Figure Of Echo Research Articles

Silence, gender and metamorphosis in Joanna Walsh’s ‘Worlds from the Word’s End’

This article explores paradoxical silence as a strategy of contemporary feminist short story writing in Joanna Walsh’s ‘Worlds from the Word’s End’ (2017). To draw out the story’s engagements with writing women’s agency beyond the binaries of embodiment and disembodiment, passivity and activity, inner and outer life, it reads Walsh’s text at the nexus of three interrelated traditions. First, it situates the story within a genealogy of women’s ‘non-writing’, which develops new aesthetic strategies through the short story form for both writing and reading the silences of women. Secondly, it explores the significance of women’s speech loss in Ovid’s The Metamorphoses to the transformative drive of Walsh’s poetics of silence, with a specific focus on the figure of Echo. Thirdly, it places Walsh’s epistolary short story into conversation with philosophical debates about the distinct silences of plenitude and vacuum, transcendence and immanence, the human and the nonhuman, by reading it comparatively with Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s ‘Ein Brief’. In conclusion, it is argued that ‘Worlds from the Word’s End’ ironizes the Ovidian topos of the silent figure who nevertheless speaks her desires in order to trouble the binaries that regulate strategies of voluntary silence in the feminist short story.

Między tęczą a kryształem. Echo u Macieja Kazimierza Sarbiewskiego jako gatunek odbicia w świetle jego komentarza do Summy teologicznej Akwinaty

Between the Rainbow and the Crystal Glass: Echo in Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski as a Species of Refraction in the Light of His Commentary on Summa theologica by Thomas Aquinas The aim of this essay is to highlight an important gap in the research into the works of Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski (1595–1640), Jesuit neo-Latin poet and philosopher, namely the fact that his still unpublished lectures on one God in three persons and on angels, held in Vilnius Academy in the years 1631–1633, have remained largely unexplored by researchers so far. The main thesis is that these thomistic commentaries can considerably deepen our understanding of the dialectical and theological context of Sarbiewski’s poetry. For example, they shed new light on his Marian imagery (inter alia, the usage of the invocation ‘purum sine fraude vitrum’), or on his way of avoiding the danger of the infinite regress of concepts as being similar to mirror reflections. The argument concentrates on the figure of echo in two poems: the praise of Jan Karol Chodkiewicz and the ode Secunda leuca seu Vaca as influenced by a new version of the Litany of Loreto (Litaniae Deiparae Virginis Mariae). It makes use of the definition of echo as taught in the Coimbra Jesuit Aristotelian courses. The phenomenon of echo is taken together with other species of refraction: the rainbow and reflection (Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, 98a.24–29), and set against the background of new technologies, such as the production of crystal mirrors.

Echoing last words: Luis Camnitzer, Vanessa Place and critical dependency

ABSTRACTThis article explores the political stakes of reprising the last statements of executed offenders as an artistic gesture. Last words represent a potential site of contestation of the sovereign power that is both reflected and constituted in the spectacle of capital punishment. Works of art reprising and recirculating these last words may, but do not necessarily, embody and amplify this disruptive potential. Jacques Derrida has suggested that claims of literary autonomy from the sovereign law in fact rely on the same logics of transcendence and idealisation that sustain the practice of the death penalty. This poses the problem of political commitment: is it possible to engage with the last words of the condemned without perpetuating the logics that underpin the spectacle of capital punishment itself? The figure of Echo, the mythical repeater of the last words of a sentence, might allow us to envisage a position of critical dependency: her repetitions neither transcend nor claim autonomy from the spectacle they partly reproduce, yet they differ from it nonetheless. The works of Luis Camnitzer (Last Words, 2008) and Vanessa Place (Last Words, 2015) are examined as examples of critical dependency’s minimal potency.

Sounding Situated Knowledges: Echo in Archaeoacoustics

This article proposes that feminist epistemologies via Donna Haraway's “Situated Knowledges” can be productively brought to bear upon theories of sonic knowledge production, as “sounding situated knowledges.” Sounding situated knowledges re-reads debates around the “nature of sound” with a Harawayan notion of the “natureculture of sound.” This aims to disrupt a traditional subject-object relation which I argue has perpetuated a pervasive “sonic naturalism” in sound studies. The emerging field of archaeoacoustics (acoustic archaeology), which examines the role of sound in human behaviour in archaeology, is theorized as an opening with potentially profound consequences for sonic knowledge production which are not currently being realized. The echo is conceived as a material-semiotic articulation, which akin to Haraway's infamous cyborg, serves as a feminist figuration which enables this renegotiation. Archaeoacoustics research, read following Haraway both reflectively and diffractively, is understood as a critical juncture for sound studies which exposes the necessity of both embodiedness and situatedness for sonic knowledge production. Given the potential opened up by archaeoacoustics through the figure of echo, a critical renegotiation of the subject-object relation in sound studies is suggested as central in further developing theories of sonic knowledge production.

Robert Germany

Robert Germany Bret Mulligan and Deborah Roberts Robert Germany, Associate Professor of Classics at Haverford College, died suddenly on March 7, 2017, a devastating loss to his family, friends, colleagues, and students. Robert was born on November 8, 1974 in Corpus Christi, Texas. He did his undergraduate work at the University of Texas at Austin, graduating with highest honors, with a major in classics and minors in German and mathematics. He then earned a Ph.D. in classics at the University of Chicago and taught for two years at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, before joining the Classics Department at Haverford College in 2008. He was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2015. Robert originally set out to study Greek religion, but he soon found his passion in Latin literature, and especially Roman comedy. His book Mimetic Contagion, published in 2016 by Oxford University Press, is a work of great richness, which uses a particular episode in one Roman comedy to explore ancient concepts of the mimetic and its effects and in so doing, offers new insights into the Roman theatrical tradition, and ideas about representation and the viewer in the visual arts, cultural constructions of sexual behavior, and the history of classical scholarship. His most recent work includes a series of brilliant essays on aspects of space and time in Roman theater and other cultural arenas, among them “The Unity of Time in Menander” “Civic Reassignment of Space in the Truculentus,” “All the World’s a Stage: Contemplatio Mundi in Early Roman Theater” and his last talk, “ “The Unity of Time in Terence’s Hecyra.” Some of these look forward to what was to be his next project, a wide-ranging investigation of the unity of time in ancient and modern drama, in theory, and in classical scholarship. He maintained a deep interest in Greek and German literature, publishing articles on “The Figure of Echo in the Homeric Hymn to Pan” and “Virgilian Retrospection in Goethe’s Alexis und Dora.” Inspired by a four-month stay in Ethiopia, Robert was beginning work on the Ethiopic translation of the Greek bestiary Physiologus and the surprising relationship between the “three natures” of the lion and Chalcedonian theology, an indication of his ceaseless curiosity and constant growth as a scholar. Students responded to Robert’s passion and recognized him for the polymath he was: he knew all about everything, and his wide-ranging [End Page 567] and playful intelligence showed the apparently tangential to be germane and revelatory. Robert believed in education as a “full body sport” and he was never content to restrict teaching to the classroom or restrict classroom teaching to traditional methods; he constantly strove to break down the boundaries that separated students from the material they were studying. For his work to bring the ancient world alive to students, Haverford awarded him its “Innovation in Teaching Award” in 2011. Robert was both a mesmerizing lecturer and a gifted leader of discussion, whose encouragement and skillful direction gave students the delight of finding in themselves the capacity to arrive at conclusions that pulled everything together. He would listen to students with glee, praising them for making their point, before telling them they had it exactly backwards. As he then showed them what they had not considered or not known their look of shock would be replaced by a smile. Students found him wise as well as learned; he came at things from unexpected angles and showed them how this could be done; he taught them what it meant to be human. They presented hilarious performances of Roman comedy under his guidance and flocked to his home for reading groups, study sessions, meals, cookies and conversation. A supportive, affectionate, and ever-enlivening colleague, Robert was a mainstay of Haverford’s happy Classics Department and its cordial collaboration with Bryn Mawr, and a welcome contributor to the bi-college program in Comparative Literature. At weekly departmental meetings he brought the same genial spirit to everything on the table: the latest administrative requirements, pedagogy, his colleagues’ work in progress, movies, and lunch. Robert participated enthusiastically in the life of the college at every level; nothing was ever a chore. He...

Empathy’s echo: post-apartheid fellow feeling

The concept of empathy has been set to work, across a range of fields, to mark a break with the relational patterns of apartheid. Similarly, empathy has been identified, historically, as that which, within apartheid and colonial rule more generally, exceeded or escaped relations of domination. This paper approaches the discourse of empathy from a different angle, taking empathy as a concept embedded in colonial thinking. Given that so many claims to empathy have had recourse to psychoanalysis, the paper focuses on empathy in Freud’s work, specifically Dora’s case and Freud’s analysis of Michelangelo’s Moses, which are read alongside the images and installations of contemporary South African artist, Nandipha Mntambo, in particular her collection of images and installations in The Encounter. Three scenes are conjured wherein empathy confronts its impossibility, but rather than foreclose on empathy as a post-apartheid condition, it is through the disclosure of the aporias of empathy that it might be brought into the realm of the ethical through a practice of reinscription and through the figure of Echo.

Dickinson, Melville, and Posthuman Poetics

Dickinson, Melville, and Posthuman Poetics Eliza Richards, Chair, Co-Organizer and Peter Riley, Co-Organizer Click for larger view View full resolution Participants in the “Dickinson, Melville, and Posthuman Poetics” panel at MLA 2016, from left to right: Eliza Richards, Stephanie Youngblood, Jason Bell, Brian Yothers, and Karen Leona Anderson. Photo courtesy of Maryse Jayasuriya. The panel explores how androcentric traditions of literary criticism have limited our understanding of nineteenth-century poets’ experiments with the categories of body, form, and environment. The four papers suggest that Emily Dickinson and Herman Melville located authorial sovereignty at an indeterminate juncture between the human and the non-human. Though these poets are typically imagined to be experimental because they are “before their time” or “proto-modern,” these papers show how nineteenth-century poetics speak to contemporary anxieties surrounding materiality and the possibility of political subjectivity, challenging the parameters of individualized lyric expression. Starting from the premise that many extant critical frameworks obstruct an ability to engage with (or detect) nineteenth-century decentered or othered articulations of the self, the presenters go on to suggest [End Page 138] that these articulations have a strong legacy in the twenty-first century. In conveying the possibilities of alternative configurations of sovereignty, they delineate a state of consciousness that eludes exceptionalist teleologies or totalizing representations of a lyric speaker. Through their poetic experiments, Melville and Dickinson ask us to question fully articulated contours of being and to think again about the coordinates of the self and its surroundings. 19th-Century Poetics in the 21st Century; or, What Melville and Dickinson Teach Us About 9/11 Stephanie Youngblood Tulsa Community College The relationship between testimony and literature is often understood through the framework of catastrophe or grief, but this emphasis on mourning encourages the perception that testimony is antithetical to politics. Nineteenth-century experimental poetics challenges that contention through indirect modes of response that facilitate political aesthetics. Specifically, lyric figures in Melville and Dickinson engage the so-called impossibility of representation that contemporary theorists, such as Jacques Rancière, say destroys the dissensus needed for politics. Lyric figures of voice, essential to traditional accounts of testimony, are central to the ways indirect aesthetic practices resist the normative bias that traditional testimony brings. Both Melville and Dickinson take up lyric through the figure of echo, which shifts lyric voice from a figure of connection with nature into a complex mixture of human and machine. Voice as echo is thus not simply a proto-modern fracturing of the self but instead points to the ways in which testimonial voice is always mediated by a mechanized reproduction; it is already a type of machine that challenges the equations we make between lyric voice and the figures of animation that seem to give it “life.” In Melville and Dickinson, echo both posits a Romantic notion of the origins of poetic voice and makes explicit the mechanistic means by which that voice—and testimonial response—emerge. Melville, Dickinson, and Unspeakable Nature Karen Leona Anderson St. Mary’s College From rhinoceros to mouse, from whale to insect: in this paper, I argue that the radical shifts in scale in Dickinson and Melville unmoor, sometimes violently and sometimes comically, a sense of scale predicated on human size and human understanding. Such unmooring challenges positivist forms of writing and reading. As alternatives, Dickinson offers the idealization of a language-less author and Melville offers an unreadable text. Human knowledge of [End Page 139] other “things” is displaced by a form of sociable intersubjectivity between objects. Dickinson’s scale-shifting nonhuman personifications of a wordless “Nature” were likely informed both by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s omnipotent poet in Nature and by Elizabeth Oakes Smith’s feminized and child-centered natural theology in “The Sinless Child.” But if “Nature” functions for many nineteenth-century writers as a reassuring solution to the problem of the unmanageable scales of the nonhuman, Dickinson’s “Nature” tends to emphasize that unmanageability, correcting not the chaos of the nonhuman world but the solipsism of the exceptional human subject. I present Melville’s scale-shifting anthropomorphism as a central question of Moby-Dick, as its protagonists toggle between empathy for the nonhuman and its...

Samuel Beckett Et La Mécanisation D'echo

This paper wants to situate Beckett's work within the cultural context of the beginning of the twentieth century when acoustic technology was strongly linked to the art of the avant-garde. I am going to analyze the 'voice of the telephone' in and I shall accentuate the pertinence of the idea of "the discourse network of 1900" (Friedrich Kittler) regarding Beckett's work. Finally I want to show how acoustic technology appears in and in In these processes the figure of Echo has been mechanized and materialized by Beckett in our view.

The Figure of Echo in the Homeric Hymn to Pan

This paper presents a literary reading of the Homeric Hymn to Pan, tracing the effects of phonetic, verbal, and thematic repetitions throughout the hymn and especially surrounding the appearance of Echo in line 21. A close reading of the structures generated by these repetitions reveals a complex superimposition of structural schemata, and a psychoanalytic reader-response analysis relates our deferred expectation for closure to Pan's disappointed desire for Echo in the erotic myth. The nightingale simile, in its allusion to the Odyssey, enacts another kind of echo and illustrates the self-conscious intertextuality of the archaic Greek poetics of variation.

Write or be Written: Early Modern Women Poets and Cultural Constraints ed. by Barbara Smith, Ursula Appelt, and: Dramatic Difference: Gender, Class, and Genre in the Early Modern Closet Drama by Karen Raber (review)

MLRy 99.1, 2004 157 early modern specialists [. . .] who began their professional careers in the late 1980s and early 1990s' (pp. xi, xv). The essays within it span a wide range of authors and issues. Some offernew interpretations oftraditionally canonical texts, such as Gordon McMullan's reading of the homosocial economy within The Two Noble Kinsmen in the context of its shared authorship. Others argue for reconsideration of neglected works: in her essay on Mary Sidney, Suzanne Trill identifies a modern 'prioritising of oppositional writing' by women at the expense of genres, such as translations ofthe Psalms, that were more central to early modern culture (p. 197). Still others, such as Michael Pincombe' s discussion of early modern notions of (geographical) Lesbianism and (sexual) lesbianism, explore topics usually marginalized in the literary culture of the period. In fact, however, the essays are not so diffuse as they might at firstappear. Those that engage with female-authored texts often highlight problems of self-expression, and their solution: Susan J. Wiseman shows how female poets found an authorita? tive voice by using the figure of echo (or Echo), while Helen Hackett argues that Pamphilia's withdrawal into privacy in Urania is paradoxically enabling forher (and by extension Mary Wroth) as a writer. Ros Ballaster finds in works by Margaret Cavendish and Katherine Philips idealized, feminocentric constructions of a preCivil War order, and notes the irony that it was the collapse of that same patriarchal order that enabled their own writing. Contributors repeatedly explore how power relations affect conceptions of the self: James Knowles relates Marlowe's theatrical play upon notions of secrecy and publicity to post-Armada surveillance and paranoia; Amanda Piesse attributes contrasting notions of selfhood in The Comedy of Errors and Pericles to divergent Elizabethan and Jacobean strategies of monarchical selfpresentation . Mark Thornton Burnett links early Jacobean political anxieties?the unification of the kingdoms, the monarch's relation to his predecessors on the Eng? lish and Scottish thrones?and Marston's The Dutch Courtesan, with its imagery of bodily collapse and its contrasting fantasies of femininity. A final unifying theme is the contributors' engagement with the criticism of the previous decade. Trill's essay is mentioned above; Sasha Roberts accepts the commonplace of early modern women as associated with the private sphere, but shows how privacy could often be enabling; Kate Chedgzoy argues, in her discussion of early modern 'white women's stake in the construction of racially and sexually marked identities', that criticism has tended to focus on blackness and difference (p. 111). Throughout the book, this engagement tends to be with methodology and conclusions , rather than underlying premisses. At times the younger scholars are almost blase' about theory, notes Ann Thompson in her Afterword (p. 254); in her own Epilogue, Rose disquietingly attributes changing notions of heroism to 'the usual suspects' of socio-economic change (p. 114). It is to be hoped that the theoretical revolution which has inspired three such diverse and intelligent books will continue to interrogate itself rather than solidifying into orthodoxy. University College London Tom Rutter Write or be Written: Early Modern Women Poets and Cultural Constraints. Ed. by Barbara Smith and Ursula Appelt. Aldershot, Burlington, VT, and Singapore: Ashgate. 2001. xxiii + 28ipp. ?40. ISBN 1-84014-288-x. Dramatic Difference: Gender, Class, and Genre in theEarly Modern Closet Drama. By KarenRaber. Cranbury, NJ: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses. 2001. 338 pp. ?38. ISBN 0-87413-757-8. Write or be Written is a satisfying collection of essays, organized around addressing 'the meaning of poetry in the lives of Early Modern women and the importance of 158 Reviews writing as an act of cultural engagement and commentary'. It is divided into four sections, each essay complementing the others and reinforcing the impact of the work as a whole. The collection opens with Pamela Hammons's concise historical and textual overview of the writing of Katherine Austen, showing her awareness of her role as widow and prophetess, in each case allowing her to be one step removed from the ostensible sources of her power as a writer. This essay will encourage a re-examination of Austen's work within this context. Margaret...

Disseminating "Circumference": The Diachronic Presence of Dickinson in John Ashbery's "Clepsydra"

John Ashbery's Clepsydra (Rivers and Mountains), a bewildering torrent of a poem, becomes more intelligible on discovery of an internal structure: it is bounded at each pole by the figure of circumference, which appears first at line 40, near the poem's beginning, and again at line 248, at its end. term circumference has many poetic reverberations, and within the American tradition, one of the loudest is that of Emerson in his essay Circles, which opens with the famous declaration: eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world. St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose center was everywhere and its circumference nowhere. (168) As many critics have noted, Emerson is an important influence on Ashbery, but Emerson is not the only source for the poetic term circumference. Emily Dickinson too is indebted to the American essayist who was her contemporary, but she took the term and made it her own, and it is around her Circumference that Ashbery considers drawing a circle.(1) In one of her most frequently cited circumference poems, The Poets light but - (Poems 883), Dickinson describes the influence that poets have on later readers as a kind of vital Light that ensures that the poets' Circumference will be preserved. Both of Ashbery's references to circumference reflect this Dickinsonian luminance, explicitly linking an image of light to a spatial circumference figure.(2) In this way Clepsydra registers the dimension of Dickinsonian circumference that suggests that the vital Light of a prior poet continues to exist, even after she is dead, by lighting the Lamps of later poets. earlier poet's Circumference thus exists simultaneously with that of a later poet (who is also giving forth light, though Dickinson herself is not concerned with the nature of the later poet's poetic production). This simultaneity is central to Clepsydra, which explores the relationship of the individual to his or her past, while at the same time, through its references to Dickinson, thematizes its relationship to its own poetic past. Clepsydran exploration of diachrony bears a striking resemblance to the theories of influence that John Hollander develops in Figure of Echo. I will touch on Hollander's theories because they can provide a working vocabulary for this essay's investigation of Clepsydra's diachronic relationship to Emily Dickinson. Hollander differentiates between outright allusion and echo in order to describe a mode of reference that is less overt or intentional than the direct invocation of a prior by a later one. He explains that a poetic figure can be said to echo a prior figure when the author is not conscious of the reference, or when the specific textual context has been lost to the reading audience. In the case of echoic references, the later poem's meaning is not dependent on interpretive inclusion of the prior poem. What is especially interesting about this theory is Hollander's emphasis that, whether echoic or direct, the allusion is by nature diachronic, and even self-referentially so. He explains that the allusive echo, leading from poem to poem, [is] itself a trope of the later text (113), and this is true for Ashbery's poem as well.(3) That the echo trope resounds throughout Clepsydra is not surprising, given the poem's interest in personal and poetic histories. But Clepsydra is uneasy about its debt to Dickinson and the problem that remembering the past generates for it, an uneasiness that more nearly suggests Harold Bloom's aggressive theories of influence and belatedness than Hollander's theories of simultaneity.(4) However, Hollander does provide a useful model for understanding the later text's awareness of itself in relation to the earlier one by describing this awareness as a trope of the fallen and unfallen conditions. …

Echo, Desire, and the Grounds of Knowledge: A Mytho-Poetic Assessment of Buttimer's Geography and the Human Spirit

In Geography and the Human Spirit, Buttimer argues that the history of geographical concern is marked by cyclical time, which is distinguished by three phases: Phoenix, Faust, and Narcissus, By taking a longer look at one of these myths, Narcissus, it is possible to suggest that Buttimer bases her account on some problematic assumptions. Thus, the figure of Echo, absent from Buttimer's telling of the myth, can return to disrupt her story. This mytho-poetic assessment reveals something of the way in which ‘others’ are constituted in her story: I take this erasure to be symptomatic of an ‘othering’ humanism, which is predicated on the other, but considers itself self-grounded and thereby distances itself from others. The conclusion questions Buttimer's universalism, her concept of cyclical time, and her sense of a liberation cry of humanism, I suggest that an emancipatory geography cannot rely on undisclosed and marginalized ‘others’, in this case represented by the figure of Echo.

The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After

The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After

The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and after John Hollander

The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and after John Hollander