Intertextual Allusions Research Articles

Jag-reformen

Installing the »I«. Editorials by Olof Lagercrantz in Dagens Nyheter 1960–1975
 This study concerns the Swedish writer and critic Olof Lagercrantz who served as both editor in chief and cultural editor of Sweden’s major daily newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, between 1960 and 1975. The material upon which the article is based is a corpus of 300 editorials, mostly unsigned and hitherto unnoticed by scholars.
 By focusing on matters of style, it is shown that the texts by Lagercrantz distinctively break the laws of the editorial as traditional genre, which in short involved framing in the newspaper’s political standpoints in by speaking from the position of an editorial »we«. Lagercrantz’s editorials differ from this well-trodden mode by using styles of writing that resemble of everyday language and by using forms of letter-writing. To a wide extent, the editorials also play with intertextual allusions to the established literary canon, and often take literature and literary issues as their starting point.
 The article stresses how Lagercrantz finds strategies of installing »himself« in the text, i.e. how he constantly seeks ways of establishing an »I« in a type of text where this particular word is not allowed. The letter-forms seem to convey the sense of presence of a subject in the text. Metaphors of body and voice, and mentioning of everyday, mundane events create effects of intimacy. Attention is drawn to the fact that Lagercrantz even on the level of grammar conveys a sense of body in the text: the number of substantives is by comparison quite high with Lagercrantz – constantly avoiding the adjective, he prefers words which literally have matter, substance.
 Finally, it is suggested that the installation of the »I« in the editorials be considered a performance in both a linguistic and theatrical sense. By means of contrast, Lagercrantz’s figurative and literary writing make apparent the laws of the editorial as generally written and understood. The latter thereby also seems to be highlighted as text, as form of language.

Sextus Propertius: The Augustan Elegist (review)

Reviewed by: Sextus Propertius: The Augustan Elegist Micah Meyers Francis Cairns. Sextus Propertius: The Augustan Elegist. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. xvi, 492. $100.00. ISBN: 978-0-521-86457-2. Patronage, biography, Gallus, and Augustus: in Sextus Propertius: The Augustan Elegist Francis Cairns offers a new consideration of these four difficult aspects of Propertian studies. His analysis is often innovative and thought provoking. Yet, as Cairns himself admits, his conclusions are necessarily conjectural, owing to the limited external evidence and the complexities attendant on distilling historical facts from Propertius’ poetry. The book focuses on Propertius’ relationship with Cornelius Gallus, Tullus, Maecenas, and Augustus, all of whom, Cairns believes, were patrons of the poet. Gallus receives the lengthiest consideration: seven of the book’s twelve chapters attempt to uncover the full breadth of his influence upon Propertius. In this respect, Cairns’s work belongs to the controversial line of Gallan scholarship in which Franz Skutsch and David Ross are prominent. Nonetheless, Sextus Propertius is valuable for its presentation of an impressive range of information. Cairns applies philological and historical methodologies to bring to bear sources ranging from epigraphical evidence and centuriation to analysis of meter and intertextual allusions. His efforts have produced a work which will prove useful for scholars of Augustan poetry, as well as other specialists who study the early principate. In the first two chapters of the book, Cairns discusses evidence about the historical figures behind the personae mentioned in Propertius’ early poetry. He gives particular attention to Propertius himself, tracing a variety of references to the Propertii and to the family of the addressee “Tullus,” the Volcacii Tulli. These chapters are thorough and offer much for scholars interested in Augustan literary history to consider. Yet there is scant solid evidence about [End Page 78] Propertius as a historical figure. As a result, much of Cairns’s argumentation relies on speculation. The reader will do well to keep this in mind, as many of his conclusions, while possible, are by no means incontrovertible. The majority of the book (Chapters 3–7, as well as Chapter 12) treads into even more conjectural territory, turning to the figure of “Gallus” in Propertius’ poetry. Cairns argues that Propertius’ “Gallus” is C. Cornelius Gallus, who he contends was not only one of Propertius’ poetic models, but also his patron along with Tullus during the period when he published the Monobiblos. Cairns suggests that Propertius’ depiction of Gallus can be better understood through the concept of deformazione, i.e., the assimilation and misrepresentation of one poet’s work by another poet. Despite deformazione, Cairns proposes that he is able to trace potentially Gallan “verbal complexes” in Propertius through (1) certain lexical patterns, (2) the maintenance of a term’s metrical sedes, and (3) the presence of tri- and polysyllabic words at pentameter line endings. Cairns’s assertions in this section of the book are particularly persuasive when he finds a confluence between a Gallan “verbal complex” and polysyllabic pentameter line endings. Cairns uncovers so much evidence of Gallus’ poetry in Propertius, however, that one wonders whether his criteria for discerning Gallan features ought to be narrowed. Chapters 8–11 focus on the relationship between Propertius and patronage in Books 2–4 of his elegies, the period in the poet’s career during which Cairns contends that Maecenas and Augustus were his patrons. He believes that the patron-client relationship inherently offered direct benefits to the patron, so that Propertius’ poetry should be understood as explicitly pro-Augustan (for a differing view on Propertius and patronage, see Heyworth, BICS 50 [2007] 93–128). Thus, Cairns seeks to refute the notion of anti-Augustanism in Propertius, contrasting his own views with those of Stahl in particular. Cairns’s work in this section of the book suggests interesting literary-historical contexts for some of Propertius’ elegies, especially 3.14 and 3.17. Yet, I suspect that this work will not do much to change the opinions of those who were not already in Cairns’s camp regarding the nature of the relationship between poets and patrons. The book is generally well edited, although there are a few typographical errors. In addition, Cairns claims that...

Ronsard and the ‘sein verdelet’ of Cassandre: uncovering an unexplored Italian source*

In a well‐known essay, Michael Riffaterre has explained a puzzling reference in one of Ronsard's sonnets, celebrating the beauty of the beloved's Cassandre's breast: “un coeur ja meur dans un sein verdelet” (“an already mature heart in a greenish bosom”). Riffaterre interprets the phrase “un sein verdelet” as an allusion to Ariosto's description of Alcina's breasts as “due pome acerbe” (“two unripe [i.e., green] apples”). But a further look at Italian lyric poetry of this period reveals that there is another possible explanation for this odd expression, one that is instead related to a famous sonnet by Pietro Bembo, which contains a reference to his lady's “senno maturo a la più verde etate” (“mature wisdom in the greenest [i.e., youngest] age”). Ronsard appears to have conflated (intentionally or otherwise) the Italian words “senno” (wisdom) and “seno” (bosom) in this fragmentary citation. He thus shows himself to be far more influenced by graphic and accoustic (but not necessarily semantic) similarities between Italian and French words, engaging in bilingual and intertextual paronomasia or punning, a tendency that might be considered characteristic of his playful approach to imitatio and intertextual allusion.

‘Large complaints in little papers’: negotiating Ovidian genealogies of complaint in Drayton's Englands Heroicall Epistles

ABSTRACTTaking as its starting point Michael Drayton's reworking of a key Heroidean topos, the heroine's self‐conscious reflection on letter‐writing as an activity fraught with anxiety, this essay examines the cultural and literary factors that conspire to inhibit or facilitate the emergence of a distinctive feminine epistolary voice in Englands Heroicall Epistles. In particular, it seeks to explain how Drayton's female letter‐writers manage to negotiate the impediments to self‐expression they initially encounter and thus go on to articulate morally and politically incisive forms of complaint. It argues that the participation of Drayton's fictional writers in the authorial business of revising Ovid for an altered historical context plays a crucial role in supporting that process. This allows Drayton's heroines to recover a degree of textual authority through an independent critical engagement, by turns resistant and identificatory, with his Ovidian sources, including the Metamorphoses as well as the Heroides. A comparative analysis of the ways in which intertextual allusions to these sources are deployed by his male and female writers reveals them to be governed by a different dynamic and used for different ends. It is primarily by means of their complex, intersecting dialogues with their male correspondents and with the Ovidian models upon which they draw that Drayton's heroines are able to formulate a compelling counter‐perspective on the politics of love and history.

Goethe's 'Faust' and European Epic: Forgetting the Future by Arnd Bohm

MLR, 103.2, 2008 579 by Pailer and Liitteken). The essays vary considerably in sophistication and in the degree towhich previous scholarship on either author has been taken into considera tion.The lack of a clear statement of purpose (beyond publishing something on both Gottscheds) and the fact thatboth methodology and language seem to have been left entirely to individual contributors results in theunevenness that tends to ail volumes of conference proceedings. The absence of a joint bibliography (or, for thatmatter, of bibliographies following individual essays) means that this book as a whole has littlechance to inspire furtherresearch on eitherGottsched: readerswho wish to take its suggestions further are reduced to rummaging for literature in the footnotes of individual articles. UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON SUSANNE KORD Goethe's 'Faust'and European Epic: Forgetting theFuture. By ARND BOHM. (Studies inGerman Literature, Linguistics and Culture) Rochester, NY Camden House. 2007. 328 pp. $75;?45. ISBN 978-I-57II3-344-I. This learned and intriguing book bears amisleading title. Itwould be easy to show thatFaust, especially Part Two, borrows many elements from epic: the descent to thedead (theMothers), heroism and love (theHelena episode), thevision of futurity (Faust's last speech). Disregarding these affinities,however,Arnd Bohm concentrates on a scene fromPart One, 'Auerbachs Keller', and particularly on the incidentwhere Mephisto (in theUrfaust, Faust himself) bores into a table and produces wine. This, he argues, isGoethe's version of a standard epic incident inwhich thehero cuts into a tree, finds itbleeding, and recognizes the soul of a dead friend imprisoned in the tree: thusAeneas recognizes Polydorus (Aeneid, Book iii),Dante findsacquaintances in the Wood of Suicides (Inferno,Canto xiii), and Tasso's Tancredi further injures thedead Clorinda (an episode from theGerusalemme liberata towhich Goethe assigns a key role inWilhelm Meister). Is this plausible? The table in 'Auerbachs Keller' is inanimate; there isno suggestion ofwounding; the theme ofhurting a person one loves is certainly present inFaust I, but transferred to the 'Kerker' scene; and there isno evidence thatGoethe conceived the scattered scenes of theUrfaust as part of an epic. Bohm may be on firmerground when he interprets political allusions in 'Auer bachs Keller'. We hear of theHoly Roman Empire, Martin Luther, and thePope, all in comic contexts; Faust and Mephisto claim to have come from Spain, perhaps an allusion toCharles V's claim to theEmpire. Other allusions seem more doubtful. If theproduction ofwine is a parody of theEucharist, where is the bread? If the 'Rat tenlied' is a grossly physical parody of the Song of Songs (a linknotmade by James Simpson, who investigated this intertext inGoethe and Patriarchy (Oxford: Legenda, I998)), what difference does itmake? Bohm ismuch less sensitive than Simpson to theemotional tone of thepassages he quotes and therefore to the literary impact of a possible intertextual allusion. He can also be careless with evidence: thus a letterof I768 mentioning 'Ugolino' is supposed toprove Goethe's early knowledge ofDante, but the reference is clearly toGerstenberg's play Ugolino, then just published (and is so identified in the edition Bohm cites). However, he carries conviction when he identifies the fourdrinkers (at least in the revised version ofGoethe's text) as repre senting each of the four temperaments of humoral psychology. This book is amixed bag. In so far as it is a detailed interpretation of 'Auerbachs Keller' in an extended literarycontext, it might have been better condensed into an article. But one is at least grateful to the author for looking beyond Germanistik in the spirit ofGoethe's verse (quoted here, p. i i i): 'Wer nicht von dreitausend Jahren I 580 Reviews Sich weilB Rechenschaft zu geben, I Bleib imDunkeln unerfahren, I Mag von Tag zu Tage leben.' ST JOHN'S COLLEGE, OXFORD RITCHIE ROBERTSON Benedikte Nauberts 'Neue Volksmdrchen der Deutschen': Strukturen desWandels. By LAURAMARTIN. Wiirzburg: Konigshausen & Neumann. 2oo6. 379 PP. ?49.80. ISBN 978-3-8260-34I6-9. Laura Martin's monograph is the first book-length study ofBenedikte Naubert's four volume fairy-tale collection Neue Volksmdrchen der Deutschen ( 789-92). Naubert who was rediscovered by feminist critics in the I98os-is gradually attractingmore scholarly attention as awriter of fairy tales: theNeue Volksmdrchenwere reprinted in 2001 (Neue Volksmdrchen derDeutschen, ed. byMarianne Henn and others...

Die hellenistische Katalogdichtung des Phanokles über homosexuelle Liebesbeziehungen. Untersuchungen zur tendenziellen Gestaltung und zum literarischen Nachleben

AbstractThis paper is concerned with the fragments of the early Hellenistic catalogue poem by Phanokles. It falls into three sections: The first enquires into the general tendency of Phanokles' work, as far as is permitted by the fragmentary transmission, especially in comparison with another similar catalogue-like poem contained in POxy. 3723. The following two sections concentrate on the literary reception of Phanokles, i.e. the Orpheus segment, first in Hellenistic epitaphs on Orpheus (section 2) and then in the Orpheus passage of Ovid's Metamorphoses (section 3). It concludes that the tendency of Phanokles' catalogue elegy is aetiological and scientific rather than personal and subjective (section 1) and that the intertextual allusions to Phanokles made by Damagetos (section 2) and Ovid (section 3) are polemical rather than affirmative. Especially Ovid seems to make light of the formal technique of catalogue adopted by Phanokles from his archaic model Hesiod.

“We're at Now, Now”: Spaceballs as Parodic Tourism

The shift from modernity to postmodernity reflects a fundamental restructuring of social and cultural life. At such dizzying and disorienting moments of social change, culture's inhabitants seek out new cultural art forms—forms that offer symbolic resources for negotiating the contours of the emerging social landscape. This essay contends that Mel Brooks's 1987 film Spaceballs constituted an innovative form of storytelling known as parodic tourism. As rhetorical analysis demonstrates, by drawing upon the cultural memory of viewers through intertextual allusions, the film fosters an interactive experience that offers viewers the mental equipment needed to navigate life in postmodernity. [R]apid and pervasive change creates the need to develop new ways of understanding the world and of interpreting our experience.— Mark C. Taylor (2001), The Moment of Complexity, p. 19

PAUL HAMMOND, The Making of Restoration Poetry.

WITHOUT question, this study of how Restoration poetry culturally was forged is erudite and valuable. However, the book is also uncommon. It puts forth no comprehensive reading of the Restoration publishing trade or of Restoration poetics as an overarching argument is not proposed. Instead, the volume is ‘designed as a collection of essays which explore linked themes … that … provide a varied, if necessarily partial, map of the complex material and intellectual factors which shaped the poetry of the period’ (p. xxiii). Additionally, the great majority of these linked essays are updated reprints, most older than a decade. Only two of the ten chapters are original to this publication. As a result, Hammond's volume has something of a cobbled-together feel to it, making its chapters perhaps best read in isolation as discrete studies. That is not to diminish the worth of Hammond's subject. As literary history, this book explores the remarkable combination of private and public elements that figure in poetic production. Two themes in particular are tracked. One is the way in which ‘not only … writers, but also … scribes, publishers, and readers’ (p. xxi) created the poetry of the period from 1660 to 1700. The canons of the major writers of the day were fashioned, of course, in large part by what those poets wrote about; however, how writers chose to publish their works bears almost equal importance to what survived and is remembered. Within the thriving practice of manuscript publication, for example, individual readers and scribes made innumerable influential choices about which poems were to find esteem and so be passed along. Similarly, in the emerging world of the print trade, innovative publishers (such as Jacob Tonson) put their crucial mark on the literary landscape. A second theme traced by Hammond is how much of Restoration poetry is fashioned by intertextual allusion, both to other English poets as well as to the classics. Such allusion creates an inner circle of readers who understand the references and an outer circle who do not; it also invites ‘a very active form of reading, making [the reader] in important respects a co-author, another maker of the text’ (p. xxii). All such points of reception theory are well made and contribute significantly to our understanding of the literature of the era.

The Texture of the Divine: Imagination in Medieval Islamic and Jewish Thought (review)

AARON W. HUGHES. The Texture of the Divine: Imagination in Medieval Islamic and Jewish Thought. Bloommgton: Indiana University Press, 2004. Pp. x + 273.Over the past decade, a number of scholars have come to question the existence of a clear dichotomy between philosophy and mysticism in late antique and medieval thought. Scholars for generations have argued the allegiances of such enigmatic figures as Avicenna and Ibn Tufayl for the philosophical and mystical camps, usually betraying their own modern concerns as much as they shed light on the subjects of their studies. Scholars have often characterized Jewish Neoplatonists, who invested their energies into literary compositions at least as much as into syllogistic philosophical treatises, as unsystematic and dilettantish thinkers (Ibn Gabirol being an exception).Aaron Hughes's The Texture of the Divine: Imagination in Medieval Islamie and Jewuih Thought approaches such issues from a new perspective and presents the first attempt to discuss together three interrelated works: Avicenna 's Arabic Hayy Ibn Yaqzan (Alive, Son of Aware), the closely related Hebrew rewriting by Abraham Ibn Kzra, Hay Ben Meqitz (a literal translation of Avicenna's title), and Ibn Tufayl's Hayy Ihn Yaqzan. The two Arabic works have been available in English for some time; m an appendix, Hughes offers the first English translation of the Hebrew from Israel Levin's critical edition. Scholars have often relegated the relationship between the two Arabic -works to one of name only. Ibn Ezra's -work has been discussed within the history of the Hebrew rhymed prose narrative (sometimes called the madama) and as a translation whose very existence testifies to the Jewish- Islamic symbiosis of medieval al-Andalus, but it has not been considered seriously as a philosophical -work that shared common but not identical concerns -with its Arabic parent text. Hughes 's attempt to discuss these three stylized, literary texts together as serious -works that convey perspectives on topics of philosophy - especially the nature of the imagination - is admirable and successful.Hughes terms all three texts tales in -which a protagonist (the narrator in Avicenna's and Ibn Ezra's texts, Hayy himself in Ibn Tufayl's) is ushered into a state of knowledge of the Divine. Hughes ge- netically traces the topos of initiation mediated by a celestial guide to the late antique Neoplatonic tradition. Each story is couclied in a meticulously constructed literary language rich in metaphor and intertextual allusion. It is the texts' employment of nondiscursive language, Hughes argues, that pushes the soul to a realm beyond discursive thought, thereby enabling its intimate encounter with the Divine. Hughes is particularly interested in elucidating the paradoxical role of visual images in the journey toward the Divine, for images are low-level derivatives of the otherworldly source from which they hail but are necessary and therefore valued footholds for the upward climb.Medieval Neoplatonism, as Hughes rightly points out, traversed and synthesized numerous intellectual disciplines including poetry and poetics, exegesis, astrology, and philosophy. Appropriately, Hughes employs an equal number of scholarly techniques in order to explicate the elusive texts under discussion: literary theory, religious studies, aesthetics, and intellectual history. Hughes reads as a scholar of religion as much as one trained in intellectual history. Hence we read of rites of initiation, mythopoesis, and the master-disciple relationship more than one often finds in works dealing with philosophical literature.The initiatory tale is understood according to the tripartite schema of separation/liminality/aggregation posited by van Gennep and in vogue in many areas of scholarship (including Arabic poetry). The pattern fits most smoothly with Ibn Ezra's text. In Avicenna's text, the aggregation stage is admittedly truncated while in Ibn Tufayl's it is extremely elongated and a partial failure (the model of the passage manque might be useful here). …

Nightmares of Absence: Hugo and "Le Rouet d'Omphale"

This article offers a new reading of an understudied poem from Les Contemplations (1856), 'Le Rouet d'Omphale.' By analysing the poem's rich web of intra- and intertextual allusions, from Ovid and Catullus to Hugo's 'La Pente de la rêverie' (1831), William Shakespeare (1864) and Le Rhin (1845), it becomes clear that Hugo's fascination with the legend of Hercules and Omphale, a legend in which Hercules is humiliated and emasculated, is linked to his own terrors of non-existence that are intimately bound up with his insecurities about the act of creation.

The Brothers Incandenza: Translating Ideology in Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest

I disagree with Boswell simply based on the poor logic of the claim that the Dostoevsky allusion is insignificant because it is the more subtly embedded of the primary intertextual allusions. Second, I contend that Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov is much more important to Wallace's overall aesthetic agenda than the more obvious Shakespeare allusion. Wallace has patterned Infinite Jest so meticulously after Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov (1880) that in many significant ways, Infinite Jest is a rewriting or figurative translation of The Brothers Karamazov into the contemporary American idiom and context.2 First, it is clear from Wallace's

The Art of Commedia: A Study in the 'Commedia dell'arte', 1560-1620, with Special Reference to the Visual Records by M. A. Katritzky

ii66 Reviews and thewoods. A chapter on Chronique des septmiseres explores thecrucial, Glissant inspired distinction between 'territoire' (a fixedand closed space, tobe dominated and defended) and 'lieu' (amore dynamic and unstable entity), arguing that themarket exemplifies the qualities of the latter. In another convincing reading,we see how the tropes of settlement, love, andwriting are interrelated inTexaco, while the concluding chapter on themost recentnovel, Biblique des derniers gestes, shows how themantle of writer (rather than transcriber or witness) has finallybeen assumed by the authorial alter ego,Oiseau de Cham. While each section ispacked with richmaterial, thehigh lights, for this reader at least, are Chapters 2 and 5. The formerexplores the notion of the abyss, an imagewhich recurs throughout Chamoiseau's work and which Milne brilliantly links via associated references to the 'matrice', to the foundational Antil lean experience of the slave ship. This vessel, asMilne argues, is also associated, via Cesaire, with literaryorigins, and is inChamoiseau's writing indelibly imprintedwith theprimal scream of negritude. InChapter 5 Milne argues thatL'Esclave vieil homme, ostensibly a novel about a runaway slave's attainment of subjectivity, is also an alle gory of theevolution of theAntillean writer. In another highly original argument, she traces four stages in this trajectory, moving from theexplicit references to the conteur, to the intertextual allusions toCesaire and Glissant, and ultimately she demonstrates how theprotagonist's discovery of the forest space can be readmetaphorically as the Martinican writer's eventual connection with his own local culture. Taking her cue from thewriting itself, and refusing to 'read back' from the ory (creolite or postcolonialism) to fiction, Milne provides meticulous close readings which open Chamoiseau's work up to a range of well-chosen approaches. It is to be hoped that her choice to publish in French will similarly expose thiswriter to a wider audience, given theEnglish-language bias ofmuch of thework being done on francophone postcolonial writing. QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY BELFAST MAEVE MCCUSKER The Art of Commedia: A Study in the 'Commedia dell'arte', I560-I620, with Spe cial Reference to theVisual Records. ByM. A. KATRITZKY. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. 2006. 625 pp., incl. 340plates. ei8o. ISBN 978-90-420-I798-6. Commedia dell'arte studies, in thepast threedecades, have been moving in revisionist directions. In particular, Italian theatre historians have mounted a sustained cam paign todivorce perceptions of thegenre from images formed by nineteenth-century French scholars, startingwith Maurice Sand: toomany of these relied uncritically on inaccurate legendswhich theacting profession had created for itselfby theeighteenth century. The emphasis of research has been pushed back towhat was certainly the seminal creative period of Italian improvised theatre, and what some also see as its 'golden age', starting in themid-sixteenth century and ending around I630. It is on this period that the book under review also concentrates. M. A. Katritzky has for a long time been recuperating and publishing surviving visual images of comme dia dell'arte, pictures often previously unknown to text-oriented scholars. Many of them originate inGerman- or Dutch-speaking countries; so Katritzky has utilized her competence inboth those languages tobroaden the spectrum of evidence for the dissemination of Italian masks and troupes innorthern Europe. The Art ofCommedia is to some extent a retrospective of herwork, rewriting and combining inone volume a number of previously discrete discoveries and reflectionson this subject. In her opening section, introducing and explaining commedia dell'arte, Katritzky chooses tohighlight a particular body of evidence from the 1560s. She quotes docu ments relating to Italian performances inBavaria, and the diaries ofBavarian aristo crats visiting Italy; and spends some time on theparticipation in improvised theatre MLR, I02.4, 2007 I I67 ofmusicians, some of them Italian but others immigrants from the north such as Roland Lassus. The point being made is presumably the chronological priority of such information over much purely Italian material. Certainly ground is also laid for the quantity and importance of relevant visual images which come from north of theAlps. When Katritzky thenmoves to a summary account of the arte genre, her listof 'stock types and players' omits any discussion of theDottore, ofmale In namorati, and of female servants. However, she offers a timely corrective treatment of the figureofHarlequin/Arlecchino. The centrality...

Intertextual Allusions as Bakhtinian Dialogism in Elizabeth Bishop's Poetics.

Tthroughout her career, Elizabeth Bishop(1911-1979)continually sought new possibilities making poetry and stretching herlimits as a poet.The body of her work is marked by an increasing capacity to render elusive and complex experience with remarkable immediacy and to engage in contemporary social and cultural issues. Above all,Bishops accomplishment lies in her unique position inAmerican poetry as a rebel within the literary establishment, not simply subversive of conversational aesthetics, butrecognizedas anauthorityon revitalizing poetry from within traditional forms. This paper examines Bishop's poetics by drawing attention to her literary ambitions and Informed by Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogism, it seeks to shed light on the enabling conditions Bishop's poetic achievement, While tracing her poetic development through her dialogic interactions with others 'ideas, styles and texts .It is the research 's contention,as such,that a study of Bishop's poetics in relation to her artistic theories will bring a better understanding of her distinct and enduring merit. Elizabeth fulfilled in her poetry the real Hope's 'and ambitions the speaker in her prose piece ,In prison articulates. Enacting his desire to be unconventional, and rebellious, Bishop preserves,and renews what has been made even as she strives to find new ways of making poems.Perhaps the most significant impact of her poems on other poets resides in her demonstration that an effective ideological and aesthetic revolt cannot afford to abandon wrestling with the restraints of language and form freedom is knowledge of necessity,as her allegorical prisoner reiterates .While posting challenges of many kinds, Bishop's oeuvre is, as she wished, a valuable legacy of thoughts for present and future generations of poets. Like all great art, her poems offer much more than ideas and designs. Seamus Heaney has put it well in saying that Elizabeth does continually manage to advance poetry beyond the point where it has been helping us to enjoy life to that even more profoundly verif~'ing point where it helps us also to endure it. In doing so, has certainly written poems that endure.

DEREK N. C. WOOD, 'Exiled from Light': Divine Law, Morality, and Violence in Milton's Samson Agonistes. Pp. xxii + 247. Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2001. 35.00 (ISBN 0 8020 4848 X).

AT last there is a book that does not celebrate a regenerated Samson slaughtering the Philistines with God's and Milton's unanimous approval, as the chant of recent criticism has done. And a good book to boot. Though Wood emphasizes the dark sides of Samson's character, he does not deny him the biblical status as a hero of faith. Unlike Wittreich, who sought to establish a contextual tradition of interpreting Samson as an anti-Christ, he concentrates on the text gathering the evidence of Samson's uncharitable behaviour. The thesis of Wood's study seems like a compromise between the orthodox and heterodox interpretations – Samson acts in faith, but in an Old-Testament fashion; his action is so savage because he is still ignorant of Christ's example. This point is so simple that within the opening chapters the reader may easily be rocked by its monotonous rhythm. Wood also argues that Milton's dramatic poem is full of intertextual allusions to Hebrews reminding the reader that the tragedy reflects the harshness of human experience under the Law.

The playful mode of writing in Psycharis’s To Ταξίδι μου (1888)

The aim of this paper is to discuss the literary qualities of Psycharts’s To Tαξίδι μοο, in particular, to analyse specific examples that demonstrate its playful mode of writing. Firstly, it will attempt to place the text in the literary context of its period by discussing its conception and significance for Modern Greek literature. Secondly, it will focus on the element of humour in the text, which can best be described as a playful mode of writing. The playfulness can be explained as raising false expectations in readers in a way that does not become obtrusive or unpleasant, but aims to entertain through the effects of surprise. This mode of writing is created mainly through intertextual allusions, incongruous juxtapositions, and comical, satirical or parodic undertones.

A Baedeker of Decadence: Charting a Literary Fashion, 1884-1927 by George C. Schoolfield Bohemia in London: The Social Scene of Early Modernism by Peter Brooker (review)

214 Reviews of reference to Borges and his essay 'The Library of Babel': the microcosm mirrors the macrocosm, the book is a reflection of the entire library,while the library is both universe and labyrinth, infiniteand unknowable. These and related ideas provide the inspiration fortwo chapters, by Marie-Therese Garcia and Anne-Sophie Huguet, on the Spanish writer Perez-Reverte, whose novels are exceptionally rich in intertextual allusion and set multi-layered enigmas forthe reader to solve. For instance, Le Tableau du maitreflamand, 'une metaphore de l'ecriture et de l'exercice litteraire' (p. 61), pre? sents a complex detective story in which author, characters, and reader are all involved in attempting to solve a crime committed fivehundred years earlier and apparently re? vealed in a fifteenth-centurypainting by Van Huys featuring a symbolic chess game. Other chapters show, rather more straightforwardly, how the private libraries and early reading of Julien Green (Anne Cecile Pottier-Thoby) and Henri Troyat (Rai'ssa Telechova) play an important role in their writings, and how Zola (Tone Smolej) fleshes out some of his characters by describing their formative reading. A number of articles, placed somewhat randomly in the collection, bring a welcome historical perspective to the general theme. In discussing libraries in the Renaissance Francois Roudaut indicates the low levels of literacy and the existence in Paris of over two hundred private libraries of between one and three hundred books, with an average of twenty. Some larger libraries are also described, as are early methods of classification and cataloguing, made necessary by developments in book production. Francois Moureau discusses a typical 'homme-bibliotheque' of the eighteenth cen? tury,Abbe Jean-Joseph Rive, more interested in the books themselves than in their content. He provides an insight into the evolution of libraries, fromthose in the previ? ous century owned by aristocrats, interested in culture and tradition, to contemporary ones belonging to the 'nouveaux riches', who saw the possession of books as affording them social standing. Jocelyne Missud-Juramie's chapter regretting the modern neg? lect of troubadour literature, despite the revival of interest in these works in the Romantic era, constitutes a rather more tenuous link with the library theme. Two authors, Michel Mestre and Michel Tailland, discuss the interesting history of two important Alpine Club libraries, one in Munich, said to be the largest in the world, and the other in London, which claims to possess the largest collection of books on mountaineering . Finally, in a chapter in Italian, Cesare Vasoli considers the contribution of a great librarian, Pope Nicholas V, who had two passions, for books and architecture. The exceptional library he established in the fifteenthcentury formed the basis ofthe present Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, one of the great European libraries. As can be seen, this collection of articles is quite varied and has potentially a wide appeal, but it is probable that the more historical studies will be of greatest interest to the bibliophile or student of libraries. Although no mention is made of it here, a sequel, La Bibliotheque, z, is due to be published in Babel in 2006. It is to be hoped that far more care will be taken with editing in that volume than is the case here. Leeds Susan Dolamore A Baedeker of Decadence: Charting a Literary Fashion, i884-ig2j. By George C. Schoolfield. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 2003. xvi + 4i5 PP- ?30- ISBN 0-300-04714-2. Bohemia in London: The Social Scene ofEarly Modernism. By Peter Brooker. Ba? singstoke and London: Palgrave Macmillan. 2004. xiii + 204 pp. ?45. ISBNo333 -98395-5. An elementary comparison of these two books, Brooker's which studies London, and Schoolfield's which, at twice the length, has astonishingly detailed discussion MLR, 101.1, 2006 215 of decadent writing in European country after country, could begin with the pricing policy. At ?45, no one who should will buy Brooker, and if Yale can afford to produce Schoolfield at ?30, then what are the publishers?or the accountants?for Brooker's book thinking of? The irony is compounded since Schoolfield looks aca? demic and Brooker's book, which has maps and photographs, appears as if it could break through from...

Doubling

Doubling

Hans Werner Henze as Post-Mahlerian: Anachronism, Freedom, and the Erotics of Intertextuality

In the early 1960s Mahler’s music became a vital stimulus for Henze’s compositional technique and aesthetics. Particularly important were its exploration of formal crises, the incorporation of ‘old’ musical materials, and its apparently direct expression of love and beauty. These aspects confirmed Henze’s desire to break out of the restrictions of Darmstadt dogma, into an apparently anachronistic expressive and technical freedom. This article explores structural and hermeneutic relationships between two of Henze’s works of the period – Being Beauteous and The Bassarids– and Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. In Being Beateous the expressive aspects of cadences in the Adagietto of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony are shown to be crucial models for Henze’s exploration of Rimbaud’s poetic expression of the destruction and revitalization of beautiful form. In The Bassarids an intertextual allusion to the second movement of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony is taken as a signal of Mahlerian ‘breakthrough’ as Pentheus has a vision of Dionysian revelries. Henze’s fragmented, broken, allusive, and eclectic musical textures are interpreted as characteristic expressions of eroticism, as well as being more generally symptomatic of his understanding of Mahler’s importance for twentieth-century music.

Dante e le figure del vero: la fabbrica della 'Commedia' by Emilio Pasquini (review)

So8 Reviews part ofour search foran organic wholeness in the futurewhich, though always a dream, we strive for as individuals and collectively, and which defines our very humanity. University of Leeds Max Silverman Dante e le figure del vero: lafabbrica della 'Commedia'. By Emilio Pasquini. Milan: Bruno Mondadori. 2001. viii + 3o7pp. ?18.08. ISBN 88-424-9519-0. Another book on Dante, but this time one that is different. Recasting a number of previously published pieces, one of Italy's leading Dantisti, Emilio Pasquini, has written a coherent volume which eschews academic jargon and footnotes, and limits references to a selective but up-to-date bibliography at the end of each of the nine chapters of the work. His main thesis is that the Divine Comedy is 'un supremo work in progress costruito per successive approssimazioni fino all'approdo onnicomprensivo del Paradiso' (p. viii). He applies Auerbach's notion of 'figura' and fulfilmentto Dante's entire oeuvre (hence the title), seeing the early works as essential forerunners to the making ('fabbrica') of the Comedy. Chapter 1 ('Dai "prefazi" ai "compimenti"') notes how all the layers of Dante's earlier poetry re-emerge in the Commedia, usually in the form of palinodes of those earlier works. Considering the poem as 'opera infieri' also explains some of its major inconsistencies, for instance, the contrast between the Limbo poets mentioned in Inferno iv and those in Purgatorio xxn, the confusion about Manto's place in Hell (Inferno xx, Purgatorio xxn), and the fact that it is not Beatrice who adds glosses to Farinata's and Brunetto's prophecies of Dante's exile, as they had claimed, but Cacciaguida . This view of the Comedy as work in progress allows Pasquini to measure in the rest ofthe volume 'gl'incrementi concettuali e lo sviluppo del dominio espressivo' (P- 24). The second and third chapters ('Ritratto dell'artista da giovane', 'Fra Dante e Guido: la neve e i suoi segreti') chart the poet's early apprenticeship in general, and in particular his relations with Cavalcanti. The whole chapter is an elegant disquisition on the echoes in Dante of Cavalcanti's famous description of snow ('e bianca neve scender senza venti'): the Commedia rejects Cavalcanti's negative views of love, in content terms in Virgil's discourse on love (Purgatorio xvii-xviii), but also in stylistic terms in the final snow simile of Purgatorio, xxx. 85 ff. In the fourth chapter ('Le favole antiche e la biblioteca di Dante: il mito delle "Atene celestiali"') Pasquini reconstructs the essential elements of Dante's library, seeing the purpose of his intertextual allusions in a rarely noted passage from the Convivio (111.14. 7-15), where the poet expresses his desire to reconcile all pagan and Christian sources in the 'heavenly Athens': hence the emphasis on harmony in Limbo and in Paradiso x-xi, where even Siger of Brabant (a 'controfigura' of Cavalcanti) is reconciled with his enemies in the church. Chapters 5 and 6 ('La parabola dell'esilio', 'Fra invettive e profezie') examine the impact of exile on the poet. Pasquini considers the nine prophecies of exile in the Comedy (this highly symbolic number for Dante also accounts for the number of chapters in this book), and also offersnuanced accounts of the varying levels of bitterness in Dante's mentions of exile both in earlier works, such as 'Tre donne intorno al cor', and in the Commedia. The critic is particularly strong here on the filigreework of minute echoes in Dante's mentions of a return to Florence in Paradiso, xxv. 1 ff., at the end of 'Tre donne' and in the firstEclogue. He also calls for a less monolithic approach to Dante's political ideas: instead of always being perceived as reactionary, the poet should be given credit for being the firstto see the dangers of the Avignon Papacy and to define its imagery for successive generations, notably Petrarch in the Avignon sonnets (RVF, 136-38). MLR, 99.2, 2004 509 Chapter 7 ('II dominio metaforico') is a thorough and stimulating analysis of Dante's metaphors and similes, w4iich highlights in particular how they work in networks and systems. Even in terms of expression, then, there is a...

Fighting the Mountain: Some Observations on the Sumerian Myths of Inanna and Ninurta

Two Sumerian mythological compositions share the motif of a god fighting a mountain. One, Inanna and Ebih, tells how Inanna fights and conquers Mount Ebih; the other, Lugal-e, tells how Ninurta, Inanna’s male counterpart, campaigns against Asag, which may symbolize a stone or a mountain. In this paper, I will compare and contrast the accounts of Inanna’s and Ninurta’s mountain-fighting. Naturally our main texts are Inanna and Ebih and Lugal-e, but other texts will also be brought in when relevant. I will first examine the similarities between the two accounts, especially in regard to the literary expressions unique to them and possible intertextual allusions, then examine the differences, including the effects of and the motivation behind gods’ fighting. This paper will show that while the two accounts differ significantly in many ways, they parallel one another closely with regard to how they portray the divine protagonists, the essential character of the antagonists, and their actions.