Poetic Knowledge Research Articles

Veiled Movements in "The Vale of Esthwaite"

The Vale of (1787), Wordsworth's first sustained effort at original composition, was first published in 1940 by Ernest De Selincourt in Poetical Works of Wordsworth as an example of juvenilia. Among scholars who treated De Selincourl version of poem, Geoffrey Martman's account in Wordsworth's Poetry, 1787-1814 is fullest, which argues that The Yale of turns upon mind of a poet enthralled by nature despite signs that his imagination may well be independent of nature (76-89). Other treatments of De Selincourl's edition appeared in F. W. Bateson, Paul Sheats, Thomas Weiskel, James Ave rill. Jonathan Wordsworth, Kenneth R.Johnston. and Kurt Fosso. The latest edition appeared in Earlier Poems and Fragments, 1785-1797 (Cornell, 1998), edited byjared Curtis and Carol Landon, and described by Duncan Wn as the most accurate and carefully edited text of poem that we are ever likely to have (3). One can learn much about Wordsworth's evolving practice from this text, experimenting as he does with description, moral encomia, and personal reflection/retrospection inspired by Virgil's Georgics and contemporary Gothic and local color. Incomplete and underdeveloped as poem is, it parleys an initiation whereby young poet recognizes his poetic calling, as Jonathan Wordsworth first surmised in Two Dark Interpreters: Wordsworth and De Quincey (224). Comprised of three major sections or movements in manuscript, poem could be read as an anthology of visual and visionary scenes, as Landon and Curtis remarked, but there is a certain cleverness about it that makes it more than discrete imitative exercises. The argument, to adapt a Romantic convention, may be sketched hvpolhelically as follows: of Esthwaite--Superstition--Spirits, as Might Be Heard by a Minstrel--Mystic Twilight--Veil of Night--Melancholy--Power of Fancy--Storm Visions--Spectral Visitations--Remembrance of Grief following Death of Author's Father--Whispering Voice--I lope for Peace at Close of Life--Faith in Friendship --Consolation in Nature and Memory--Homage to Native Region--Filial Love--Homage to a Friend. These headings could be faithful to poem as it exists in manuscript and as young Wordsworth might formulated them for An Evening Wath and Descriptive Sketches (both 1793). For all of lapses or shifts in theme, tense, and tone, particularly in third movement, a line runs through first two movements, one that turns upon young poet's place in literary tradition, which in turn impacts final movement. Wordsworth cleverly and self-consciously acknowledges over course of poem literary tradition that precedes him, and gestures toward origins of his own poetic calling with an opening verse paragraph that I call a View of Esthwaite (1-24) that foregrounds georgic inquisitiveness inflecting first section by describing some of the larulskip's varied treasure (2). The narrator finds himself in gloomy glades of Superstition (25 ff.), where the ringing of druid Sons (31-32), moves him to ask Why roull on me your glaring eyes/Why fix on me for sacrifice (33-34, echoing Wordsworth's Irregular Fragment). The question imparts a sense of foreboding, trading as passage does in English druidic folklore. Then musing onward would I stray/Till every rude sound died away, speaker observes to lead off verse paragraphs that I tagged Spirits, as Might Be Heard by a Minstrel (43 IT.), which exhibit further awareness of other English folklore along with a knowledge of Virgilian and contemporary poetics: And oft as ceased owl his song That screamed roofless walls among Spirits yelling from their pains And lashes loud and clanking chains Were heard by minstrel led astray Cold wading thro' swampy way Who as he flies mingled moan Deep sighs his harp with hollow groan He starts dismal sound to hear Nor dares revert his eye for fear Again his harp with thrilling chill Shrieks at his shoulder sharp and shrill Aghast he views. …

Духовно-исторические смыслы поэзии А. С. Хомякова (опыт культурологической реконструкции)

Духовно-исторические смыслы поэзии А. С. Хомякова (опыт культурологической реконструкции)

Istrian Italy and the homeland: The lessons of poetry

This article uses Eugenio Montale's poem ‘Dora Markus’ to reflect on considerable complications attending the concept of the patria vera, or the homeland, in borderland Italy. The geographical locales are Istria – the peninsula southeast of Trieste on the Adriatic coast – and Carinthia some distance to the north, where Italy meets Austria and Slovenia. Both places have been multiethnic and politically contested regions for centuries, changing political hands so frequently that they make a mockery of the very notion of homeland. This article considers historical, poetic, and linguistic knowledge to offset much of the nationalist, ideological rhetoric surrounding the two world wars.

Aquinas on Poetry and Theology

hiding of in figures is useful for the exercise of thoughtful minds. Summa Theologiae, I, q. I, a. 9, ad 2. WHAT BEST UNCOVERS THE TRUTH OF THINGS? For most people, suspect, the obvious answer to this question is our capacity to think, the ordinary yet extraordinary gift of human But, if that's the case, what are we to say about poetry in relation to truth? Does the genius of poetry serve to reveal or does it obscure it? This question is almost as old as imaginative literature itself. As one commentator puts it, Plato raised it early, and answered it negatively. He denied poetry any claim to truth, in both the logical and the moral senses of the word: --the logical, because poetry, according to him, imitates an imitation of reality and is thus thrice removed from the of the Ideas; the moral, because poetry is a lie, a fiction that feeds and waters the passions instead of drying them up. Aristotle was the better philosopher here. He saw that poetry grew out of man's mimetic and harmonic instincts, and that, though dealing in fictions, it was akin to philosophy in its adumbrations of the universal: Poetry, therefore, is more philosophical than history, for poetry tends to express the universal, while history describes the particular. (1) Aquinas, as we know, is often inclined to take the side of Aristotle and, in this matter, he has no hesitation in emphasizing the mimetic genius of the art. He writes for example, Poetry makes use of metaphors for the sake of representation since as human beings we naturally take delight in representation. (2) And he says further, The poet's task is to lead us to something virtuous by some excellent description. (3) But elsewhere Aquinas speaks of poetry or poetic knowledge as being in truth (defectum veritatis). (4) What can he possibly mean by such a declaration? At first hearing, it sounds like a rather unlikely statement for a Christian artist and theologian to make. Is Aquinas not aware that divine revelation itself, in its final and definitive expression, makes use again and again of the language of poetry? Aquinas, as it happens, has no hesitation whatever in asserting that in Holy Scripture spiritual truths are fittingly conveyed with bodily metaphors. (5) He cites a passage from the Old Testament in which, through one of the prophets, the of Israel declares: I have multiplied visions, and have used likenesses by ministry of the prophets (Hos 2:10). (6) And, then, in a further, clear affirmation of the language of metaphor, Aquinas notes: God provides for everything according to the capacity of its nature. It is natural for human beings to come to intellectual truths through sense perception, since all our knowledge takes its origin from the senses. (7) Aquinas, when addressing the subject of poetry in these texts, is clearly affirmative in his judgment. Why, then, does he find it necessary elsewhere to speak about poetry as deficient in truth? To answer this question it will be helpful to understand the context in which the phrase defectum veritatis occurs. In the Summa, for example, when Aquinas employs the phrase, his concern is to compare poetic knowledge and expression with sacred knowledge and expression. (8) And he is impressed by the fact that poetry, unlike theology, tends by its very nature to resist abstraction. In that sense, it remains inaccessible to speculative thinking. He writes, Poetic knowledge is about things which because of their deficiency of (propter defectum veritatis) cannot be laid hold of by reason. (9) Walter Ong, commenting on this statement, remarks, [Aquinas] is aware of the unsatisfactory and inconclusive nature of discussion about any poem. Because of its peculiar insistence on remaining concreted within the act of apprehension itself, a poem resists the very abstraction by which we would understand it. …

Poetry, Beauty and Contemplation: The Complete Aesthetics of Jacques Maritain by John Trapani, Jr.

BOOK REVIEWS 649 work will change some viewpoints of those who live in and with the culture of death. BASIL COLE, O.P. Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception Washington, D.C. Poetry, Beauty and Contemplation: The Complete Aesthetics of Jacques Maritain. By JOHN TRAPANI, JR. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2011. Pp. 188. $32.00 (paper) ISBN: 978-0-8132-1825-0. “Let us tell her that there is an ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry” (Plato, Republic 10.607b). Ever since Plato there have been philosophers who have claimed that there is a war between philosophy and poetry. As Jacques Maritain suggests, philosophers often desire to pull away from the sensual world with their abstractions and theories. Among other things, like truth and goodness, they seek to learn, apart from their own concrete experience, how their concepts and theories might cohere with one another. The poet is decidedly different. He wishes to dwell in the land of the Heraclitean flux. He sits down in the sensual, the individual, the momentary and the transient. Hence, when any philosopher tries to write a philosophy of poetry, especially if he appreciates poetry, he may have a very divided mind. On the one hand, he wishes to appreciate and explore the depths of the inner being of individual persons, things, and their actual concrete existence in space and time, and on the other hand, he will want to extricate himself from these very same things in order to develop clear, abstract, timeless and universal principles concerning poetry. And these may seem to his poetical self as dry as dust. Indeed, as Maritain wrote in his Degrees of Knowledge and elsewhere, “The metaphysician breathes an atmosphere of abstraction which is death for the artist. Imagination, the discontinuous, the unverifiable, in which the metaphysician perishes, is life itself to the artist. They are playing seesaw, each in turn rising up to the sky.” Thus, there is a constant danger for the philosopher. He may, like the literary critic, wish to be closely bound to individual authors or texts, restrict his scope to them and so lose out on providing a properly philosophical benefit. Or the philosopher may, like the proverbial ivory-tower or armchair philosopher arranging abstractions, lose his real-life blood ties to individual works. In this work, John G. Trapani, Jr. has done a wonderful job of balancing this seesaw. On the one hand, he colorfully communicates his 650 BOOK REVIEWS insights into the unique influences upon Maritain’s life and work as well as illustrating Maritain’s own poetic insights. On the other hand, he has done the painstaking work of delineating the historical and ahistorical conceptual parameters of Maritain’s chief aesthetic concepts of poetry, beauty, and contemplation. In addition to conceptual charts diagramming the concepts of intuition and connaturality and in addition to the helpful summaries of Maritain’s thought, we are provided with, in effect, miniature philosophical lexicons delineating the major notions. And for those exploring Maritain’s aesthetics, these are invaluable. As there are now many Thomistic works on beauty and quite a few on Maritain’s aesthetics, some might ask what makes Trapani’s work unique. Several things are worth mentioning. First, his work on the history and conceptual parameters of the basic terms in Maritain’s aesthetics surpasses others in depth and quality. Take, for example, the terms of poetry and intuition. Trapani carefully shows their roots in Henri Bergson’s philosophy, causing the reader to want to read Bergson again. He traces the journey of these concepts from their inception in the later versions of Art and Scholasticism and Art and Faith—the correspondence with Jean Cocteau—to their emergence into full-fledged notions in The Situation of Poetry and Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry. Trapani tells us that we should not mix and match the terms of poetry and poetic knowledge because, as he cogently argues, poetry is ontologically prior to the latter. He makes us aware of the priority as he illumines Maritain’s famous definition of poetry in Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry as “that intercommunication between the inner being of things and the inner...

Poetic Knowledge and Cultural Renewal

IT HAS BEEN OVER A DECADE since the appearance of John Haldane's essay, Ethics in America, first delivered as a lecture at the University of Notre Dame subsequently published in the pages of Logos. Haldane's essay is in part an encomium to those thinkers institutions that, in the latter half of the twentieth century, reinvigorated academic moral debate in the United States with arguments inspired by the thought of Aquinas. But Haldane's essay is also a plea for greater promotion of Thomism beyond the walls of academia. The essay urges what Haldane calls the of serious moral thinking in American public life in the culture more widely. (1) Haldane diagnoses a cultural degeneracy in American life, rooted in a pervasive crippling moral skepticism. How to combat it? With the truth, is Haldane's reply, and not just any truth but that which matters most; the set of general truths about the structure of reality about the human condition. (2) is not that such truths had not been reproposed defended in the Thomistic revival Haldane praises. But even this revival was not immune from controversy. Debate throughout the 1980s 1990s between the so-called new natural-law theorists classical natural-law theorists drew attention to the question of how the facts of human nature may or may not be related to our moral obligations. The old debates about fact's relation to moral value returned in a dispiriting Thomistic reprise. In his essay Haldane offers his own reasons why we should reject the disassociation of fact value, yet he does so not merely to score an academic point. For Haldane, the recovery of the idea of moral value's dependency upon the facts of human nature is the key to the restoration of a truly serious moral culture. By identifying the roots of modern skepticism in the divorce of moral value from fact, Haldane indicates that the cure for our cultural ills lies in resources other than the ones commonly available in our postmodern world. What is needed is a revival of forms of pre-modern moral understanding. The general strategy Haldane offers is that of presenting ethical claims in terms that show their ground in commonly known facts about human Yet he concedes: It is part of the cultural problem that those facts have themselves become somewhat obscured. So what to do? Haldane submits: think the effort to render [facts about human nature] vivid in phenomenological consciousness is best pursued by those possessed of literary artistic imagination, rather than by philosophers. (3) Haldane's suggestion is that works of literary artistic imagination are the most persuasive means of showing a degenerate culture the grounding of a Thomistic ethics in the facts of human nature. In short, Haldane proposes a retrieval of what Jacques Maritain calls knowledge. By knowledge, we should understand a kind of knowledge that comes about via engagement with poetic imitations of reality. The term is here used in the Aristotelian sense, as including all narrative art lyric, though we might extend it even further to include music, painting, dance, understanding with Aristotle that all of these arts are in their various modes mimetic of human character. The promise of knowledge is that it makes a claim to real knowledge, a knowledge that cannot be substituted for by more purely conceptual, analytic modes of knowing. In this article, I would like to explore the rich relationship knowledge enjoys with moral philosophy in the Thomistic tradition--how it first makes possible even, in a sense, helps complete our moral understanding. I also want to explore the ways in which knowledge can help make Thomistic ethics an even more potent force of cultural renewal in our time. The poetry I will consider in what follows is the poetry I know best: works of narrative fiction. Nonetheless, what I argue has, I believe, intriguing implications also for drama in all its forms, lyric poetry, music, painting, dance. …

Une politique interieure: la question de l'engagement chez Roger Martin du Gard

This mammoth study of the work of Roger Martin du Gard, following the publication in 2009 of Roger Martin du Gard et le biographique, a collection of essays jointly edited by Hélène Baty-Delalande and Jean-François Massol (Grenoble: ELLUG), treats Martin du Gard's literary output with reference to critical material published throughout the twentieth century, both of general and specific nature, the latter reflecting the increased interest in his work in the last decade. Following an introductory discussion of engagement as posed by Sartre and debated thereafter in French intellectual circles, Baty-Delalande begins with a consideration of Martin du Gard's personal ethics as a pessimistic and passionate observer, devoted to the cult of freedom and of the individual, who, in an age where the literary figure is expected to adopt a political stance, like Montherlant, refutes the notion of engagement. Through the journal, memoirs, and correspondence (with Gide, Mauriac, Giono, Rolland, Romains), Baty-Delalande establishes that, for Martin du Gard, writing is a vocation, whereby the author is essentially absent in order best to renounce all didactic intention and open the phenomenological project to the reader's interpretation. Martin du Gard believes in the power of fiction that gives voice to the other's discourse and effaces that of the writer. In relating personal writings and fiction, Baty-Delalande argues that the anti-religious argument of Jean Barois, the tempered immorality of Confidence africaine and Taciturne, the pacificism of Les Thibault, the socialist dream that is the antithesis of the society described in Vieille France, and the ideological and moral ambition of Maumort are produced by private motivation rather than any sense of public responsibility. She then examines the contemporary reception of the fiction (Chapter 3), including comments by Malraux, Duhamel, and Aragon. In Part II, Chapter 4, the discursive nature of the texts is analysed, with the identification of temporal and discursive ambiguity. The novels' discourses, recognized as dialogues of a system within a system or between characters or as monologues, are defined as the space where the true politics of the novels is played out. As Camus noted in his 1955 preface to Martin du Gard's Œuvres complètes, the writer's duty is understood as a personal form of asceticism; this forms the basis for a rereading of the fiction as engagé. Chapter 5 treats the polemic of the novels, including the debate between religion and reason, the individual and the collective, ideological inscriptions such as socialism and pacifism related to the causes of the First World War, concluding with the great schisms of modernity, the Second World War, Nazism, and the colonial wars. Baty-Delalande's scrupulous analysis shows how the essential political nature of the novels, despite the author's stance, is conveyed through the rhetoric of reason and emotion. Chapter 6 maintains that the novels' scenes, combined with Martin du Gard's discursive strategies, open up the possibility of a sceptical reading. In Part III, Baty-Delalande demonstrates how the ‘politique intérieure’ (the phrase is from Thomas Mann) is present in the encounter between a poetics of knowledge and an aesthetics of showing. Martin du Gard's tragic vision of history is further explored in Chapter 8, where the characters' engagement is assessed in their gradual discovery of learning how to be: these ambivalent, unheroic figures pursue individual liberty in a tragic universe, without any metaphysical dimension. Finally, Martin du Gard is situated between realist fiction, late naturalism, and the melancholia of modernity: his work portrays the individual bound by his psychology and social milieu and also celebrates the total and authentic engagement of man in himself and in History. Overall, Baty-Delalande's book is an eloquent, coherent, and comprehensive assessment of Martin du Gard's work.

Poetic Knowledge and Cultural Renewal

Poetic Knowledge and Cultural Renewal Daniel McInerny (bio) It has been over a decade since the appearance of John Haldane’s essay, “Thomistic Ethics in America,” first delivered as a lecture at the University of Notre Dame and subsequently published in the pages of Logos. Haldane’s essay is in part an encomium to those thinkers and institutions that, in the latter half of the twentieth century, reinvigorated academic moral debate in the United States with arguments inspired by the thought of Aquinas. But Haldane’s essay is also a plea for greater promotion of Thomism beyond the walls of academia. The essay urges what Haldane calls the “restoration of serious moral thinking in American public life and in the culture more widely.”1 Haldane diagnoses a cultural degeneracy in American life, rooted in a pervasive and crippling moral skepticism. How to combat it? “With the truth,” is Haldane’s reply, “and not just any truth but that which matters most; the set of general truths about the structure of reality and about the human condition.”2 It is not that such truths had not been re-proposed and defended in the Thomistic revival Haldane praises. But even this revival was not immune from controversy. Debate throughout the 1980s and 1990s between the so-called “new” natural-law [End Page 17] theorists and “classical” natural-law theorists drew attention to the question of how the facts of human nature may or may not be related to our moral obligations. The old debates about fact’s relation to moral value returned in a dispiriting Thomistic reprise. In his essay Haldane offers his own reasons why we should reject the disassociation of fact and value, yet he does so not merely to score an academic point. For Haldane, the recovery of the idea of moral value’s dependency upon the facts of human nature is the key to the restoration of a truly serious moral culture. By identifying the roots of modern skepticism in the divorce of moral value from fact, Haldane indicates that the cure for our cultural ills lies in resources other than the ones commonly available in our postmodern world. What is needed is a revival of forms of premodern moral understanding. The general strategy Haldane offers is that of presenting “ethical claims in terms that show their ground in commonly known facts about human nature.” Yet he concedes: “It is part of the cultural problem that those facts have themselves become somewhat obscured.” So what to do? Haldane submits: “I think the effort to render [facts about human nature] vivid in phenomenological consciousness is best pursued by those possessed of literary and artistic imagination, rather than by philosophers.”3 Haldane’s suggestion is that works of literary and artistic imagination are the most persuasive means of showing a degenerate culture the grounding of a Thomistic ethics in the facts of human nature. In short, Haldane proposes a retrieval of what Jacques Maritain calls “poetic knowledge.” By poetic knowledge, we should understand a kind of knowledge that comes about via engagement with “poetic” imitations of reality. The term “poetry” is here used in the Aristotelian sense, as including all narrative art and lyric, though we might extend it even further to include music, painting, and dance, understanding with Aristotle that all of these arts are in their various modes mimetic of human character. The promise of poetic knowledge is that it makes a claim to real knowledge, a knowledge that cannot be substituted for by more purely conceptual, analytic modes of knowing. In this [End Page 18] article, I would like to explore the rich relationship poetic knowledge enjoys with moral philosophy in the Thomistic tradition—how it first makes possible and even, in a sense, helps complete our moral understanding. I also want to explore the ways in which poetic knowledge can help make Thomistic ethics an even more potent force of cultural renewal in our time. The poetry I will consider in what follows is the poetry I know best: works of narrative fiction. Nonetheless, what I argue has, I believe, intriguing implications also for drama in all its forms, lyric poetry, music, painting, and dance...

Special Issue: Sport, Development, and Poetic Knowledge

Special Issue: Sport, Development, and Poetic Knowledge

‘A literary animal’: Rancière, Derrida, and the Literature of Democracy

In Passions, Jacques Derrida writes: Literature is a modern invention, it inscribes itself [elle s'inscrit] in conventions and institutions which, to hold on to just this trait, secure in principle...

"Time to Translate Modernism into a Contemporary Idiom": Pedagogy, Poetics, and Bob Perelman's Pound

Central to the work of avant-garde U.S. American poets from Ezra Pound to the present have been continuing conflicts between didacticism and coterie exclusiveness, and over the poet's relationship to pedagogical institutions. Within the contemporary poet Bob Perelman's ongoing consideration of the relationship between the avant-garde and pedagogy in all its forms, including but not limited to the academic, Pound has been a constant presence. This essay examines how some of the terms and categories surrounding the idea of "pedagogy"—teaching, learning, reading, knowledge, authority, the new—manifest themselves in Perelman's response to an influential predecessor such as Pound, particularly in poems from his latest book, Iflife . Pound is the precursor point at which all these concerns meet and from which they emanate, the central site for a contemporary avant-gardist's exploration of—and perhaps anxiety about—the nature of poetic learning and poetic knowledge, and for the relationship of that knowledge to poetics and to institutions.

Aimé Césaire: poetics and politics

‘Poetic knowledge is born in the great silence of scientific knowledge’ (Aime Cesaire) Sociologist Mimi Shiller (2003, p. 1) cogently argued that the: Caribbean lies at the heart of the western hem...

‘Wallowing in the rubbish of departed ignorance’

Thomas Love Peacock, in his essay ‘The Four Ages of Poetry’, opposes ‘the progress of knowledge’, as accelerated by historians and philosophers, to ‘the rubbish of departed ignorance’, as wallowed in by poets. This opposition seems categorical, and invites resistance from poets and those supporting the cognitive claims of poetry; P. B. Shelley duly obliged. However, what happens if one does indeed wallow in the specific kind of ‘rubbish’ designated, ironically, by Peacock? This essay aims to find out, with reference to Wordsworth's poem ‘The Danish Boy’ (rubbished by Peacock) and to Theodor Adorno, German connoisseur of rubbish. In Wordsworth, Peacock and Adorno, we can sense the shadow of knowledge in the form of its determinate negation. Poetry is haunted by the particular knowledge it lacks, and this study argues thus for a kind of negative poetic knowledge. By returning to the rubbish of departed and not yet departed ignorance, this essay hopes to trope a heap of commodities into something else.

The poetics of knowledge sharing: putting Aristotle to work in the enterprise

Advances in repository technology have not 'solved the problem of knowledge sharing'. The problem does not arise from the 'noun-like' properties of 'knowledge' but from a failure to grasp the 'verb-like' qualities of 'sharing'. While this appears to advocate process-centric approaches to knowledge management, the verb-based strategy actually has origins that precede knowledge management and goes back to the time of Aristotle. Furthermore, they are based not on Aristotle's investigations of logic but on the principles of his Poetics, which may be read for instructions for making knowledge sharable, and which may be applied to both work practices and supporting technologies.

Toward a Sacred Discourse: Reconceptualizing the Heart Through Metaphor

In this article, the author takes as her subject the lived experience of the heart. She presents an autoethnographic case to examine the regions of spiritual inquiry and discourses of the sacred. In mystical traditions, the heart is often conceptualized as a site of liberation or enlightenment. Entering this inner territory of the heart through the tacit knowledge of poetics and the body, the author explores how a metaphoric turn in her research illumined a heart practice and discourse, how somatic images became a bridge to lived experience. She discusses how mining three concrete metaphors, evoked by a set of experiences in the field, moved her study of the heart. The field in which this project is situated has three dimensions: the author’s poetry, lived experience, and images and conversations arising in her teaching practice.

Shakespeare and Aristotle

In comparison with some of his contemporaries, most notably Jonson, Shakespeare has often been seen as a writer who was largely unconcerned – at least on an explicit level – with dramatic theory. It is widely assumed that he can have had no knowledge of Aristotle's Poetics, since he knew little, if any, Greek. However, the Poetics would have been accessible to Shakespeare through one of the many Latin and Italian translations and commentaries which were circulating in the period. He could also have ascertained its basic premises from a variety of mediating sources such as Sidney's Defence, or through personal contact with fellow dramatists, such as Jonson and Fletcher, who were acquainted with the Poetics. Shakespeare's plays present clear evidence of at least some familiarity with Aristotelian theory, through references to catharsis and the Unities. In view of this, I argue in this paper that Shakespeare's plays do indeed engage with contemporary literary theory, and that plays such as The Tempest show Shakespeare adopting an oppositional stance to neo-Aristotelian doctrine.

The Consolation of Physics: Tennyson's Thermodynamic Solution

Tennyson's In Memoriam suggests that poetic knowledge may precede and shape scientific knowledge. Struggling with the implications and possibilities of Victorian energy physics even as that science came into being, Tennyson anticipates not only the laws of thermodynamics but also many of the ways these ideas suffuse Victorian thought, from widespread anxieties regarding the death of the sun through religious invocations of the conservation of energy. In Memoriam at once evokes the roots of physical theory in Romantic elegy and suggests the elegiac structure and function of Victorian physical discourse; like In Memoriam, the laws of thermodynamics effect a reconciliation between the dissipation we observe and the conservation we crave. Moreover, as Tennyson reconceives waste as transformation in the natural world, In Memoriam also reveals a surprising relation between energy physics and another emergent science, evolutionary biology.

Narrative in the Feminine: Daphne Marlatt and Nicole Brossard by Susan Knutson

REVIEWS materials gathered here provide guidance, factual information, and a range of critical analyses. Individually, or as a group, they illuminate Pollock’s work and contribute to an understanding of the place of theatre in our culture and history. SH ER R ILL E. G R A C E / U n iversity o f B ritish Colum bia Susan Knutson. Narrative in the Feminine: Daphne Marlatt and Nicole Brossard. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2002. 248. $59.95 cloth. Having taught and written on both Daphne Marlatt and Nicole Brossard, I was eager to review this new critical study of their works. I was particularly interested because the author of Nar­ rative in the Feminine is Susan Knutson, a writer whose anal­ yses of poetics I have often found instructive. Her 1995 char­ acterization of Brossard’s motive as “the drive to reach the internal horizons of meaning” (“Reading” 12) is one I return to, particularly as it accommodates a poetic committed to in­ terrogating and romancing the words we have inherited. The word “internal” acknowledges the impossibility of imagining a space wholly external to the symbolic, while “horizon,” a highly invested term in Brossard’s œuvre, signifies the liminal site of productive exploration and renovation. While Knutson and oth­ ers have fostered an interesting critical discussion about how Brossard and Marlatt negotiate a language sedimented with cultural bias, here we have an original study of the ways these poets approach the horizons of the larger grammar of narrative. Knutson brings classical narratology to bear on Marlatt’s long poem How Hug a Stone (1983) and Brossard’s novel Pic­ ture Theory (1982), a tack that leads her inevitably to a con­ comitant critique of this hermeneutic and the introduction of feminist narratology. Both authors are known for the way in which their creative projects blur with and serve as theoretical works, and here Knutson is able to draw from the primary texts themselves as they address traditional narratological assump­ tions. Marlatt, for example, challenges the notion of quest as universal narrative structure; while deploying this heroic model in her account of a trip to England with her son, she overtly 319 ESC 28, 2002 thematizes the failure of such a model to address adequately the intersubjective bond between parent and child and to move out of the gendered schema: male hero/female matrix. A narratological analysis of Knutson’s own book would note the reso­ nance (or to use the narratological term, “mirroring” ) between Marlatt’s simultaneous embrace and refusal of quest narrative and Knutson’s simultaneous adherence to and critique of narratology . Readers unfamiliar with the field of narratology will not be left behind in Knutson’s discussion. She very deftly introduces the key terms and methodologies of the discipline even as she promptly embarks on their application and interrogation. The strategy of committing to a theoretical approach while under­ mining it proves a tricky balancing act. For the most part, Knut­ son’s rigorous narratological analysis proves an excellent vehicle for the elucidation of the complex narrative structures of both Brossard and Marlatt. Since the narrative innovations of their texts ultimately throw into relief the flaws of traditional narra­ tology, however, there are moments when the reader might lose interest in the meticulous structuralist mapping that Knutson has undertaken here. I am grateful, for instance, that Knut­ son has articulated Brossard’s notion of the hologram more thoroughly than any critic to date, but that articulation in­ volves several tabulations of fabula (the chronological sequence of events, or deep structure) that read like statistics. Outside of some of these empirical moments, Narrative in the Feminine is a pleasure to read for its elegant style and intimate knowledge of feminist poetics. The text is bookended by introductory and concluding chap­ ters that address questions surrounding écriture au fém inin: W hat is it? And have these poets, indeed, written in the fem­ inine? Knutson rehearses feminist debates on the topic over several decades and situates specific dialogues and conflicts in France, America, Québec, and English Canada. She also demon­ strates the important contributions Marlatt and Brossard have made to these histories. The confluence of this body...

Maritain, Northrop Frye, and the Limits of Poetic Knowledge

Maritain, Northrop Frye, and the Limits of Poetic Knowledge

Adam Krims, ed., with commentary by Henry Klumpenhouwer. Music/Ideology: Resisting the Aesthetic. Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1998. 311 pp. ISBN 90-5701-321-5 (paperback)

Adam Krims, ed., with commentary by Henry Klumpenhouwer. Music/Ideology: Resisting the Aesthetic. Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1998. 311 pp. ISBN 90-5701-321-5 (paperback). Un article de la revue Canadian University Music Review / Revue de musique des universités canadiennes (Volume 20, numéro 2, 2000, p. 1-155) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.