metonymy, synecdochy, and irony. Dialectic is the movement generated by die breakdown of each trope in turn as it discovers itself unable to bear the burden of Absolute Knowledge. If we follow the traces left by classical rhetoric, many sections of the PL·nomenology acquire a new life, and the movement of Hegel's dialectic takes on the rhythm of changing tropes. Spirit takes up a successively metaphorical, metonymical and synecdochical relation to reality. Metaphor stands for the stage of naive identification; metonymy for contiguous relations and alterity; and synecdochy for what reminds us of the whole. Finally, irony turns the tables on any position which accounts itself stable before the permutations and combinations of Spirit have been fully worked out. This book pioneers a rhetorical analysis ofHegel's early texts. Though limited by its subject matter, many of the issues raised have relevance to philosophy ofmind and education far beyond a merely academic study of Hegel's writings. I recommend it for the light it sheds both on Hegel's early works, and on the function of rhetoric in...