Poetic Tropes Research Articles

Schumann and Romantic Distance

The poetic trope and aesthetic category of "distance" is central to Novalis's and Jean Paul Richter's definition of the Romantic, as embodied in dying sound and distant music. In the "young poetic future" proposed by the composer and critic Robert Schumann in the 1830s, romantic distance figures prominently, exemplified by the relationship between the endings of Jean Paul's Flegeljahre and Schumann's Papillons, Op. 2. Distance also provides the key for a new understanding of the relationship between analysis and poetic criticism in Schumann's review of Schubert's Great C-Major Symphony; between texted and untexted music in his Piano Sonata, Op. 11; between music and landscape in Davidsbündlertänze, Op. 6; and between the composer and his distant beloved in the Fantasie, Op. 17 and the Novelletten, Op. 21. The article presents new evidence of Schumann's reference to Beethoven's An die ferne Geliebte and Clara Wieck's Romance variée, Op. 3 in the Fantasie, and to Clara's Valses romantiques, Op. 4 in Davidsbündlertänze.

A Penetration of the Historical Theory of Poetic Tropes: A Phenomenological Investigation of the Iconic Historical Field: A Hermeneutic Study

A Penetration of the Historical Theory of Poetic Tropes: A Phenomenological Investigation of the Iconic Historical Field: A Hermeneutic Study

Stanley Cavell and "The Claim of Reason"

By banishing poets from his Just City in The Republic, Plato declared war on poetry and, as Eric Havelock and Iris Murdoch have differently argued, on the poet in Plato himself. But his followers waged the warfare more fiercely, reducing Plato's parables, tropes, and larger dramatic fictions to the examples of expository argument, to schemata, paradigms, ideas, and problems. A philosophical example-what may clarify, typify, or diagram a point in some other way for the moment-is fundamentally different from the poet's art, which has to puzzle the reader as much as it has to resolve his puzzlement. An example acts like a onetime diagram on a classroom blackboard; a poetic trope is more like a systematic erasure--clear and obscure, bold and shady--of received diagrams. Sir Philip Sidney, during the youth of English literature, affirmed poetry's distance from philosophy as well as from history; and certainly Hobbes, Locke, and Hume, who provided the main course of philosophizing in English, kept their front lines firm by continually edging out of no-man's-land. Hobbes, who held imagination (even if it wasn't what Wordsworth or Shelley or Stevens or we ourselves mean by it) to be a disease of thought, could make some interesting observations about the relation of poetic genre to social structure, but these observations might as well have been (compare them, for example, to some analogous pages of Vico) amused and concerned notes on fashionable lace collars by a man who cared a good deal for the way he dressed. In this main line of philosophy in the English language, literary, or poetic, philosophy has a bad sound; it conjures up evocation rather than analysis, the dilution of technical, moral, and epistemological ar-