Prose Genres Research Articles

From 'Socratic Logoi' to 'Dialogues': Dialogue in Fourth-Century Genre Theory

This paper argues that we can only have a just appreciation of the rise and early development of philosophic dialogue in Greece by bracketing the immense influence that the Platonic version of the form has exerted and turning instead to tracing how “Socratic logoi” came to be recognized as a new prose genre in fourth-century Athens. A consideration of the early terms used to name the form suggests that dialogue should not be derived from fifth-century mime or drama but should be understood in the context of the burgeoning rhetorical literature of the period; in particular, dialogue will be shown to be one of many innovative kinds of fictional speech-texts that were proclaiming new and special powers for written prose.

Hajji Baba in St Petersburg

In ‘Journey to Arzrum’, set in the Caucasus during the Russo-Turkish War of 1828-9, Pushkin refers to Hajji Baba, rogue-hero of James Morier’s novels The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan (1824) and The Adventures of Hajji Baba in London (1828). Morier’s novels, set in Persia, the Ottoman Empire and London, became widely known to Russian readers in the early 1830s, in translations by the orientalist popular fiction writer and journalist, Osip Senkovskii. They were read both as entertaining satire and as a source of knowledge about the East. Since the 1820s, Pushkin and Senkovskii, contemporaries and rivals, had been experimenting with different literary styles for representing the East. While Senkovskii, an orientalist of world renown, turned to sarcastic satire, parody and masquerade after his encounter with Morier, Pushkin, whose library reveals a sustained interest in the English novelist, moved beyond satire, shaping a new genre of first-person travel prose.

Rhyme or Reason: Three Patterns of Poetic Interference in the British Crime Novel

This essay shows how poetical elements may be integrated to a prose genre, the crime fiction narrative, and the perturbations they may generate. Conan Doyle’s Musgrave Ritual centers on a pattern of verse. There are two ways of interpreting it: a poetical reading, that denies the text an object, and an utilitarian reading, that forces out of it a series of names limiting its “effect of illimitation” (Jean Cohen), though questioned by narrative irony. In Agatha Christie’s Crooked House, the nursery rhyme in the title is merely submitted by the detective to a rational, analogical reading. Now an irrational reading, based on Freud’s interpretation of dreams, might show that the poem’s signifiers all reveal one unspeakable statement: a child has killed. In Colin Dexter’s The Way Through The Woods, a detective builds up a poem in order to display its object – a corpse. This interpretation happens to be faulty, yet the poem states the truth insofar as it expresses another murderer’s confession – unknown to his author and the murderer. An oracular utterance, it subverts the traditional pattern of the detective’s final explanation.

'Lieber in Gedanken reisen': Some Notes on the Back of a Camel

'Lieber inGedanken reisen5: Some Notes on the Back of a Camel ROBERT GILLETT Queen Mary, UniverdtyofLondon In The Oxford Companion toGerman Literature,Friederike Mayr?cker isdescribed as 'an avant-garde poet [who] has published poetry and prose'.1 This assess ment, however, has scarcely been reflected in the secondary literature on her work. Not only has her experimentalism been seen as a passing phase ? Matthias Luserke quotes the author herself on the end of this period and her return after 1973 tomore autobiographical writing2 ? but critics have also shown a curious reluctance to engage with her poetry. Renate K?hn, in her preface to a collection which, unusually and programmatically, covers the whole spectrum ofMayr?cker's output, complains that the poetry has been consigned to the margins of the critical debate.3 At the same time it is common to dwell on the 'poetic' nature of Mayr?cker's prose: Daniela Riess-Beger devotes a whole book to the subject,4 and Gisela Lindemann paradoxically asserts thatMayr?cker's prose ismore poetic than her poetry.5 The aim here is to approach the issue as itwere from the other end, by taking a careful look at some ofMayr?cker's (relatively recent) poems. In the process, a number of tropes ofMayr?cker criticism, especially those that straddle the genres of poetry and prose, will need to be revisited. Yet because the approach adopted is programmatically inductive, these matters of general poetics will not be the centre of attention. That role is reserved for a particular collection of poems by Friederike Mayr?cker ? theNotizen auf ?nem Kamel [Notes on a Camel] of 1996.6 1 Henry and Mary Garland, The Oxford Companion toGerman Literature (Oxford, 1976), p. 578. 2 See Matthias Luserke, '"Ein unsteter Zyklus Schreibkunst." Betrachtungen zum Werk von Friederike Mayr?cker', EuphoHon, 89 (1995),438-54 (p.440). 3 Renate K?hn, 'Vorwort', in Friederike Mayr?cker oder 'Das Innere des Sehens'. Studien zu Lyrik, H?rspiel und Prosa, ed. by Renate K?hn (Bielefeld, 2002), pp. 7-13 (p. 10). 4 Daniela Riess-Beger, t?ensstudien. Poetische Verfahrensweisen in Friederike Mayr?ckers Prosa (W?rzlpurg,1995). 5 Gisela Lindemann, 'Das Licht am Ende des Tunnels. Versuch ?ber das Werk der Friederike Mayr?cker', inFriederikeMayr?cker, ed. by Siegfried J. Schmidt (Frankfurt a. M., 1984), pp. 92-101 (p. 100). 6 Friederike Mayr?cker, Notizen auf einemKamel. Gedichte iggi-igg6 (Frankfurt a. M., 1996). All references to this volume will be by page number in parentheses. Poems from this collection are reprinted with the kind permission of the Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt a. M.. robert gillett One of the most immediately striking things about this book is its tide. This conjures up a mental image of a poetess seated astride a ship of the desert looking around her curiously with a notebook in her hand. And because camels are not indigenous to Europe, any European lady wishing to bestride one will normally have to have travelled some distance. The chances are that the notes written on camel-back will reflect that distance. Hence there is some justification for expecting that theNotizen auf einemKamel will somehow belong to the genre of travel writing. Yet Friederike Mayr?cker is not generally regarded as being that kind of traveller. On the contrary, R?diger G?rner describes her as a 'quint essentially urban poet, deeply rooted in Vienna5.7 And Iris Radisch even goes so far as to insist that 'Friederike Mayr?cker verl?sst ihre papier?bers?te Schreibkammer in der Zentagasse seit 45 Jahren nur noch, wenn es gar nicht anders geht' [For the last 45 years Friederike Mayr?cker has lefther paper strewn study in the Zentagasse only when she has had no choice].8 If she travels at all, then, it is likely to be a journey of themind. Or, as Mayr?cker herself puts it relatively early on in Notizen auf einem Kamel, in a line which can be read as deserving of special emphasis: 'lieber in Gedanken reisen, HoKUSAi' [Travel in themind instead, Hokusai]. Here the small capitals that encourage us to lay stress on this line also mark itout as a possible surrogate tide for...

Invisible Fences: Prose Poetry as a Genre in French and American Literature

For all its recent popularity among poets and critics, prose poetry continues to raise more questions than it answers. How have prose poems been identified as such, and why have similar works been excluded from the genre? What happens when we read a work as a prose poem? How have prose genres such as the novel affected prose poetry and modern poetry in general? In Invisible Fences Steven Monte places prose poetry in historical and theoretical perspective by comparing its development in the French and American literary traditions. In spite of its apparent formal freedom, prose poetry is constrained by specific historical circumstances and is constantly engaged in border disputes with neighbouring prose and poetic genres. Monte illuminates these constraints through an examination of works that have influenced the development of the prose poem as well as through a discussion of genre theory and detailed readings of poems ranging from Charles Baudelaire's La Solitude to John Ashbery's System. Monte explores the ways in which literary-historical narratives affect interpretation: why, for example, prose poetry tends to be seen as a revolutionary genre and how this perspective influences readings of individual works. The American poets he discusses include Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and Ashbery; the French poets range from Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stephane Mallarme to Max Jacob. In exploring prose poetry as a genre, Invisible Fences offers new perspectives not only on modern poetry, but also on genre itself, challenging current theories of genre with a test case that asks for yet eludes definition. Steven Monte teaches at the University of Chicago.

The Veil of Familiarity: Romantic Philosophy and the Familiar Essay

THE OBJECT OF THIS DISCUSSION IS A DISTINCTLY ROMANTIC PROSE GENRE, the essay. The qualifier familiar is definitive, and separates from the great critical and thematic writings of the period, the kind of prose essay categorized by its randomness and spontaneity. This is published prose in a private and informal guise; which, appearing under such titles as Reading Books, the Want of Money, Poor Relations, or Old China, remains miscellaneous, occasional, conversational. The assumption implicit in all of these descriptors, an assumption by which the essay has traditionally been marked, is of a fundamental lack of seriousness or purpose. This paper will contribute to the ongoing critical project of undoing that assumption. Despite the considerable increase in recent years of critical interest in the genre, the essay is still fully to be recognized as being, at its best, a primary form of a distinctly creativity, embodying and affirming a philosophical position that we are used to identifying elsewhere in literature, and especially in its poetry. The vindication of the romanticism of the essayists collectively is the basis of at least one study that predates mine, Thomas McFarland's Romantic Cruxes: The English Essayists and the Spirit of the Age (1987). The success of this study is limited, not least by its focus on the characters of the essayists rather than on the practice of the essays, and by its continuing construction of the essayists as secondary and second-rate in relation to the poets, especially Coleridge. McFarland's metaphor of the essayists as the lesser mountains in a range that includes the dizzying elevations of Wordsworth and Coleridge, (1) perpetuates a hierarchy, the unsettling of which must be central to any reassessment of the essay. The project remains outstanding, of relocating the essay within the romantic mainstream, not below, but on a par with the poetry. Conversation: the Common Ideal In the past, poetry and poets' statements about poetry have exemplified a monolithic and unifying Romanticism to which the essay has borne little if any relevance at all. More recently, having grown to prize the discontinuous, non-linear, and fragmentary qualities that the essay so fashionably manifests, we are even less minded to recognize its common ground with an increasingly problematic canon. Yet it is so well known that it hardly needs saying that the common ground of poetry and prose is the subject of one of the most powerful and influential statements of poetics. In his 1800 Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth famously insists that between the language of prose and metrical composition ... there neither is nor can be any essential difference, claiming, by that insistence, to move poetry out of an inaccessible celestial realm into the workaday world of common humanity: ... where shall we find bonds of connection sufficiently strict to typify the affinity betwixt metrical and prose composition? They both speak by and to the same organs; the bodies in which both of them are clothed may be said to be of the same substance, their affections are kindred and almost identical, not necessarily differing even in degree; Poetry sheds no tears 'such as Angels weep,' but natural and human tears; she can boast of no celestial Ichor that distinguishes her vital juices from those of prose; the same human blood circulates through the veins of them both. (2) In thus humanizing poetry, and despite the metaphor of celestial and terrestrial, Wordsworth is not of course lowering, but lifting, both poetry and humanity, and in so doing, reveals his common ground with the German theorists. Kant's disciple Schiller, in his essay On the Naive and Sentimental in Literature (1795), writes that poetry means nothing else than to give humanity its most complete expression possible. …

‘In the Footsteps of the Ancients’: The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni (review)

In Footsteps of Ancients.- The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni. By Ronald G. Witt. [Studies Medieval and Reformation Thought, Volume LXXIV.] (Leiden: E. J. Brill. 2000. Pp. xiii, 562. $162.00.) Ronald Witt's new book, recipient 2000 of Renaissance Society of America's Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Book Prize, represents culmination of decades of research on emergence and development of humanism. In it he self-consciously aims to challenge, indeed to upend, conventional assumptions about origins of humanism. Readers discover that they should no longer think of humanism springing fully formed from mind and pen of Petrarch fourteenth century or of as humanism's birthplace. The emergence of humanism required a lengthy process, and its earliest origins lie thirteenth century with Paduan poet Lovato dei Lovati (1240/41-1309). Lovato broke with northern Italian tradition of producing chivalric poetry Provencal to write classicizing verse Latin. His principal inspiration was Seneca, and his outlook was decidedly secular. The use of Latin, study and imitation of classical authors, choice of secular themes: these are essential ingredients of what Witt calls the new aesthetic. That this aesthetic first manifested itself poetry makes perfect sense when one considers that ars dictaminis, medieval formal style for Latin composition, concerned itself with prose, not with verse. Compared to Padua, early fourteenth-century was of a cultural backwater for study of ancient Latin writers (p. 173). In first half of Trecento, witnessed a growth vernacular literature, which in short run hindered development of humanism Florence (p. 229) because it detracted from Latin learning.Yet many vernacular translations of classical literature familiarized Florentines with ancient culture and helped them value it, thus paving way for emergence of humanism second half of Trecento. The process of humanism's origins comes to a close with Leonardo Bruni and his generation at beginning of Quattrocento. Several developments indicate that humanism was by then fully formed. Dictamen, which had to be dislodged from one genre of prose after another something like a house-tohouse campaign (p. 443), experienced its complete demise with emergence of a classicizing oratory With revival of oratory Cicero replaced Seneca as principal source of inspiration and imitation. Under auspices of Bruni the first Ciceronianism forged powerful links between classical oratory and political ideology Florence. Cicero and his literary aesthetic served as basis for support of city's republican constitution, contributed to elaboration of a civic ethic independent of religious influence, and won over Florentine patriciate for humanism. Not surprisingly, Hans Baron's interpretation of Bruni's Laudatio Fiorentinae Urbis and response of Baron's critics frames Witt's discussion of ties between a new humanist aesthetic and Florentine politics. While Witt acknowledges that Florentine oligarchy adopted language of republicanism its own interest to prevent popular challenges to its authority, he argues for another source that shaped ruling elite's conception of government: extended contact with ancient literature and history, wherein ancient civic ethic and republicanism were extolled (p. …

British women writers and the writing of history, 1670-1820

Until recently, history writing has been understood as a male enclave from which women were restricted, particularly prior to the nineteenth century. The first book to look at British women writers and their contributions to historiography during the long eighteenth century, British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670-1820, asks why, rather than writing history that included their own sex, some women of this period chose to write the same kind of history as men-one that marginalized or excluded women altogether. But as Devoney Looser demonstrates, although British women's historically informed writings were not necessarily feminist or even female-focused, they were intimately involved in debates over and conversations about the genre of history. Looser investigates the careers of Lucy Hutchinson, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Charlotte Lennox, Catharine Macaulay, Hester Lynch Piozzi, and Jane Austen and shows how each of their contributions to historical discourse differed greatly as a result of political, historical, religious, class, and generic affiliations. Adding their contributions to accounts of early modern writing refutes the assumption that historiography was an exclusive men's club and that fiction was the only prose genre open to women.

Aristotelian Foundations of German Novella Theory

Erich Auerbach credits Boccaccio's The Decameron with introducing a new medium (prose), a new theme (actual occurrences in contemporary life), and a new genre (the novella) into the mainstream of post-classical letters (188-89). Boccaccio's innovations apparently left literary critics of the Renaissance at a loss, for they failed to develop a theory for this genre – a failure that Robert J. Clements and Joseph Gibaldi attribute to the fact that classical aestheticians had not dealt with prose as an artistic medium (6). Hannelore Schlaffer takes this view one step further when she notes that Boccaccio, by choosing ignoble themes and the medium of prose, not only mocks and parodies the Horatian dictum for delectare et prodesse, but also subverts Aristotelian aesthetic principles to such a degree that she labels the early Italian novella an antiaristotelische and eine Gattung ohne Poetik (3-16). Although this narrative form gained immense popularity and spread through Romance Europe and England, it did not become part of the German genre repertoire until the late 1700s. Yet only a few decades after its initial appearance, it came to dominate the German literary landscape. This popularity was attended by many attempts at definition, for German commentators began almost immediately to speculate about the nature of the novella. Although studies abound, agreement remains elusive. Such lack of consensus prompted Harry Steinhauer to observe in 1970 that the enormous mountain of German criticism has been labouring for two generations and has not even brought forth a mouse (154). Almost another generation has passed since Steinhauer made his pronouncement, yet the mountain is still in the throes of labour. Such an impasse suggests that different critical approaches are needed. One such pathway, hitherto untrodden, involves an examination of German novella theory from an Aristotelian perspective. This approach reveals striking similarities between Aristotle's opinions about the ancient verse genres of the epic and the drama and modern critical opinions about the relatively new prose genre of the novella. Similarities raise the question of in fluence, a thorny area of investigation under even the best of circumstances. Problems in matters involving

WEIGHTY MATTERS, WEIGHTLESS FORM: POLITICS AND THE LATE MING XIAOPIN WRITER

This article looks to XIAOPIN, a prose genre often associated with the late Ming period, as a way of approaching a corresponding late-Ming literati way of dividing up the lived world. The term XIAOPIN refers here to a type of short, informal, often anecdotal prose piece that in its relatively non-euphuistic, even colloquial style could be seen as an offshoot of the guwen “ancient-style prose” movement begun by Han Yu in the Tang, — although in its choice of subject matter XIAOPIN implies a substantially different function. XIAOPIN is a concept which has always resisted precise formal definition, but if we think of genres not in strictly formal terms but rather as modes of writing that function to delineate areas of social being, then the trend that XIAOPIN represents corresponds and contributes to the articulation of a late-Ming sense of where the personal gives way to the political. The prose tradition that Han Yu initiated was rooted in the language and public moral purpose of the Confucian Classics and was set against the ornate parallelism of the prose of his time. Where Han Yu had sought an alternative to parallel prose, many Ming writers increasingly found fault with the prescribed structure of the “eight-legged” examination essay, and began leaning instead toward a prose that used a seemingly unassertive manner to depict circumscribed personal contexts. The result ironically—and quite intentionally—was to lend a guwen weight and legitimacy to personal, non-political, existence. We will here be examining this process through the writings of two Ming authors, Xu Wei (zi Wenchang, 1521–1593) and Mang Dai (zi Zongzi, 1597–1684?), who were generations apart but were linked through place, family friendships, and literary projects. They will give us a sense of how at a time when political, commercial, and social factors were rearranging the landscape of prestige, personal (as opposed to public) identity found an analagous structure in literary genre.

The Rhetoric of a Nature Writer: Subversion, Persuasion, and Ambiguity in the Writings of Edward Abbey

The genre of in American is rich in tradition and cultural significance. It has produced such canonical figures and texts as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau's Walden, and is now, with the many environmental pressures of these last years of the twentieth century, becoming one of the most frequented avenues for literary expression by the artists of our time. Indeed, with the recent rise in the genre's popularity, galvanized by such writers as Annie Dillard and Barry Lopez, some scholars are claiming that is arguably the major genre in American literature (Murray 73). The rhetorical intricacies of this essay-driven, advocacy-focused genre are elaborate in the least. The work of Edward Abbey in particular, Abbey being one of the most significant of modern writers, demonstrates the real rhetorical and theoretical complexity embedded within the genre. In order to locate Edward Abbey in the intellectual and philosophical tradition of writing, certain key concepts which exist in the genre need to be defined, and certain key distinctions need to be made between those same concepts. In the genre of writing, there seems to be certain philosophical and rhetorical assumptions about such large issues as wilderness, and These assumptions act as the controlling concepts of the genre, and provide the with a particular rhetorical environment or situation that conditions the discourse that is being constructed. Indeed, in even attempting to make these intellectual distinctions and definitions, we come immediately to a central rhetorical issue: what is the writer about? In one sense, the definition of the genre and the answer to this question are simple: [Nature writing] is a specific genre of non-fictive prose about nature, written in a way that remains faithful to the objective scientific facts, includes those facts as a significant element of content, and at the same time presents a human response and relationship to those facts. (Bryant, Frontier Experience 205) Yet in a deeper sense, in the very rhetorical assumptions of the genre, we discover something else: seems geared towards towards the delivery of meaning, significance, and truth. Another critic writes of the genre: At its most characteristically American, it captures and reflects the pecularily deep and detailed, if often troublesome, relationship between ego and ecos, or pysche and bios, in American history and culture. (Fritzwell 153) The same critic also argues: It captures and explores the radically different modes of ordering experience that first attained full expression in Aristotle's Historia Animalium and Saint Augustine's Confessions and that later came together with particular force in early America. It is, in fact, largely the product of these two traditional modes of thought. It is likewise the largely unarbitrated expression of the two-geobiotic science and autobiography.... (154) Thus, is a genre concerned with the egos or the self, and the world that surrounds that self; it is, in fact, concerned most with that self's interaction with that world, with nature. The self is understood to be historical, to be layered with cultural and mythic contextualities which the either strips away or better understands in the naked, solely individual observation, exploration, and contemplation of the natural world; the function, indeed, of writing is to enact that process, to discover some kind of self, and also, importantly, some kind of real, truthful world-the self will discover something, must discover something, and must deliver that message, that discovery to the reader of the work, to the audience. Inside this discovery, and inside the entire notion of nature or the natural world, there occurs an intellectual opposition between the concepts of wilderness and civilization. …

?Nichts besonderes, nur unverge�lich?: Zur z�surthematik in der diaristischen prosa Sarah Kirschs

Sarah Kirsch, who in the wake of the Biermann scandal moved from East to West Germany in 1977, is arguably the most talented living German lyric poet. But she is also a prose writer. It seems that since her break with the GDR in 1977 and the breakup of the GDR in 1989, this particular genre has gained in importance in her literary output. Her diarylike prose-often called “lyrical prose”-records and blends intense reactions to events of change or collapse: political, historical, environmental, existential, and personal. The volumes La Pagerie (1980), Allerlei-Rauh (1988), Spreu (1991), Schwingrase (1991), and Das simple Leben (1994), all of which could be called “diaries,” increasingly evoke the impression of “scattered notes,” of fleetingness, deliberate vagueness, or lack of structure. Kirsch's predilection for this particular prose genre suggests her uncertainty and pessimism about the possibility of artistically and philosophically restructuring or controlling socio-political and environmental realities.

An Errant Priest. Sasayaki Take

T HE tale Sasayaki Take ts -tf, translated below as 'The Whispering Bamboo', is one of about 350 extant prose narratives, known collectively as otogizoshi 'ifbu#, that originated largely in the Muromachi period. Apart from its intrinsic charm, the story is instructive of the structural features common to most works of this broad prose genre that has attracted the interest of scholars in both Japan and the West.' The term otogizoshi dates from the early eighteenth century, probably before 1730. The impetus to the coining of the word was Shugen Otogibunko R Xftb:XZ ('Felicitous Companion Library'), a woodblock edition of twentythree illustrated booklets produced by the Osaka publisher Shibukawa Seiemon 'II5iom wq. The set contained prose narratives from the Muromachi period concerning such diverse topics as legends associated with renowned figures in cultural history, stories of adventures in enchanted realms, and tales of seeming misfits who manage to attain wealth and high position. Other booksellers soon began to list Otogibunko in their own catalogs, replacing the original title with the similar term otogizoshi, and the latter has become the standard term for Muromachiand early-Edo-period narratives of the same type as those in the Shibukawa collection. Prior to the Shibukawa edition, such stories were typically presented in the format of brightly illustrated, hand-copied booklets, called nara ehon Wf.2

Chaucer and the mystics: The Canterbury tales and the genre of devotional prose

Contextualizing The Canterbury Tales in terms Chaucer himself valorized in his Retraction, this book describes analogues among the five great Middle English mystics (Rolle, Hilton, Julian, the Cloud-author, and Kempe), with attention to Chaucer's sometimes comic, sometimes serious, purposes.

Gorgias'sHelenrevisited

Gorgias's Helen has earned a central place in the revival of interest in sophistic and neo‐sophistic rhetorical studies in the late twentieth century. This essay offers a “predisciplinary” historical analysis of the text and makes five arguments: 1) Identifying Gorgias’ Helen as an “epideictic” speech is a somewhat misleading characterization; 2) The speech is not a veiled defense of the Art of Rhetoric; 3) Gorgias may have inaugurated the prose genre of encomia; 4) Gorgias advanced fifth‐century BCE “rationalism” by enacting certain innovations in prose composition; 5) The Helen's most significant “theoretical” contribution is to offer a secular account of the workings of logos— an account that functions as an exemplar for later theorists.

Egyptian Fiction and Arabic Literary Tradition

It is generally acknowledged that the modern Arabic prose genres were borrowed from European literature. A few Arab critics, however, maintain that earlier Arabic literature also contains novels, and that the real origins of modern Arabic fiction are to be found in the élite and popular literary heritage. This paper looks at the relationship between the indigenous literary heritage and Egyptian fiction. The paper is limited to Egypt without any intention to generalise from Egyptian literature to that of the Arab world at large, given that developments in different Arab countries do not follow an exactly parallel course.

On the Evolution of Prose Genres in Older Scots

On the Evolution of Prose Genres in Older Scots

A tradition of subversion: the prose poem in English from Wilde to Ashbery

From its inception in 19th-century France, the prose poem has embraced an aesthetic of shock and innovation rather than tradition and convention. In this suggestive study, Marguerite S. Murphy both explores the history of this genre in Anglo-American literature and provides a model for reading the prose poem, irrespective of language or national literature. Murphy argues that the prose poem is an inherently subversive genre, one that must perpetually undermine prosaic conventions in order to validate itself as authentically other. At the same time, each prose poem must to some degree suggest a traditional prose genre in order to successfully subvert it. The prose poem is thus of special interest as a genre in which the traditional and the new are brought inevitably and continually into conflict. Beginning with a discussion of the French prose poem and its adoption in England by the Decadents, Murphy examines the effects of this association on later poets such as T.S. Eliot. She also explores the perception of the prose poem as an androgynous genre. Then, with a sensitivity to the sociopolitical nature of language, she draws on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin to illuminate the ideology of the genre and explore its subversive nature. The bulk of the book is devoted to readings of William Carlos Williams' Kora in Hell, Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons', and John Ashbery's Three Poems. As notable examples of the American prose poem, these works demonstrate the range of this genre's radical and experimental possibilities.

Pragmatics of discourse modality: A case of da and desu/masu forms in Japanese

This study analyzes Japanese verb morphology, da and desu/masu endings in three genres of modern Japanese, i.e. conversation, prose and dialogue in fiction. Advancing a step beyond the view that the choice between da and desu/masu endings depends on ‘styles’, such as formal versus informal, written versus spoken, I argue that motivations for the mixture of da and desu/masu endings in a single paragraph or a single speaking turn can be pragmatically explained in terms of what I call discourse modality, especially in its three aspects - perspective, discourse organizational and interactional modality. I conclude that the da style is selected (1) when the speaker takes a perspective internal to the narrative setting and immediately responds within that framework, (2) when the speaker presents backgrounded information semantically subordinate within the discourse structure and (3) when the speaker finds the addressee close enough and the speaker uses a style similar to the style in which he or she self-addresses. The cognitive and social source for the verb morphology in Japanese is sought in the philosophy of Watsuji and Mori which advocates the ‘betweeness’ of self and other, and above all, the importance of ‘thou’. While the concept of ‘thou’ - the addressee - is important in any communication, this paper argues that Japanese language requires the choice of verb morphology based on the level of ‘thou’ awareness, which in turn defines its discourse modality.

Language and experience in 17th-century British philosophy By Lia Formigari (review)

398 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 67, NUMBER 2 (1991) enteenth-century contrast between final action (PS) and currently relevant action (PC) (65). Subjects showed little significant social or demographic variation in their use of PC and PS, although middle-class subjects tended to use more PS than those whose parents were manual laborers, and subjects from the West and South of France tended to use more than those from Paris, the North, and the East (100). Ch. 5 (102-14) sets up a hierarchy of rules for tense choice between PC and PS. The only rule deemed obligatory is that PS is used when the axis of orientation or point of view is retrospective (Bull's RP-V), in which case the PS functions much like a pluperfect or past anterior (113). Other rules accounting for the various factors investigated are presented on a sliding scale of influence of tense choice (2,103-4). The conclusion (Ch. 6, 115-22) calls for more research with a wider variety of approaches, such as a study of children's acquisition of the PS as they try to use it in telling stories (120), and investigation of the use of the 'picturesque imperfect ', the historic present, and the historic future for past punctual narration (121). This last is a potentially fruitful field of inquiry. Like the Waugh & Monville-Burston study cited above, Engel's work uses newspaper articles as raw material for investigation of the use of one or two tenses, but does not integrate them into a broader description of tense choice in the French newspaper narrative, a unique prose genre with its own genre-specific tense choice rules. [Clyde Thogmartin, Iowa State University of Science and Technology.) Language and experience in 17th-century British philosophy. By Lia Formigari. (Studies in the History of Language Sciences, 48.) Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins , 1988. Pp. 178. $36.00. Crediting Bacon with charging 17th-century British linguistics with 'a kind of skepticism which tends to stress the shortcomings of language and advocate reform or even invent new languages, in order to adapt them to the real needs of communication' (1), F develops her history around the notion that Bacon's distrust of language was the catalyst for restructuring Renaissance linguistics. In fact, she organizes her book according to her thesis that there were three major evolutionary consequences of Bacon 's philosophy of language: scholars were first led to discover the imperfection of natural languages; then they developed artificial languages to replace natural languages; and finally, since they realized that artificial languages were prone to the same imperfections as were natural languages, they formulated semantic theories based on the constituents of thought. She concludes her book with an excellent bibliography that contains many rarely-cited sources. In the first section F points to John Wilkins' Mercury, a manual advancing a system of cryptography , as the start of a long line of works influenced by Bacon's distrust of natural language . She traces the intriguing 17th-century debate over whether or not the ideal language, Adamic language, was perfect; and she moves to Seth Ward's vision of constructing an artificial language which would be free of all the imperfections that creep into natural languages. She comments on John Webster's view, different from Ward's, that an artificial language should not be based on words but on Chineselike characters which would indicate the philosophical nature of their referents. F concludes her first section with a discussion of Thomas Hobbes' insistence that language is functional in that it is invented as needs dictate, so that neither Adamic language nor any natural language could remain perfect, because of an everchanging context. In her second section, F accurately traces the development of philosophical languages—artificial systems designed for international communication , which relied on symbols reflecting the philosophical nature oftheir referents. Thus, in a philosophical language, the speaker says as well as defines the word. Although she cites a large number of contributors to the movement, she draws mainly on the works of William Holder, George Dalgarno, Francis Lodwick, Commenius, and Wilkins. Surprisingly, she takes a rather well-discussed topic— 17th-century English linguistic scholarship—and offers a number of fresh insights...