Pathetic Fallacy Research Articles

Reception, Elegy, and Eco-Awareness: Trees in Statius, Boccaccio, and Chaucer

The essay examines a specific case of “wood-stripping” that occurs in three related texts: one ancient, Statius's Thebaid, and two medieval romance versions of Statius's poem, Giovanni Boccaccio's La Teseida and Geoffrey Chaucer's The Knight's Tale. It argues that all three writers are gazers at nature (in the sense that they situate action in a natural environment that they make visible), by adopting an “affective fallacy” (traditionally called the “pathetic fallacy”) they also convey the “feelings” of the natural world (in this case, its sorrow, suffering, and mourning). In doing so, they become co-partners, even “co-sufferers” or mourners, in the feelings of natural phenomena. The elegy for the trees in Statius, Boccaccio, and Chaucer provides a pointed example of how the intertwining of thinking and feeling that poetry makes possible allows the authors to enter into an eco-critical space that reveals an affective environmental understanding even without the discursive tradition for writing about nature that modern environmentalism has made possible. In contrast to Ernst Robert Curtius's assumption that medieval literary notions of nature follow standard tropes, medieval literary texts in fact reveal a keen awareness and dedicated study of natural phenomenon. Comparing how the three authors discussed here describe the trees, forest, and defoliation in their elegies highlights their knowledge of the natural environment and their affective response to deforestation. Recognizing this eco-consciousness in medieval texts can enhance our understanding of the period while at the same time contributing to a working history of environmentalism.

Parisian Intersections: Baudelaire’s Legacy to Composers by Helen Abbott

Society and Culture edited by Frederick Toner Abbott, Helen. Parisian Intersections: Baudelaire’s Legacy to Composers. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2012. ISBN 978-3-0343-0805-2. Pp. 215. 8 musical scores. $64.95. Abbott investigates how poetry is transformed when it encounters music. She appropriately selects the latter half of the nineteenth century in France as a particularly fecund period for cross-pollination among the arts. Within that vast domain, she focuses on the clash between the artistic expectations raised when the popular intermingles with the formal. Using the Microcosm approach, she studies Baudelaire’s “La mort des amants”(first published in his eleven-verse Limbes of 1851), five musical settings of that poem for voice and piano by contemporary composers, and an obscene parody by two of the Vilains Bonshommes, Paul Verlaine and Léon Valade. Focusing on time, place, and performance (including reading aloud as well as singing and accompanying ), Abbott shows how poets and musicians struggled to define and to embody “musicality” in words, and lyricism in music. She writes elegantly and clearly, knows the mélodie (art song) and chanson (popular song) traditions well, and has conducted thorough research into recent scholarship about Baudelaire. Of particular interest are Abbott’s discussions of how sounds, rhythms, and images in poetry can reflect a struggle between routine and innovation (9). She demonstrates how Berlioz’s music does the same with Gautier’s verse (21–22). Note also her survey of Villiers’ relationship to Baudelaire’s work, which led to the former’s abandoning poetry (14–17). Her analysis of how “La mort des amants” itself resists closure is valuable (22–29). She keenly observes that a poem about dying can become transformed into a resurrection when it is set to music, and even more so when that music is performed (41). Nothing innovative here, of course—dirges, requiem masses, Gibbons’s“The Silver Swan,”arias such as Gluck’s“Che faró senza Euridice”demonstrate abundantly that the mournful effervescence of Symbolism merely revives an ancient tradition, as do the “Farewell Tours” of many popular musical groups today. Chapter 3, on “Musical Theories,” is weak, confusing sound with spelling when characterizing rhymes, missing many patterns of sound repetition while arbitrarily privileging others, and unfortunately succumbing to the Pathetic Fallacy when saying “the intensity of these sounds” (61), where “density” would have been much better (moreover, “intensity” is a technical musical term for“loudness”). Chapter 4,“Song,”begins with an interesting discussion of word history (65–67). In what follows, no account is taken of many prominent rhythmic features: internal divisions such as coupes secondaires in alexandrine verse, of free divisions (ranging from 1+7 to 7+1) in the octosyllable, of the expressive effects of vers impairs, of melisma and ornament in vocal lines, or of the ad lib treatment of the e caduc (better called “weak” than “mute” e) in popular songs. We never come to understand why the five settings for “La mort des Amants” are of musical interest 246 FRENCH REVIEW 87.1 Reviews 247 (even Debussy’s, superior to the others, dates from his early period, and harmonically depends mainly on the Circle of Fifths). The final two chapters, however, on“Parody” and “Legacy,” are perceptive, and reveal Abbott as a promising cultural historian. Oberlin College Affiliate Scholar Laurence M. Porter Binet, Laurent. Rien ne se passe comme prévu. Paris: Grasset, 2012. ISBN 978-2246 -79933-7. Pp. 308. 17 a. Binet continues a tradition of “embedded journalism”in a presidential campaign started by Yasmina Reza, who shadowed Sarkozy in 2007, as chronicled in L’aube le soir ou la nuit (Flammarion, 2007). For this book, Binet shadowed François Hollande during the 2012 campaign. Reza had a subject who provided her with amusing details in 2007; she described Sarkozy in his Ray-Ban sunglasses as “Joe Pesci dans une ruelle de Palerme.” Sarkozy’s pronunciation of “joint-venture” came out as “John Ventura.” Binet’s subject is much less colorful, providing fewer anecdotes, more impénétrable than Sarkozy, plus lisse. The title of the book is taken from a statement that Hollande made, captured in a Canal+ documentary, following Strauss-Kahn’s...

Japanese Poetry and the “Pathetic Fallacy”

Japanese Poetry and the “Pathetic Fallacy”

La guerre amoureuse par Jean-Marie Rouart

ROUART, JEAN-MARIE. La guerre amoureuse. Paris: Gallimard, 2011. ISBN 978-2-07013104 -4. Pp. 244. 18 a. A literary and art critic delivers a presentation at a college near Helsinki. His conference is met with polite defiance with the exception of a one half-Russian student by the name of Helena. Jean-Marie Rouart immediately establishes an atmosphere of absolute purity, clarity, and tranquility which bores the protagonist to the brink of death. Helena will be the narrator’s “pathetic fallacy”: “La vie revenait comme la sève qui fait reverdir un bois mort. J’étais réconcilié avec moim ême. J’étais amoureux” (40). The protagonist’s meeting with a marabout from Tchad—or is it an apparition?—enhances his desire to fulfill his destiny with Helena, even though warned of the catastrophic outcome. Nearly every image utilized by Rouart involves water, its power and its ambiguity. His writing flows like poetry, and the writers and artists he draws inspiration from reflect sentiments in his character’s own life, from Constant to Fromentin, for, as we learn, the tragic flaw of the narrator is not being able to write creatively himself. Thus, he feels himself denied of genuine love, the love of oneself for whom one really is. While entering the relationship with Helena, the narrator is unaware of the maelstrom he is sucked into. He muses on the decency and virtue of this young lady, so very different from the lustful and lascivious Finnish blonds he sees around him. After their one-night-stand however, he cannot forget her torrid passion, and he revisits his memory of her in the torrential Paris summer rain: Le souvenir d’Helena me revenait d’une manière indirecte. D’abord dans l’appétit que je retrouvais pour la vie. Elle m’avait réveillé d’une sorte de somnolence [...] Elle me redonnait de l’intérêt pour les choses, du goût pour les saveurs, le désir d’en humer les parfums. (73) His obsession begins, and with it, his fall, as he tries to reconnect with her, to no avail. The elusive Helena suddenly arrives in Paris. She and the narrator pick up where they left off, but in his attempt to spice things up with erotic objects and enhancements, he finds her repelled. Her reference to their difference in age does not help either. However, because of the age issue, he feels safe taking her to a dinner celebrating Molnar, a satyr-like elderly artist from her motherland, who will be featured in the next issue of the magazine he directs. This dinner becomes the catalyst of events leading to the protagonist’s jealousy, lack of confidence, paranoia, and more. Helena is not what she seems. The narrator, Helena, her fiancé, and Molnar are caught in a web of intrigue from which the narrator may not exit in one piece. He is warned on three occasions that Helena is not his destiny : “Bizarrement, je n’étais pas satisfait: je souffrais de ne plus souffrir. J’avais mal de ne plus avoir mal. Une sorte de vide” (210). When such an ardent passion dies, the world can seem without a pulse, colorless and dry. The narrator can only achieve happiness and peace with Helena in the death of one of them. In this short tempestuous novel by Rouart, all of the emotions of love pass fleetingly. Is love masochism? Is it hurt? Is it exaltation? Is it substance? Is love a war we are all doomed to lose? Is it flying to the heights and then descending precipitously with no net? Obviously, love is all of the above. Rouart’s novel is fluid, visual, and exquisitely written. Each word and reference counts. It is the tale of how most of us rather ordinary individuals have no idea how to hold on to someone/ 796 FRENCH REVIEW 85.4 something wonderful, and how we often sabotage the happiness we have: no matter. We are here for but a small stay, so how does any of it actually impact us? Millburn H.S. (NJ), emerita Davida Brautman VÉDRINES, JEAN. La belle étoile. Paris: Fayard, 2010. ISBN 978...

Don’t Know About You

The persistence of the pathetic fallacy Even among the learned, or those Who think of themselves in that way, Becomes more curious by the year. After all, Do we really insist on “the continuity of action” When things are always going on and off like lights in a storm? Suppose, for example, that a mild afternoon breeze Rises at dusk into a wind that persists And can be heard (and even seen, in the trees through the window) During a cocktail party later that night, Where it accompanies, without interrupting, The conversations, whose elusive content remains unavailable To even the snoopiest reporter. Does anyone still expect The possibility of an abrupt and precise moment of change, The coincidence of a sudden calm just when someone says to himself, Surprised, “I don’t love her”? Of course not. Imagine that the wind just idles and dies, While the party, naturally enough, shifts into high gear (Why shouldn’t it?); and that someone, raising a hand (to wave?), Says “Stop, come here”; and that starting to obey, You cannot, because of the absolutely fresh clearing That the wind has opened between them.

The place of nature in Godard's late films

The place of nature in Godard's late films

Intertextual Patterns in J.R.R.Tolkien’s <i>The Hobbit</i> and <i>The Lord of the Rings</i>

The thesis that every text is a „mosaic of quotations. from other texts becomes particularly obvious when examining literary fantasy, which refers to the implied readers. previous reading rather than to real life. An analysis of Tolkien.s work shows that differences of style and narrative technique can be described as due to the choice of different pre-texts. In The Hobbit, fairy-tale and epic discourses are juxtaposed with everyday speech pattern through irony and parody. In The Lord of the Rings, elements of the nineteenth-century novel like circumstantial realism and pathetic fallacy are supplemented by archaic rhetorical patterns. The concept of intertextuality also enables us to examine the relationship between text and reader.

Stasis, He Says, Is Not the Object, and: Monsieur Duvet & Madame Lit

Stasis, He Says, Is Not the Object, and: Monsieur Duvet & Madame Lit Susan Terris (bio) Stasis, He Says, Is Not the Object Falling birds as white scraps of paper,The mountain spiking a wreath of fog. A promise, like a pomegranate,Bleeds when it is cut, This blood-letting more painful than most.Each seed another bitter sweet. Don't Count. Counting confuses the future.Consider terror, yet don't wrap it In the cotton wool of everyday.Let the paper birds fly. Let the bloody seeds Burst. Let the fog keep its secrets.No matter what you do, he—discarding Red fruit—will turn towardWhiteness, step over the crest and vanish. [End Page 83] Monsieur Duvet & Madame Lit In this new storm, the power has failed, so it'scold in the beach house, though the duveton her legs is weighty and—yes—metaphorical. Occam's razor. Maybe Schrödinger's cat, too,and the elephant in the room. Cat, razor, elephant,and an easy woman, a weeping woman. If what seems is or may have been or happenedbefore it happened, then everyone else sees—the woman and man but sees without seeing. His body's cinnamon scent confuses. His wiry hair.He is here yet not here. Another kind offailure; and some days she feels she doesn't touch his life at all. A cold truth no duvet will help.Once, in jest, he'd called himself Monsieur Duvet,and, in response, she became Madame Lit. Still, rain, sadness—pathetic fallacy—and powerlessness.Soon the sun will reappear and the electricity,light and heat, a literal return. The metaphor, however, the elephant-cat-razor one,will be left tense and unlit.M. Duvet & Mme. Lit. Gender wrong, too. Pathetic. [End Page 84] Susan Terris Susan Terris's 2008 book is Contrariwise (Time Being Books). Recent work has appeared in Field, Denver Quarterly, Volt, The New Orleans Review, and Ploughshares. She has a poem in The Pushcart Prize XXXI: Best of the Small Presses. She is poetry editor with Ilya Kaminsky of In Posse Review. Copyright © 2008 University of Nebraska Press

Aemilia Lanyer's Pathetic Phallacy

In her groundbreaking 1992 article, (In)significance of 'Lesbian' Desire on Renaissance Stage, Valerie Traub described two contrasting models of female same-sex desire appear in textual legacy of early modern England. On one hand, in medical and travel literature one encounters figure of tribade, a woman who sexually penetrates other women using her enlarged clitoris or a dildo.1 Typically an object of moral condemnation and fear, tribade was considered transgressive because she usurped sexual prerogatives reserved for men. On other hand, in fictional literature of period we find relationships Traub, in a conscious anachronism, describes as femme-femme-loving, equal friendships between women are often erotically charged. According to Traub, such depictions of female homoerotic bonds seem to have escaped moral opprobrium reserved for tribade because femme friends did not transgress normative gender roles. Traub speculates such fictional depictions of female friendship may point toward a set of early modern sexual practices similarly existed under radar because they did not challenge gender norms. She admits, however, one with her account is her presumption that erotic practices of 'tribades' and 'femmes' were radically discontinuous; only 'tribades,' for instance, used dildoes on their partners (79).In following pages, I will address this conceptual problem by focusing on Aemilia Lanyer's 1611 Description of Cooke-ham, a work describes a loving relationship between women. The does not mention dildos, and any conclusions one might draw from it about early modern women's sexual interactions must remain highly speculative. does, however, portray poet's desire to induce both pleasure and gratitude in her female addressee by means of a specific literary technique-the pathetic fallacy. In demonstrating writer's power to imbue inanimate objects-in this case natural and built environment of a country estate-with human feeling, Lanyer's explores an eroticized power dynamic between women is mediated by artificial devices. In doing so, constructs a vision of female homoerotic desire English Renaissance scholars have thus far overlooked-one cannot be defined in terms of polarized categories of tribadism and femme-femme love.2Lanyer was one of first English women to publish her original literary works. Her single volume of poems, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, appeared in 1611 prefaced with no less than nine dedications in verse and prose to various noblewomen. The book therefore appears to have been a bid for patronage, one directed most pointedly at Margaret Clifford, Countess of Cumberland, who seems to have granted Lanyer favor in past.3 Both long title and Description of Cooke-ham are addressed to Clifford. The latter describes an idyllic summer Lanyer once spent with Clifford on estate at Cookham, where Lanyer composed poetry to please her noble friend and countess's daughter, Anne. It appears since time Lanyer had fallen into financial difficulties, and most critics interpret as her attempt to re-establish a patronage relationship with her powerful female acquaintances.4 Near end of poem, Lanyer recounts how Margaret Clifford said her farewells beneath an oak tree where women had spent much of their time. Elaine Beilin describes this as the single dramatic event of poem in which the countess leaves a 'chaste, yet loving' parting kiss on great oak, which poet immediately steals for herself, as if trying to absorb countess's love and spirit (205).While Beilin depicts episode as rather benign, an expression of affection between women at a site had sentimental meaning for them both, actual lines of are more jarring:To this faire tree, taking me by hand,You did repeat pleasures which had past,Seeming to grieve they could no longer last,And with a chaste, yet loving kisse tooke leave,Of which sweet kisse I did it soone bereave:Scorning a sencelesse creature should possesseSo rare a favour, so great happinesse. …

Larkin’s “Sad Steps” and the Augustan Night Piece

Unless we are dealing with embedded quotations of unquestionable provenance, there is a sense in which literary allusions are illusions, since, like that most celebrated of illusions, the rainbow, a good few of them are a function of vantage. People located at different points on a rainy landscape are likely to see (a) nothing at all, (b) a partial rainbow, (c) a rainbow in the form of a perfect arc, (d) an inverted secondary rainbow alongside it, or (e)--rarely--a number of supernumerary rainbows within it. By the same token, the literary baggage that individual readers bring to a work will issue in corresponding experiences: no echo at all; the faint suggestion of an echo; an unequivocal echo; an echo that sets off another; and, in some rare instances, an echo that reduplicates itself through a whole literary landscape. Philip Larkin received a thorough grounding in classical English literature as an undergraduate at Oxford, and while the (slightly juvenile) comments he penciled into the St. John's College library Spenser suggest that he received it with some reluctance, his first-class result suggests that he received it even so. His acquaintance with all the major poets of the eighteenth century, and a good few of the second rank to boot, is therefore a matter of public record; whether they echo in Sad Steps to the extent that I shall claim is ultimately a question of where we situate ourselves. Writing to Monica Jones in 1971, Larkin remarked that writer has a book he wants to re-write (Dylan Thomas said his was The Pilgrim's Progress): mine is 'The Seasons' (qtd. in Motion, Writer's Life 415). Such a project might seem at blush to be at odds with the poet's famous critique of allusiveness, his disavowal of the of influence: As a guiding principle I believe that every poem must be its own sole freshly created universe, and therefore have no belief in tradition or a common myth-kitty or casual allusions in poems to other poems or poets, which last I find unpleasantly like the talk of literary understrappers letting you see they know the right people. (273) This anxiety might be suppressed, of course, but it can never be evaded, for just as Edward Young acknowledges the interinvolvement of the dead and the living--From human mould we reap our daily bread (119)--so too almost every word and permutation of words in the language carries its freight of allusion and adaptation. The very fact that Larkin entertained thoughts of rewriting The Seasons confirms this. Had the project ever been realized, he would probably have repainted Thomson's varnished Claudian landscapes in the manner of Hitchens or Nash, and replaced his magniloquence with reserve, but his source would have remained there as the unnegotiable substrate of the enterprise. As it happens, Larkin did redraft, if not a specific Augustan text, then certainly a form with close connections to the period, and it is to this, the meditative night piece, that I propose to relate Sad Steps. Although the latter's title directs us to a sonnet from Astrophel and Stella, Sidney is only tangentially present in the poem, though in three distinct ways. His and chief purpose is to have furnished a pathetic fallacy that bridges the divide between the earth and the moon. Secondly, he seems also to have prompted the shape of Sad Steps, which takes the form an amplified Italian sonnet with a 12-line first position instead of the customary octave, and, after the volta centered on the negative in line 12, a sestet into which the tercets slot themselves comfortably, having earlier suggested the halt cautiousness of the author's passage--first step, second step, pause; step, second step, pause--to the lavatory and back. Initially he makes this passage in the dark to keep tenuous contact with sleep, but severs it when he parts his bedroom curtains, revealing not the sad steps of Sidney's moon (projected as a Petrarchan lover) but rather the flash of a sprinter--The way the moon dashes through the clouds that blow. …

Bangladesh Cricket: Scoring on Passion, but Little Else …

Cricket in Bangladesh and Bangladeshi cricket are two totally different entities. The first is a thriving, throbbing, vibrant passion with a people that only came into existence in 1947 as part of East Pakistan following India's bloody partition, and then became an independent nation in 1971 following another bloody war. The second is a fledgling, wobbling, almost pathetic fallacy that has invited criticism from the entire cricketing world. A few pretensions to flatter here and there, but largely deception; that's Bangladeshi cricket. But if cricket is just a sport, and is to be evaluated as just that, Bangladesh is where it's at. The nation lived, breathed and slept football until some years back, but today, a politically and socially divided set of people come together as one in the name of the game, even if the team it supports does close to nothing in the international arena. Cricketers who would struggle to make a reserve side in an English county are feted as national heroes, their every move is followed and people wait for judgement day – the day Bangladesh as a cricket-playing nation will rub shoulders with the best in the business. And the past – well, it's quite a story! A story that could well serve as the plot for a thriller, with high drama, Eisenstein-like protests, glorious moments, accidents that shook the world and, above all, a sociocultural milieu that needs to be understood and comprehended.

Approaches to metaphor: Structure, classifications, cognate phenomena

The article aspires to present a systematized view on the contemporary understanding of metaphor essence and structure, reviews various classifications of metaphor, and discusses cognate ‘similarity-based’ phenomena in natural language. The opposing views on metaphor as a three- and two-component structure are reconciled in the article through the analysis of different kinds of metaphors. Three types of classifications of metaphor — semantic, structural and functional — are specified and reviewed. Finally, the article examines the cognate phenomena, viz. metaphoric personification (prosopopoeia, pathetic fallacy, apostrophe), animalification, metaphoric antonomasia, metaphoric allusion, metaphoric periphrasis, synesthesia, allegory, and metaphoric symbolism.

Pathetic fallacy: That Canada's arctic sovereignty is on thinning ice

This paper contests the increasingly widespread belief that climate change and Arctic sea‐ice reduction are about to produce a commercial‐shipping challenge to Canadian sovereignty over the Northwest Passage. The author demonstrates that ice‐condition variability and containership economics will not make Canadian Arctic waters a viable alternative to the Suez Canal much before mid‐century, by which time the better option of Arctic transpolar navigation may also be available. He shows that the potential for occasional voyages of rogue, tramp, and non‐cargo ships in the Archipelago could give rise to new Canadian security and law‐enforcement requirements, but not to any great sovereignty challenge. The author reaffirms his 2003 proposal for Canada to approach the US to work out a new Arctic‐waters regime based in part on the recognition that, from a homeland‐security perspective, Canadian law and law enforcement are preferable to internationalstraits status for the Passage. Finally, he urges a reinterpretation of Arctic sovereignty to focus on the capacity of Inuit to lead in a new Canadian occupancy of the high Arctic Archipelago at a time of increased accessibility and geopolitical change.

Thomas Hardy and the Language of the Inanimate

Like the romantic poets, Thomas Hardy might appear "morbid" when considered in terms of John Ruskin's pathetic fallacy. As I argue, however, the pathetic fallacy is a trope, another name for personification which, more than being one trope among many, is an inherent human characteristic of language. Using various examples of Hardy's work, I demonstrate the ways in which personification operates not only as an essential trope to literature, but also as a primary aspect of language and a basic resource of knowledge.

La Voix de l’ombre: pastorale et mélancolie dans l’Arcadie de Sir Philip Sidney

The melancholic pastoral mode plays a limited but essential role in the complex architecture of Sir Philip Sidney’s New Arcadia. It contributes to the narrative demonstration that the pastoral retreat is a trap. The princes increasingly seek the solitariness of deserted places ever further away from their original heroic focus until they withdraw into the cave which inverts the temple motif of Montemayor’s Diana. Pastoral melancholy is also essential in the poetic production of the eclogues that cannot be discounted in spite of the unfinished state of the text. Solitariness triggers a reflexive, involved and existential poetry in which the princes ponder on the somber aspects of the human plight. Erotemas, oxymorons, phonic and semantic echoes, inverted vistas, the expressionistic accents of pathetic fallacy fashion and refashion wavering and uncertain mental landscapes. Interrogations multiply and enduring meaning often seems beyond reach. The speakers seem swayed by violent passions and impotently falter, in the throes of delusions. But their dark ruminations ultimately lead them to acknowledge the need to trust in Providence to answer the needs of a failing and fallible creature.

The Figuration of Reality: Psychoanalysis, Animism, and the "Pathetic Fallacy".

The Figuration of Reality: Psychoanalysis, Animism, and the "Pathetic Fallacy".

“Talked to by Silence”: Apocalyptic Yearnings in Louise Glück's The Wild Iris

is easy, sir he said, obtain a suitable place, a garden, in which one can work without interference and grow with seasons. There can't be too many opportunities left any more. --Jerzy Kosinski, Being There In an interview given more than twenty years ago, Louise Gluck said: I've [...] felt temptation of Absolute as a danger; mysticism, spirituality out of which [...] my best poems will come, has in some ways to be fought. I tried--try--to introduce and reintroduce earthly, because my orientation is always toward eternal [...]. It has a powerful hold over me [...] absolute, eternal, immutable--that condition which does exist in physical world. (Descending Figure 119-20) And in her 1994 Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry, Gluck remarks: The impulse of our century has been to substitute earth for god as an object of reverence. This seems an implicit rejection of eternal. But religious mind, with its hunger for meaning and disposition to awe, its for path, continuum, unbroken line, for what is final, cannot sustain itself on matter and natural process. (21) Since beginning of her career, this craving for that which is immutable, caught in grip of the earthly, temporal, has been an obsession for Gluck. And in cast[ing] about for those situations, or myths, that will answer to that craving, Gluck has found some of her most memorable poems (Descending Figure 119). If anything, such an obsession, such a craving, has become more insistent in Gluck's work as time has gone on, and, I would argue, this obsession comes to climax in her Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Wild Iris (1992), where mutable and immutable merge in three powerful and visionary apocalyptic sequences. The Wild Iris is an extremely risky book. Essentially it consists of a trialogue of voices--God, poet, and flowers in poet's garden. The flowers provide a kind of arena and act as a kind of referee for between two primary protagonists, poet and God. The natural cycle of life, death, and resurrection in a garden thus becomes literal ground for and frame upon which this is carried out, while plants and flowers (pathetic fallacy with a vengeance) actively participate in discussion. The dominant dialogue, however, is carried on between divine and human protagonist/antagonist, and this dialogic discussion/ debate is stressed through structure of book, which is almost equally divided between two voices of these speakers. The itself centers on impossibility of any resurrection beyond human, earthly realm as in a garden. The poems spoken by poet-protagonist are best described--perhaps inevitably so given terms of setting and identity of antagonist--as prayers (or anti-prayers), and they are explicitly associated with Divine Office of canonical hours. Seven poems are titled Matins and ten Vespers. It is interesting that both matins, first of canonical hours, and vespers, penultimate hour in Divine Office, are prayers prayed in twilight hours. These two sequences, then, suggest beginnings and ends, ends and beginnings, placed in contexts of times in which natural illumination, literal light, is diminished, blurred, or blotted out. Brought together in such twilit times, these prayer-poems evoke typical apocalyptic time of a not yet, even if it is also a time prescient with what is nevertheless an inevitable end--an end vivid in vision but one that, paradoxically, one must survive. As I have suggested elsewhere, One of paradoxes of apocalyptic mode is that it is bound up with questions of temporality in general and [. …

The rescue of Romanticism: Walter Pater and John Ruskin

The fascinating relationship of two contemporary Victorian critics Valuable and timely in its long historical and critical perspective on the legacy of Romanticism to Victorian art and thought, The Rescue of Romanticism is the first book-length study of the close intellectual relationship between Walter Pater and John Ruskin, the two most important Victorian critics of art. Kenneth Daley explores the work and thought of both writers in context with other Victorian writers, and enlarges the issues at stake between them, connecting these issues to ongoing artistic, cultural, and political concerns of the world. Professor Daley gives a more finely honed picture than ever before of romanticism's emergence as a literary concept in Victorian England, detailing the political differences that characterize the opposition between John Ruskin and his younger contemporary, Walter Pater, over the nature of romanticism. Individual chapters reassess the Victorian reception of such romantic figures as Wordsworth, Dante Gabriel Rosetti, Leonardo, and Michelangelo. Daley demonstrates how Pater's modern reading of romanticism emerged from Ruskin's distrust of romanticism and from Ruskin's arguments and examples defining pathetic fallacy. His discussion of Ruskin's Oxford lectures and their timing in Pater's developing career refresh the intersections of the two bodies of work and the portrait of the Victorian period in general.

Folklore's Pathetic Fallacy

Folklore's Pathetic Fallacy Robert Cantwell (bio) [Editor's Note: This article is the first in a series of articles that we hope to publish in JAF in a new section we have entitled "Dialogues." We have initiated this section in order to publish articles and commentaries that are different from "Notes" and somewhat different from the regularly published articles. We will place essays here that we hope will invoke and provoke readers to write responses, to be published in the next issue. For this section, we invite serious rejoinders or extensions of thought on social, political, and disciplinary grounds.] Ruskin asks, what is "the difference between the ordinary, proper, and true appearances of things to us; and the extraordinary, or false appearances, when we are under the influence of an emotion, or contemplative fancy; false appearances, I say, as being entirely unconnected with any real power or character in the object, and only imputed to it by us[?] "For instance, in Alton Locke,— "They rowed her in across the rolling foam— "The cruel, crawling foam." "The foam is not cruel, neither does it crawl," Ruskin writes. "The state of mind which attributes to it these characters of a living creature is one in which the reason is unhinged by grief. All violent feelings . . . produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the 'pathetic fallacy.'" The pathetic fallacy, Ruskin goes on, is "eminently characteristic of the modern mind. . . . For instance, Keats, describing a wave breaking out at sea, says of it— "Down whose green back the short-lived foam, all hoar, "Bursts gradual, with a wayward indolence." ". . . Homer would never have written, never have thought of, such words. He could not by any possibility have lost sight of the great fact that the wave, from the beginning to the end of it, do what it might, was still nothing else than salt water; and that salt water was neither wayward or indolent." But "Homer has some feeling about the [End Page 56] sea; a faith in the animation of it much stronger than Keats's. But all this sense of something living in it, he separates in his mind into a great abstract image of a Sea Power. He never says the waves rage, or the waves are idle. But he says there is somewhat in, and greater than, the waves, which rages, and is idle, and that he calls a god. "With us, observe, the idea of the Divinity is apt to get separated from the life of nature; and imagining our God upon a cloudy throne, far above the earth, and not in the flowers or the waters, we approach those visible things with a theory that they are . . . governed by physical laws. . . . But coming to them, we find the theory fails . . . that, say what we choose about them, the instinctive sense of their being alive is too strong for us; and in scorn of all physical law, the wilful fountain sings, and the kindly flowers rejoice . . . we fall necessarily into the curious web of hesitating sentiment, pathetic fallacy, and wandering fancy, which form a great part of our modern view of nature. But the Greek never removed his god out of nature at all; never attempted for a moment to contradict his instinctive sense that God was everywhere. . . . But in thus clearly defining his belief, observe, he threw it entirely into a human form, and gave his faith to nothing but the image of his own humanity" (Rosenberg 1963:64-79). This curious snare of hesitating sentiment and "contemplative fancy," Ruskin's "pathetic fallacy," is precisely the epistemological predicament of the folklorist, who, more than either anthropologist or sociologist, finds herself caught in a participatory indeterminancy rooted in folklore's ontological relativity; neither objectively discoverable nor altogether "constituted," seldom present to investigation independent of any a priori representation, virtually impossible to perceive much less analyze absent a background radiation of anxiety, nostalgia, interest, advocacy, even personal identification, its derivative "theory" rarely more than an extrapolated and rationalized justification of "practice" (often itself an opportunistic adjustment to an ever-shifting configuration of political, economic, and historical contingencies), folklore...

Folklore’s Pathetic Fallacy

Research Article| January 01 2001 Folklore’s Pathetic Fallacy Robert Cantwell Robert Cantwell Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of American Folklore (2001) 114 (451): 56–67. https://doi.org/10.2307/3592378 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Robert Cantwell; Folklore’s Pathetic Fallacy. Journal of American Folklore 1 January 2001; 114 (451): 56–67. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/3592378 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of American Folklore Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2001 American Folklore Society2001 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.