Thematic Resemblances Research Articles

Everything Honks, Everything Creaks: Frank O'Hara and the Early Poetry of James Schuyler

Abstract: In 1993, Geoff Ward stated that "O'Hara's methods were in a sense absorbed and filtered by Schuyler, his more exploratory and prolific output converted to a series of moves, a repertoire, that Schuyler could then deploy at will" (14–15). Schuyler, however, did not simply mimick the characteristic rhetorical gestures of O'Hara's improvisational approach. O'Hara's influence on Schuyler's poetic sensitivity is undeniable, but this does not mean that Schuyler's work can be adequately described as an amalgam of elements gleaned from O'Hara. Despite many formal and thematic resemblances, Schuyler was interested in issues significantly different from those which absorbed O'Hara. O'Hara donned many costumes; in short, there are many different Frank O'Haras. I suggest taking a closer look at particular poems (the early ones) to see which of these costumes Schuyler at times borrowed from his friend.

Nguyen’s The Sympathizer and Coetzee’s Early Fiction: Representation, Grievability, Framing

Viet ThanhNguyen’s The Sympathizer(2015) is an intriguing novel for anyone familiar with the early fiction of J.M. Coetzee. Nguyen’s debut novel has as its theme the war in Vietnam, which is not surprising given his background and his scholarly work preceding its publication. Interestingly, Coetzee’s first novel, Dusklands(1974) comprised two novellas, the first of which,called “The Vietnam Project”, is also related to the US invasion of Vietnam. Both works offer critical insights into US war-mongering in the post-World War II era. Additionally, Coetzee’s third novel, Waiting for the Barbarians(1980), bears thematic resemblances with both his and Nguyen’s debut novels, as they, in one way or another, are concerned with imperialism’s modus operandi and its continuation through the subjugation, intimidation,and annihilation of collective subjects. The main aim of this paper is to investigate the parallels and overlaps that can be detected among these three novelsthat are germane to the stratagems adopted by an imperialist power to sustain its dominion, legitimize its presence,andjustify brutality. These stratagems mediate the way the imperial force relatesto or conceivesof the other. Of the concepts employed in this article,the following areof particular significance: representation, grievability, and framing.

To Africanize Spain: Twentieth-Century Spanish Poetry and the Persistent Forms of al-Andalus

To Africanize Spain: Twentieth-Century Spanish Poetry and the Persistent Forms of al-Andalus

“This intrinsicate knot of life” in Antony and Cleopatra

Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra is a transitional play from his great tragedies to the late romances. In his last plays Shakespeare represents his expanded and comprehensive vision of life with his centrifugal images and expansive symbolism. Thematically this vision is dramatized by the achievement of the virtue of patience by his long-suffering and meandering sea-tossed characters. We can easily find out some thematic resemblance between the late medieval narrative poem, ‘Pearl’ and his romance plays. Both Antony and Cleopatra falls short at the brink of entering that happy paradise of reconciliation at the last moment. However, Shakespeare suggests their happy marriage in death, as did Romeo and Juliet. This after-life vision makes it difficult for us categorize generically both Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra in tragedies and comedies. The titular heroes and heroines in both plays are comically rash and impatient. Shakespeare’s experiment in tragicomedies is made possible by his understanding and detached observation of life as a “mingled yarn’ of some “intrinsicate knots” and entanglements. The apparent bipolarism in Antony and Cleopatra of Rome and Egypt, self-indulgence and military discipline, and the Tiber and the Nile, confounds itself into the final reconciliation of the “mighty opposites” and the vision of life in death and death in life at once. Shakespeare succeed in the play in alchemically transmuting his uncertain historical materials into a cosmic myth-making. The myth-making in his last phase is adumbrate in the play’s expanded spatio-temporal structure and images. “This capacity to correlate opposites” makes possible Shakespeare’s oblique criticism of the heroic honour and political powers that be.

Night in Novalis, Schelling, and Hegel

THE ABSOLUTE NIGHT INVOKED BY THE GERMAN ROMANTIC FRIEDRICH von Hardenberg, better known as Novalis, might well have been more influential at turn of nineteenth century than previously acknowledged. This image saturating his dithyrambic cycle Hymnen an die Nacht [Hymns to Night], published in 1800, continues to be read by some in terms of obscure private experiences despite twentieth-century work of Kate Hamburger, Martin Dyck, and others that show scientific connections. (1) This construal is especially popular in Enghsh-speaking world and has followed long tradition of interpreting Novalis that began with reviews of essayist Thomas Carlyle. In late 1820s, Carlyle had tied this poet not just to medieval German mystic Jakob Bohme but also to what he regarded as tenebrific constellation of Immanuel Kant and Kantists. (2) Common readers today tend to merge Novalis's night more with state of spiritual loneliness Christian mystic St. John of Cross had called the dark night of soul [la noche oscura del alma]. This inclination is not merely result of religious metaphor's familiarity; it derives its understanding from an incident linked to poem's inspiration, an epiphany Novalis experienced at grave of his first fiancre, Sophie von Kuhn, on 13 May 1797. (3) The subsequent view that Novahs's spiritual insight was inextricable from his vulnerability has led several critics to identify wide range of literary influences. Suggestions include August Wilhelm Schlegel's essay on Romeo and Juliet of 1797, Johann Gottfried Herder's mythic poems, religious writings of Karl von Eckartshausen and Johann Patti Friedrich Richter, or Jean Paul, and Edward Young's Night Thoughts of 1742-45. (4) Young's poem, which had numerous European translations by end of eighteenth century, is often cited in view of its thematic resemblance to Novahs's poem and its reputation among German writers such as Herder, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, Christoph Martin Wieland, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. (5) Novalis might have turned to this reflection on mortality weeks before his graveside experience, but it seems rather excessive to proclaim Young's direct and deep impact. The British surrealist David Gascoyne expresses same doubt in his introduction to an English edition of Hymnen an die Nacht translated by American poet Jeremy Reed and published in 1989: Gascoyne notes that Young's poem exudes disgruntlement--its other tide being, after all, The Complaint--while Novalis's achieves a serene transcendence of bereavement and mourning through resolution of into rapture rather than resignation. (6) This distinction between two otherwise comparable nights demands that we not only make better sense of Novalis's design but also check our own assumptions about lyrical intensity. Well-meaning critics who rehash point of his anguish inadvertently perpetuate tiresome picture of sentimental artist so devastated by loss that he could barely order his thoughts, let alone argue for them. Even esteemed Friedrich Hiebel seems to have contributed to this impression when he found Hymnen an die Nacht deeply rooted in those months of grief and its emotional depth reached only after three years of recuperation. (7) Such views present an obvious interpretive problem: what ultimately saw print in Schlegel brothers' journal Athenaeum is taken to manifest both profound mystical self-transformation and contrary rehance on overcoming of trauma. Novahs's poem becomes both product of strong mind able to integrate and transcend thoughts and mark of irresolution and maladjustment to life, product of weak mind. The inconsistency here is wholly illusory; in what follows I will show that Novalis's main ideas reflect distinct intellectual currents of his time. His image of night is no casual aesthetic plaything and in fact provided heretofore uncharted series of reactions from both philosophers Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. …

Elegia marcial e ocasião de performance

<div class="page" title="Page 116"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><span>O presente trabalho consiste de um exame breve das correntes teóricas que propõem o simpósio aristocrático como ocasião única e evidente da <em>performance</em> de poemas elegíacos arcaicos de pequena extensão. Igualmente, considera testemunhos antigos sobre a recepção da poesia de Tirteu e a presença de tópicas militares em elegias notadamente simposiais. Por conseguinte, visa a oferecer, liminarmente, pressupostos para uma compreensão outra da elegia exortativa marcial, na medida em que verifica a relação entre esta poesia, o contexto que a motiva, e a sua similaridade formal e temática com textos pertencentes à tradição épica. </span></p><div class="page" title="Page 1"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><strong>Martial elegy and performance </strong></p><p><strong>Abstract </strong></p><p><span>This work consists in a brief exam of academical studies which assume the aristocratic symposion as an exclusive occasion for early greek </span><span>elegies’ performance. It also considers historical evidence about the reception of Tyrtaeus’ poetry and the p</span><span>resence of military topics in typical symposion environment. Therefore, this paper raises preliminary conjectures for a different comprehension on martial exhortative elegy, along with the inspection of relations among this poetry, its context, and its formal and thematic resemblances with epic texts. </span></p><p><span><strong>Keywords:</strong> early greek elegy; epic tradition; performance; Tyrtaeus. </span></p></div></div></div><p><span><br /></span></p></div></div></div>

“The Striving”: Eliot's Difficult Ethics

Responding to the new modernist studies' attempts to interrogate the boundaries between high and low cultural artifacts, this essay historicizes T. S. Eliot's cultural prose, including his Criterion commentaries and longer works, to argue for his interventionism. Although recent studies continue Raymond Williams's assessment in Culture and Society that the impossible implementation of Eliot's organicist cultural project speaks to his lack of systematic coherence, his emphasis on ethical rectitude over direct action does not necessarily indicate diffidence in his religious goals. Instead, the efficacy Eliot discovered within uncomfortable and difficult intellectual states is related to his cultural project, which banks its success on his prose's structural and thematic resemblance to religious mystery. Eliot's ethical priorities render his writings from protestations into transformative and conversional vehicles, providing the non-violent vehicle for the Christian Society he favors.

Women of Power Compared in the Celtic and Slavic Traditions

This will be a brief and tentative effort at comparison that may begin with thematic resemblances, but will attempt to move past these parallels to find deeper ideological (in the Dumézilian sense) roots. That is, I will try to find and found my comparands in an Indo-European patterning matrix or common ancestry, despite the obvious geographical or spatial separation (at least at the present time) of the two cultural-linguistic traditions we have in primary view. To take up “women of power” in the Celtic and the Slavic contexts also confronts a pseudo-historical cliché with some historically factual backing: that is, the essentially “patriarchal” conformation (or essential character) of the I-E socio-political order, where male rulers and warriors are said to dominate, worshiping, aided by or associated with potent (male) deities. This view is, I think, much too simplistic or at least un-nuanced.

Learning to Hover: Robert Frost, Robert Francis, and the Poetry of Detached Engagement

Robert Francis's reminiscence of Robert Frost, A Time to Talk, entry dated April 4, 1932, contains poem published day before in Springfield Republican and Union. Francis wrote poem to commemorate Frost's arrival at Amherst. Here are its final stanzas: Best of all--you've heard?--he comes to stay. This is his home now. He is here for good. To leave us now would be running away. (I too would stay forever if I could.) While stays, life that breathless fugitive, Will stay. While lives, things here won't die. And we, breathing his air, may learn to live Close to earth, like him, and near sky. An example of Francis's exuberant juvenilia (neither published in book form nor included in Collected Poems), lyric was, in his words, the pop gun fired in my private campaign to establish significant relation with this most significant man in town (48-49). following January, befriended Frost in his home on Sunset Avenue in Amherst; thereafter blossomed relationship in which younger found in Frost mentor. fact, recalled, when Frost's acquaintance, still unpublished in book form, young looking for guidance. So Frost took role of mentor, and much that said had to do with my own poems and my problems as poet (45). [1] After his second book, Valhalla and Other Poems, was published in 1938, volume made no stir anywhere (21), Francis wrote in his autobiography, Trouble with Francis. But if book failed to excite critical notice, it brought some quiet rewards (21), one of which was letter from Robert Frost: I am swept off my feet by goodness of your poems this time. Ten or dozen of them are my idea of perfection. A new swims into my ken. I can refrain from strong praise no longer. You are achieving what you live for.... You have not only feeling of true lyric poet, but variety of man with mind. (19) Francis's mention of Frost's letter is important because Frost's praise was formal recognition of his poetry. letter also provided evidence of Frost's influence on Francis: note that his praise of Francis's poems is reserved for those that are [his] idea of perfection (19). Not surprisingly, then, there is sort of Frost static everywhere in this volume. Compare passage from Francis's Valhalla- valley sees pasture on hill. Below pasture and above are woods Up to wooded peak up to sky. valley sees darkness of evergreens Waiting above pasture to come down As other evergreens have come or wait To come to darken pastures on other hills. --to an excerpt from Frost's poem, The Mountain: mountain stood there to be pointed at. Pasture ran up side little way, And then there was wall of trees with trunks; After that only tops of trees, and cliffs Imperfectly concealed among leaves. [2] As David Graham observes, echoes of Frost in Francis's early poems helped shape critical view that Francis was a minor lyricist perpetually standing in Frost's broad shadow (83). Reviews of Francis's early volumes focused on thematic resemblance of his writing to Frost's. Consider, for instance, Louis Untermeyer's critique of Francis's third book, Sound I Listened For (1944), whose poems accentuate what asserts is Francis's gift for seeing minutiae which are anything but trivial. In this, Untermeyer animadverts, he reminds reader of his more illustrious forerunners, especially of one whose background is contiguous. It is nothing against Robert Francis that often resembles Robert Frost. And though Untermeyer admires Francis's lyrics for way in which they blend observation with imagination, adds, finally, [b]ut we know who wrote them first (345). …

Shakespeare and Beckett Revisited: A Phenomenology of Theater

Shakespeare and Beckett Revisited: A Phenomenology of Theater Marguerite Tassi Comparisons of William Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett have been popular among academic critics over the past few decades. In the locus classicus of such comparisons, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, Polish critic Jan Kott memorably argued that Shakespeare's King Lear bore a deep thematic resemblance to Beckett's dark absurdist dramas.1 Beckett's universe of the grotesque , of incomprehensible punishment and painful endurance, offered Kott the vision he needed to reinvent Shakespeare for Eastern European audiences who had undergone the atrocities of world war, concentration camps, fascism, and widespread oppression . Kott's Shakespeare, like Beckett, unflinchingly exposed the "absurd mechanism" at work in the universe and penetrated to "the thing itself," as Lear called man stripped to the bareness of his existence; through the ethos of Beckett's dramaturgy, Kott offered critics and directors a stark modernist approach to Shakespeare 's histories and tragedies that rejected both nineteenth-century romanticized interpretations and realist-historical stagings. If the ultimate test of a theater critic's vision lies in its embodiment in a successful production, then Kott has seen the theatrical viability of his ideas proven beyond a doubt. Impressed with Kott's famous essay, "King Lear or Endgame," Peter Brook produced King Lear as a philosophically absurd, ponderous piece of theater that robbed the play's world of Cordelia, Kent, and Edgar's redemptive virtues—goodness, kindness, generous service, and love.2 As Charles Marowitz, Brook's assistant director, commented in his "Lear Log," the production was "not so much Shakespeare in the style of Beckett as it [was] Beckett in the style of Shakespeare, for Brook believes that the cue for Beckett's bleakness was given by the merciless King Lear."2 There were no consolations and no catharsis to be had in Brook's theater; many of those who saw his Stratford production in 1962 248 Marguerite Tassi249 found themselves alienated, as in a Brechtian drama, "strangely unmoved," yet compelled to watch, as Robert Speaight claimed in his review.4 Speaight chastised the Stratford directorate for its "flirt with a fashionable and fugitive existentialism."5 Kott had emphasized not only a similar philosophy underlying Beckett's Endgame and Shakespeare's Lear but also a continuity in phenomenal expressions of this philosophy through the actors' bodies, their use of stage space, and their ability to provoke particular perceptions and emotional responses in the watching audience . He reflected a phenomenological awareness of how the material condition of bodies and objects can take on a "selfgiven " quality that strikes spectators viscerally rather than intellectually . Similarly, Brook reflected the decomposing world of Lear in phenomenal terms by creating a set made of geometric sheets of rusting, corroding metal, which became the thunder sheets for the storm, and rough-hewn wooden furniture. In the screen version of Lear produced by Lord Birkett and directed by Brook, frozen tundra covered a vast, forbidding landscape; the characters seemed to be the last wretched inhabitants of this world. The leather costumes and knights' cloaks for both stage and screen actors gave the appearance of having weathered many years. Lear's cape and coat in particular had been blackened and creased to give this effect.6 The lighting for the Stratford stage cast the play in a permanent, unnaturally bright light, which calls to mind the blazing light of Beckett's Happy Days. Brook clearly emphasized the phenomenal qualities of performance and place that evoked an unrelievedly bleak, threatening atmosphere in which men and women have lost their bearings. But in its phenomenal emphasis on moral and physical decay, Brook's production lacked a balance to be found in the playscript itself—that is, a Shakespearean equipoise struck between loss and gain, waste and value. Kott and Brook neglected the positive values offered in the play in favor of the lurking absurdism, the grotesqueness, and the disintegrating forces of civilization, which frankly interest twentieth -century playgoers who have been stunned by the world-wide brutalities of this century and mesmerized by the profound truths of Beckett's pained vision of life as an interminable waiting to be endured and a crouching towards death. Brook's famous production was...

Debussy's Trois Chansons de Bilitis: Song, Opera, and the Death of the Subject

Asummary of the action narrated in Debussy's Trois Chansons de Bilitis might run as follows: Two young lovers share a moment of inexpressibly intimate communion; the young man speaks of being bound up in the maiden's flowing tresses; she encounters a strange older man beside aforest spring. Readers familiar with Debussy's Pelldas et Milisande will note a striking resemblance to three specific scenes in the opera, in Acts IV, III, and I, respectively. These thematic resemblances can hardly have arisen coincidentally: Debussy composed the song cycle in 1895-98, immediately following the completion of the draft of his opera. Undoubtedly the most intriguing link between the two works is their similar protagonist, a mysterious young woman caught up in a web of destructive erotic relationships. Indeed, we might regard Bilitis as the lyrical twin of Mdlisande, translated from opera into the sphere of art song. Viewed thus, she may perhaps serve as the pivotal figure in a comparison of Debussy's work in these two disparate genres. A fundamental distinction between art song and opera in the nineteenth century lies in the treatment of what, in Hegelian terms, we might call the individual subject. The genre of solo song, which drew its nourishment from the confessional, introspective tone of Romantic lyric verse, clearly reflects the demand of the age for individual subjective expression. Conversely, the history of nineteenthcentury opera, under the inescapable influence of Wagner, moved in

The Genesis of Shakespeare's Sonnets: Spenser's Ruines of Rome: by Bellay

Sonnets has appeared to draw on antique topoi of permanence and change and to escape other sonnet sequences' intertextuality and attachment to a set of narrative and lyric conventions. In fact, Shakespeare extensively followed Spenser's nearby nonamatory sequence, translated from Du Bellay's Les Antiquitez de Rome. Numerous verbal and thematic resemblances (some exclusive to Ruines and Sonnets) show Shakespeare transmuting Spenser's image–a preeminent city ruined by time and the conflicts of will and of appetite among its contentious sons but immortalized in the literature inspired by its greatness–into another image: a preeminent youth, vulnerable to time and moral decay, who endures in Sonnets. Also, Shakespeare's early histories borrow verbally and thematically from Ruines' weakening of an otherwise invincible nation by strife. The nature of Shakespeare's transaction with Ruines remains to be investigated.

Paulus Silentiarius, Ovid, and Propertius

In the late nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth thematic resemblances to the Roman elegists in Paulus Silentiarius (and other late epigrammatists) were explained as the result of the poets' reliance on a common Hellenistic source – usually this was identified as the so-called ‘subjective Alexandrian love elegy’ – and this represented a departure from the views of earlier scholars such as Hertzberg and Postgate, who had maintained that Paulus knew and imitated the elegists. In recent years the pendulum has swung back (partly, perhaps, because the whole notion of a ‘subjective Alexandrian love elegy’ has been abandoned), and the prevailing opinion seems to be that the Roman elegists were known to Paulus. This is the view of, for instance, Giovanni Viansino in his edition of Paulus, of Elmar Schulz-Vanheyden in his important work on Propertius' relationship to Greek epigram, and of Hermann Beckby in his edition of the Greek Anthology. Recently, too, Gordon Williams has put forward a very strong case for earlier epigrammatists like Antipater and Crinagoras imitating the Augustan poets.

Social Borderers: Themes of Conflict and Ambiguity in Greek Folk-song

The ‘Akritic cycle’ of Greek folk-songs consists of those texts in which scholars have found thematic resemblances to the epic poem of Digenes. The name Digenes itself has not been an essential criterion for the inclusion of a song in this category, although many of the songs do boast at least one seemingly Byzantine name; in a few cases, the name is that of Digenes, and other forms have been somewhat debatably claimed as corruptions of the latter. Like all learned taxonomies, the Akritic rubric involves a measure of distortion or oversimplification. True, the thematic resemblances exist, and are rarely likely to be the outcome of pure coincidence; but they can be matched against other, hardly less compelling similarities which violate the boundaries of the Akritic category.

Significant and Coincidental Resemblance between Classical Themes

N I9TH-CENTURY MUSIC the conscious procedures of many composers justify minute attention to thematic resemblances on the part of the listener. The clearly marked relationships of Carnaval, for example, suggest a protocol for approaching Schumann's more abstract works. Similarly revealing of conscious method are some remarks of Weber-if we can trust the report of Lobe --calling attention to a phrase of Malbrough hidden in the huntsmen's chorus of Der Freischiitz. Intentional relation-